Re: RedHat Linux 7.2 needed.

On 14 Jul 2007, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.linux.misc, in article
<y938x9j41zp.fsf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Allan Adler wrote:

ibuprofin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Moe Trin) writes:

Geez Allan - that's a little slow on the response time, isn't it? That
was almost 7200 articles back from "now".

I'm going through them slowly...

You have to wonder if the O/P is still reading the group, never mind
remembers posting the original request ;-)

ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/distributions/ has distributions
going back to the early 1990s - including early versions of SLS,
Slackware, Debian, Yggdrasil, and others.

That's good to know.

It's mainly good for nostalgia and less for useful work. While a 1.2.13
kernel may work quite well on a Sparc 2 or 64 bit Dec Alpha, it's not
going to know anything about your Turion64 - any more than XFree86-3.1.1
is going to have any clue how to drive your SuperWhizzo LCD monitor.

I recently bought a 500 MHz Celeron with 256 Megs of RAM, 6.4 Gig
drive, and a crappy but usable 15 inch CRT monitor for US$30.

That's good to know too. I rarely see discarded computer systems or
garage sales.

The old saw about 'dumpster diving' is less accurate today, as most
municipalities have laws or regulations against putting computers in
the garbage. I can dispose of old monitors (or old refrigerators)
here, but it's considered hazardous waste, and I have to pay the city
a US$10 per item fee if I drop it off, or they'll send a truck to pick
it up for US$25 per item. If it's discovered in the ordinary trash,
it's a US$275 fine (plus court costs).

The local (Phoenix) Yellow pages has listings for "Computers-Recycling"
and "Computers-Used" and companies are often using them to dispose of
older systems. The "dumpster" is more likely to be a pallet full of old
systems down in shipping, waiting for pickup by the recyclers. Here,
most of our servers are recycled workstations ("my secretary _needs_ a
new Quad Xeon to handle my mail and reports."), with the original
drives replaced with current stuff, and the video hardware either
removed or downgraded (servers don't need eye-candy hardware), and
the stuff they are disposing of usually is long in the tooth.

Garage sales? They're happening all the time - but like most guys I
never notice them, as they usually don't have the "stuff" that I'm
interested in. That Celeron system was something I found at the
"community garage sale" (the neighborhood association only approves
four community-wide garage sale events a year) while taking a short-cut
through an area I normally don't drive through. Last March, I picked
up an Athlon computer for US$5, and three old Pentium Is (for the
72 pin SIMMs) for under US$25 total. The stuff _is_ out there.

I found a discarded printer and lugged it home and am still unable to
get it to work.

I'm not in to masochism.

Sometimes friends give me their old PCs instead of throwing them out.

Nothing wrong with that.

Someone just gave me a laptop that runs Ubuntu and has about 50 GB of
free disk space. Unfortunately, it has a few problems, including a fan
that does not work, causing it to shut down when it overheats. I asked
a computer repair place how to open it to remove the fan and was told
what to do. I opened it up, removed the fan, found some loose padding
inside the fan casing, removed it, put the fan back, closed up the
laptop and tried to start it. The battery light went on and so did the
light indicating the line from the power supply, but it won't actually
start. There are a few other things wrong with it, since someone once
tripped over the phone line before I got it and damaged the connector
for it. There might still be some parts rattling around inside. I
haven't given up on it yet ...

The fact that it's been dropped probably isn't helping things any. I
tend to limit the amount of repair effort I'll put into a system. An
obvious look through the system, searching for loose/broken hardware,
but I find it difficult getting needed replacement parts. I'll often
wind up just cannibalizing the box - it's not as if it were expensive
or unique. Still, the perimeter box here is a recycled laptop without
case, keyboard, or display. bit with two NICs and a modem hanging off
the second serial port.

I once purchased RH 9 and learned when I got home that the system
requirements on the box were not accurate. I don't remember exactly
what the problem was, but I think it gave the impression that one
could install from a floppy drive, which was the only means available.

If you mean floppy only, I don't remember the last distribution that was
an option - probably Debian or Slackware. I don't think RH ever was a
floppy _only_ type of install - you could boot from a floppy, but then
you needed to be able to access the CD image, either via a CD, NFS, or
off a separate partition on the hard disk. RH9 certainly did have
that capability. From the RELEASE-NOTES file on disk 1:

Red Hat Linux 9 uses a different boot diskette layout than
previous releases of Red Hat Linux. There is now a single boot
diskette image file (bootdisk.img) that is used to boot all systems
requiring a boot diskette.

So, now I don't believe what the distribution says about its system
requirements until I have succeeded in installing it.

I'm not quite that paranoid, but I'll agree that what's on the box may
not be totally useful. I'm no longer using Red Hat, but when I was,
I always checked out the release on line (including grabbing copies of
the README and RELEASE-NOTES files and full directory listing from
ftp.redhat.com) beforehand.

Old guy
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: installation problems
    ... RH 9 had trashed my Linux partition and rendered my PC unbootable. ... >you can create the floppy from and can be created on a differnet ... >on the CD as the floppy boot image. ... and since flash drives seem to be listed in /proc as scsi devices, ...
    (comp.os.linux.misc)
  • Re: How can I flash the Bios with out a flopy drive?
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    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support)
  • Re: Registry Failure - c0000218
    ... boot floppy, but the situation with my shuttle machine was that it did not ... I wish to create a bootable disk for my winXP setup for future ... normally useless for repairs since they cannot access NTFS drives, ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support)
  • Re: Processor Fan, Sluggish Computer...
    ... So what say you about the best capacity for hard-drives ... Bad fan, over worked processor, or what? ... external drives with nothing more than files on them? ... The long boot times you describe could be attributed to many issues. ...
    (microsoft.public.dotnet.academic)