[SWLUG] Cardiff meeting reminder - Tuesday 7th January

[Robert McQueen]

On Mon, Jan 06, 2003 at 01:47:19PM +0000, Dave Cridland [Home] wrote:
> 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.

Then I'd have thought it was ideal for him to ask a LUG list, because
we're exactly this kind of hardware hoarders. =)

> (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?)

When a disk shows signs of problems, I immediately buy a new disk and
copy all the data off onto it. The possibly-problematic disk then turns
out to be under warranty, so I send it back and have it replaced. This
means I don't accumulate dead disks, I accumulate live disks. It's
proved much more useful. =)

> 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.

Of course we do. Debian's m68k port is an ongoing effort, and we have a
flock of build daemons ensuring that all the latest software like GNOME
2 and Mozilla 1.2 are ready to run on your 20Mhz Amiga. *stifles
laughter* I think it takes our m68k boxen several days to build things
like X, glibc, gcc and Mozilla. =)

> 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.)

This is what eBay is for. You can pick up whole old computers for £20
or whatever, or you may even manage to just get the parts you want.

> 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.

Sound like a Creative Sound Blaster Live! card of some description, well
supported by the emu10k1 module under Linux. A "live drive" is a front
panel thing which has sockets for line in, line out, S/PDIF in/out,
microphone, headphone, MIDI in/out, optical in/out, and such goodies. I
have one which I use a headphone socket, much to the annoyance of
electronic music people who see my PC. =)

The problem with 32Mb of RAM is not the ability to drive a sound card,
it's just that with any modern distro and desktop environment like GNOME
2 or KDE 3.x, it's just going to be painfully slow.

> Dave.

Regards,
Rob