computoman

Thinking back oh so many years ago when the internet was not universal yet and everyone used dial-up bulletin board systems to communicate with. There was a lot of messaging as there is today. When it came to file transfer, that was another story. At that time, the only way to download a binary file was to download a file full of hex data. The hex data ascii file was then converted to the binary file. There was no error checking so that if you have line noise and extraneous data  was captured, you usually had to recapture the file. Not fun especially with large files and slow download speeds. Eventually. There was a file transfer technique known as xmodem that would allow portions (known as packets) of the file to be downloaded and checked for integrity till the full file was downloaded.   But there laid a small problem, My commercial terminal program for the commodore 64 did not support xmodem.  Knew how to program the hardware to get get and send data, so then ...

No  longer spend time burning #linux cd's. Do not need to do that anymore. You can even do the same thing with bsd. By the time you spend downloading the cd image and burn the cd, and then do the install, I can do an ipxeboot from floppy and have the job done. Though to save time sometimes I will do a minimal install and then later add whatever is needed. Done this even with a Pentium 1 to install Slackware 14.1. Pentium 2's or better get Debian. Bought a Sony double speed usb floppy drive from a local office retailer for 5 dollars. Been a good investment.There is a rare instance when I can not install linux on a system, Floppies are not dead.... You can even use the virtual floppy images to load linux into a virtual machine. Search ipxe in this blog for more details.. Floppies can also load terminal programs or modem programs as we used to know them. Terminal programs will easily work on older equipment where the old fashioned rs232 ports (or an adapter f...

Last article I talked about using a dos disk to access some terminal software. Here is a disk that is allegedly pure linux to act as a terminal. It seemed to work on the old 486 laptop connected to the arch linux based pogoplug, though I did not check it out completely. About: PiTuX is a floppy based Linux distro that turns an old, low-RAM, machine in a very useful serial terminal running minicom. Think about your old laptop as a pure VT102 . Features: PiTuX boots from a floppy and runs completely in ram so you can even have a diskless PC. New: persistent configuration! Configure minicom as you need and if you want you can have config files stored and saved over reboots. It works from 386, without math coprocessor, up and NEEDS ONLY 4 MB RAM . It doesn't have any kind of support for hard disks so it will not mess up data on them Most 386 and 486 can run even without a fan so you can have a ...

As much of a 'nix advocate as I am, there are a few times when  for really old equipment, a dos boot disk just works. All you really need is a dos boot disk, a terminal program, usb to serial adapter, null modem cable. The biggest advantage of this is that you do not need a network to connect to the unit. You can get dos from all boot disks and then use the dd command  to create a bootable disk. My computer did not have a floppy drive, so I found a usb floppy drive that was inexpensive. It is also great for making bios upgrade boot disks. $ dd if=dosdisk.img of=/dev/sdb For a terminal there are a variety to use. Started with our old dos terminal program to make sure things worked. Then we installed Hiterm on the boot floppy which takes little room. $ sudo mkdir /mnt/flop $ sudo mount /dev/sdb /mnt/flop. $ sudo cp the hitermfiles  /mnt/flop/. $ sync; sync $ sudo umount /mnt/flop There is a default configuration file you need to edit for the se...

Message of the day, Message of the day if the screen you see when you log into the command line. Usually if s short and mundane, You may want to jazz it up a little bit with some text graphics.Some of the settings for your computer are int he /etc directory. Message of the day or motd usually resides in this directory. Now if you add your message  or graphic to the regular motd file, it will usually get wiped out. What you can do is add your messages ad or graphics into a file call /etc/motd.tail. Then when you log in you will see your message. You will need to reboot to see the message.You can also edit /etc/issue that is used by mgetty for when you log into a serial port. (rs232).

Had an old machine that had some problems with the ide (legacy hard disk) controller. Though most machines now use what is called "sata", I did not want to throw it away. Actually this is a great idea for small offices, schools. and even families. Instead of having to buy all new computers, you can purchase one machine as a server and then just reuse the existing machines as thin clients. A tremendous money saving move. That is what we did and saved a fortune. If you go completely open source, you do not have to worry paying for software licenses either. It saved us ten thousand dollars to dump proprietary software in addition not having to buy new hardware. So really it saved us much more than ten thousand dollars. Also you are helping to save the environment not to have the old machines go to a landfill. Happen to be talking with an MSWindows admin about disaster recovery. He was talking about how it was a challenge to do recovery. I made a bet that I could ...