[ale] open source solutions for Win 98 on an old laptop

[Jim Kinney]

That will be a tough one as the NIC drivers must be loaded through the
pcmcia dirvers. I don't know of any tiny image floppies that support pcmcia
off the top of my head. But, hey! It's all open source so it can be
assembled! Basically a kernel with the correct modules compiled in (a tad
smaller than loadable modules) get substituted for a kernel image on a boot
floppy. The trick is squeezing it all down to be the same size of smaller
than the original.

Hmm. More to that is needed... Need to have nfsroot compiled in as well as a
custom rc.sysinit to actually mount the remote / and then continue loading
things and services from there. It would probably work to canabalize the
structure of the LTSP files.

The first thing to try is a floppy boot, external CD installation with the
NIC installed to see if an insaller has drivers for the NIC. The older
PCMCIA stuff was as notoriously linux-driverless as wireless NICs are now.
It used to be that a linux admin fu factor was whether they could make the
pcmcia card _work_ on their Linux laptop :)

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 1:34 PM, Daniel Howard <dhhoward at comcast.net> wrote:

> Jim Kinney wrote:
>
>>
>> A tiny kernel image with networking and a NFS mounted / from a server
>> would make that feeble thing a thin client but you'll need a pccard NIC.
>>
>>  Given that I got the Ambicom PCMCIA Ethernet card to work, I'd love to
> use this as a thin client.  Any ideas where I could grab a floppy image that
> I could try?  Daniel
>



-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
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