[SWLUG] Cardiff meeting reminder - Tuesday 7th January

[Dave Cridland [Home]]

On Mon, 06 Jan 2003 11:37:54 +0000
"noel jhnson" <nrj60 at hotmail.com> wrote:

> hi
> If you have, then it is useful to tell us the hardware
> >specs. There is no point in burning a CD of a distro
> >which is known not to support that hardware out of the
> >box. If you haven't yet taken the plunge and bought the
> >thing, it might be worth saying what you're looking at
> >to see whether we have any tales of success or woe
> >with that hardware and specific distros
> 
> i have some bits  already have a live drive sound card
> A  s7 233mh chip and two 16mb edo simms

SIMMs? Really? I've got some of them knocking about you can have. I'll bring them if you want. However, if you've got a S7 CPU (Erm... Errrr... Is that K6? Or something?) then you'll also need to find a S7 motherboard, and most of those have gone the same way as SIMMs. Which is to say, most people have them purely because of a fundamental problem with actually throwing bits of hardware away.

(I even keep dead disks. I figure I might need something off them some day. My wife does not understand this habit. Who'd have thought?)

The good news is that really ancient hardware tends to work very nicely indeed with Linux. But then again, so does an Amiga. Just buy another harddisk and slap Linux on it. I've no idea what distributions exist for the Amiga, though, having never owned an Amiga (Okay, I do actually have a 4K sitting here, but it's not actually mine) - Google should tell you in no short order, though. (My only Amiga using friend remaining uses NetBSD on his Amigas. When not running kickstart or workbench or whatever it is.) My Google search revealed that Debian, at least, has a port to the Amiga.

The bad news is that if you've only got half an old computer, finding the other half can be tricky. Pop into any computer hardware shop and ask for a Socket 7 motherboard which'll take SIMMs, and watch their faces carefully, and you'll see what I mean. (But, as said earlier, you have a whole Amiga. Which will run Linux just fine.)

Incidentally, I have no idea what a "live drive" soundcard is, but I suspect that on 32M, you're not going to be using it much anyway.

Dave.