Getting ready for Loscon

[mdlbear]

Spent most of the late morning and early afternoon with chaoswolf at the Legion of Honor (an art museum in SF) so she could work on an art history term paper that's due next Tuesday. Naturally, she left it until the last possible day...

Almost all the rest of my day, plus some of yesterday evening, have been spent trying to find a Linux distribution that works on chaoswolf's old laptop and is new enough to have decent wireless support. Tried Fedora 1.0 -- buggy, and very limited choices about which apps it installs. kudzu, which might have a chance of recognizing the hardware, core-dumps because it can't install a module for the floppy controller that isn't there. Tried the beta of the new Debian installer (for Sarge) -- crashes in cfdisk failing to open the hard drive. WTF?

Finally settled on RedHat 9, which isn't really as robust as 7.3 but is reasonably stable (after installing apt-get and doing an upgrade) and supports my cheap Orinoco-based card.

Spent a few more hours getting the darned thing configured and doing a cvs checkout on my current state. It's not going to be perfect, but it'll work.

Comments

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

FWIW, I successfully got SuSE (version 7.3 or 8.0 - can't recall which now) running on an ancient tablet PC, a '486 DX-50, with 4MB of RAM, and a 340MB PCMCIA hard drive. If it'd had another couple or 4MB of RAM, it would have actually made a fine terminal.

I've not yet found a PC that wasn't having active hardware issues that I couldn't run SuSE on.

[roaringmouse.livejournal.com]

I rapped chaoswolf over the nose with a rolled up newspaper as Auntie Mouse....
Hope you have fun....hehehe