3 ms·
And the single-disk router distro! In the Coyote Linux derivative I ran that for years, back in the early noughties, on the one of several beat-up parts machine
by throwanem 4y ago
And the single-disk router distro! In the Coyote Linux derivative I ran that for years, back in the early noughties, on the one of several beat-up parts machines I then had which could run two 3C509 cards at once - who knows how I laid hands on those, but once I got it working it was a reliable enough setup for the whole more-or-less group house whose slant-ceilinged back attic room I lived in. Unlike in the article, we were within DSL range of the nearest CO and had no load coils to worry about, so any POTS extension would do - hence being able to have the whole house's network ops up in my little garret. I had a couple of desks and tables in there plus my little twin mattress and an Ikea Poang chair - and, thanks to a long run of Cat-5 I'd somehow managed to scrounge, not only 802.11b coverage for the whole house with one of the early-model WRT-54Gs, but even rudimentary internet TV for the living room with another hacked-together beige box and an All-in-Wonder card bought used with an employee discount from the cheesy little computer store I'd spent a few months working at. We even had four-player Gauntlet with MAME and a few cheap USB 1.0 controllers.
Thin times by the standards of the life I live these days, but good times, too.
- znpy 4y agoFloppydistros! The memories! Booting linux on an internet café from a floppydistro because I didn’t really know what linux was and my parents wouldn’t let me try stuff on the “home computer”. What was it, coyote linux? Can’t really remember now :)
- throwanem 4y agoCoyote, yeah! Same one I ran, and maybe the first time I ever actually put Linux to a useful purpose beyond satisfying my own intellectual curiosity - my first first time being a few years earlier with a Slackware floppy install on a Toshiba Tecra laptop. I had to scrape together enough disks for the A set, download and image them from the Windows 95 install, and then print out enough docs to figure out how to get dialup working again once I was done repaving the machine with a then totally unfamiliar environment - I'd bought the laptop used with summer-job money and it hadn't come with OS install media, so I either got it working or I was just SOL, with no access any longer from Tennessee to the mostly West Coast-based social circle that Internet access had made available to me, and no obvious way to recover the machine to a working state. Luckily, it didn't come to that! Good times. :D
- dtaht 4y agoIronically we never did get the VERY EXPENSIVE 20MB IDE flash drive to work, to replace the floppy disk. I still have it.