Slitaz = Life Saver

Well it has been quite a while since I wrote on this blog and that is probably because I never found the special need to do so, be it for whatever reason.

Today I had the chance to toy around with a Toshiba Laptop built somewhere around ´99 or 2000, Pentium III Proc @ 450 MHz and 64 MB of SDRAM, which I tried upgrading but didn´t work, and a superior 6 GB HDD. This, laughable as it may seem to some, was my perfect choice for a school laptop, as I need to write a lot and my old T60 is gone now, forever, which left me with my bare hands... yeah, no.

So I was playing around with this thing and I tried different Distros in it with no success, Debian 6 and 7 RC 2 were not working at all, as a matter of fact I couldn´t connect to the wireless network as it uses WPA and the Debian installer only allows WEP; PuppyLinux was just doing bad, probably because the video card ranges somewhere around 2 to 4 MB, maybe even less; I wasn´t doing DSL, I didn´t do DSL; Knoppix was also out of the question; Crux, which is a Distro I learned about from K. Mandla, wasn´t working either and I have no other laptop at hand to do the whole "transfer this to the faster one then finish the fight on the slower one", too much hassle and not enough resources; then came SliTaz and everything somehow changed.

You see, with all the other Distros I wasn´t getting anywhere, at all, and the furthest I managed to get through was with Debian 6 but yet again that didn´t go far with the PCMCIA Wireless Card, take note that this laptop has no internal wireless or ethernet, keyword, NO, ETHERNET.

BOOM, HEADSHOT!

Back to SliTaz. I give it a try, at first I´m not sure why it won´t boot in some modes, then I discover it is because of the video card, so I just let it roll and get to console, good, this thing boots at blazing 8 to 5 seconds, I am impressed but I need to find a way to get this working on the hard drive itself and get rid of the CD thing.

So I look around for instructions and find that it was easier than I expected, no compiling was required and only some slight tweaking here and there, including formatting the hard drive and what not, did everything for me. Copy this and move it here, mount that, unpack this, everything goes smooth even though I have to work with Vi, nothing against it but man I´d rather have Nano anyday.

So the thing boots, IT BOOTS, but it goes into this horrible twisted screen that could be a surrealist painting. It kinda looked alive but I wasn´t sure... so in the end the video was still screwed up.

Solution?

Console mode. By adding a single screen=text to grub it all worked juuuuuuust as I needed it, this whole adventure actually started because I needed a system that would run a console system not a GUI based system so this is what I got in the end and this is what I wanted, it was a win-win situation for everyone as the guy who put it in the office wasn´t really looking forward to seeing it coming back.

Ancient Technology wins again

Been quite a while since I've wrote in this blog but that was because I was going around with school, work and other more important things and besides I had nothing really techy to talk about until now.

Just a few days ago I bought a desktop, nicknamed Anubis from now on, from a friend, this is probably the most advanced desktop I've ever owned as I transitioned to laptops quite a while back, and I was surprised by the casing itself which looks like some sort of ship, specs were quite nice actually and once I added a few hard drives, a DVD reader and installed Windows XP, because I wanted to try my hand at something a little bit more flexible for this baby, everything looked great except for the fact that when I tried to turn it on it just wasn't working and playing around with it got it to work but I wasn't 100% sure what the reason was.

Forward two weeks later and it goes completely dead again but this time nothing I do will turn it on and it isn't until the damn things blasts my hand, the PSU that is, that I decide I've had it with the thing and decide to return it although there was the additional solution of trying another PSU but I wasn't sure I had anything for this one, specially since that PSU was 650 watts and had cables going everywhere, but fortunately I found that there was, in between all the trash I keep from old computers that I dismantle when I can't sell them, a PSU that could fit and could work for this mobo.

Two minutes later this baby is running perfectly fine, as a matter of fact it's better than before, and I just got enough cables in it to connect everything without leaving anything flying around which makes me very happy since I hate seeing crap flying around and even though it's a meager 200/300 watts PSU it is just what I needed. All in all it seems investing in ancient technology does serve you in the end!