The promised picture

Meet oldsnake

This monstrosity above is known as oldsnake. Unintentional pun, I love to play with it... you figure it out.

Regardless, just today when I arrived I decided to put the old motherboard to rest, the one holding the Coppermine processor, and decided to remove it. Once done I remembered that somewhere around my old stuff I had another processor lying around and lo' and behold I found it, tried it out and now we're back in operations with a 500MHz processor and the old motherboard. Believe it or not I can notice a LOT of difference from the AMD K6-2.

Sad as it may be it's a frankie computer and if I can get more juice out of it then so be it.

Funny that is...

So I'm playing around with oldsnake, went with that name because the thing somehow reminded of the character, and a couple of things have happened since last time I posted.

Turns out some programs won't run on the AMD Processors and this is due to the fact that there's some support issues here and there for the older versions. To me that is totally reasonable as a matter of fact and yet again it adds more flavor to the battle ahead.

So far I've tested out the little thing and I'm surprised to see that it has managed to stand a bit of heavy work in a reasonable amount of time. Installing packages wasn't a bliss but it went way better than expected.

Also I found, by mistake, my internal ZIP-drive and have been playing around with it for old sakes times... feels funny to be using it since I never had a chance to own one back when the whole thing was considered to be the end of floppies and the beginning of faster and better portable media. As we now know that never happened and ZIP drives died with the 90's.

As a final note Apache with PHP and MySQL are now installed and running just fine, pending is the NoIP software and off we go with a test environment!

We got a live one!

I like to play with old hardware and I'm talking dirty here, I'm talking old school.

For some time I had this Coppermine that was giving me issues due to the fact that the thing fried at some point, incredibly the bastard kept on working.

Then Mr. Da Kid was ever so kind to provide me with the old brain and heart of Lavos, now Neo Lavos, which was a tiny Celeron Mendocino. Unfortunately I like to play around with things way too much and in between fighting to release the tiny thing from the socket and trying to put in a new one, which wasn't compatible by the way, I broke the socket bed... again don't ask me how it broke in two but it happened.

This left me without a computer to do my evil deeds, and I do like to make evil deeds with old hardware because it feels like you're making an effort to make the thing work and it becomes a challenge which ultimately leads to satisfaction, but let us forget about masturbatory geek fantasies and let us go back to square one.

I'm without a test computer... until today.

Back on friday I got around to do some stuff and one of them was getting a Socket 775 MOBO for a desktop I'm building for myself and I was also looking for a test environment which could be anything from Pentium 3 to Pentium-Not, AKA 386/486 land, but I hadn't had much luck, with either, until someone pointed out an old swap meet that handles that kind of stuff.

In I go and five minutes later and some bargaining I got this tiny, tiny for the 90's, ATX Motherboard with what I was told was a Pentium II processor of unidentified source since the BIOS lacks any useful information.

Not only did I have to rebuild the desktop from scratch, since I had to take everything off including the power supply unit, I had to reset the CMOS to get video working since it simply wouldn't bulge. Once finished it was the turn of Debian 6 to do its magic which took some noble two hours to fully install, fully means installing Base and SSH.

My biggest surprise was getting to know what kind of processor I was running on this little beast. Turns out the thing is running with an AMD K6-2 3D Now! processor which is fine with me as I had the chance to work with a K6 and many members of the AMD family many, many, years ago and I honestly can't complain.

This is how the thing ended up looking like (I'll take a screenshot later of how that looks inside):
1 x 128MB PC 133 RAM stick.
10 GB Seagate HDD (Won't boot the 40GB which leads me to believe this motherboard has issues going in for the big guys)
CD-RW/DVD-ROM (Which I had given up for dead but apparently works just fine!)
Floppy and Zip Drives (Floppy is going straight into MOBO and Zip Drive is through USB since I lost my internal 100-Zip Drive)
AMD K6-2 3D Now! Processor @ 350 Mhz
PSU @ 300 watts

Great projects are coming for this little one but that is for another time.
-Vico