Awww, nuts!

[vakkotaur]

The previous entry went over what I did with mustang this weekend. It still has a couple unused partitions ready for when I decide what to do with them. I expect sometime I'll get Calmira to use as the WfW shell to make it at least look less like WfW 3.11.

I decided to see about replacing the CMOS battery in caspian, the 386. I might have broken it in the process. It could be that I goofed and need another NiCd cell (got two, need three). It could be that washing off the crud that had leaked from the old battery wasn't thorough enough and left something shorted. It could be that the memory needs re-seating. I suppose I'll pull the motherboard again and wash it - rinsing with distilled water and also see if I can pull and re-seat the memory. Not sure when I'll get to it. A 386 can sit - or be replaced. It's not like I don't have other motherboards around. Upgrading will result in a much faster machine - but will lose the absurdity of the 386, which is a bit of an attraction. Just what can I make the old machine do?

Speaking of changing motherboards, I finally pulled the old motherboard from what is now icelandic (it was temporarily vector) and replaced it with a new (it had never been used before) one. Now it can see a full 64MB rather than only 32MB. It also is out of the dining room and in the machine room. The memory upgrade didn't seem to help Vector Linux all that much. VL was still slow and chugging at the disk, even without accessing swap. Since pasofino (a 200MHz 128MB machine) also had Vector Linux, I decided to try Peanut Linux on icelandic. This has not turned out to be as simple as it ought to be.

The latest version of Peanut is 9.6 and the Peanut web page claims all it needs is a 486 and 64MB. There's a problem: the page is wrong. After repeatedly getting a kernel panic during installation, I poked around the forums (fora?). It turns out that 9.5 only needed 64MB. The newer 9.6 wants 140MB(!) just to install - and is considered beta, as well. Oh joy. I'm not the only one who ran into this problem. The recommendation is to use 9.5 instead. That's easier said than done as the older versions of Peanut are not hosted on the nice, fast site but on a slower (and far less reliable, in my experience) site. I tried downloading 9.5 several times last night and had almost no luck. I started a download going again this morning - hopefully this time it'll go to completion.

So I have a few possible computer related projects now: Install Peanut Linux 9.5 on icelandic (P-166/64MB) if I ever can download it all. Decide what to do with the unused partitions on mustang(P-90/64MB). Fix or upgrade caspian (386DX25/8MB). At least all but caspian no longer involve fiddling with the hardware.