Nimrod

The folks just sent me their old P200 laptop. (It barely qualifies as a notebook, as its dimentions are 8.5 x 11 x 2.2 inches.) Thanks, guys.

It's a Compaq Armada 1571DM. I named him nimrod.

He's a behemoth. CD and floppy drive. Integrated power supply. 12-inch 800x600 screen. With all that, there is just one usb port and no ethernet jack. And you can tell the previous owner (Dad) showed him some love: good condition, maxed out RAM (96 Megs), LCD in great shape.

I shredded the drive and installed linux.

Due to the ancientness of the hardware, this became an excersize in minimalism. Windowmaker is still good, if not user-friendly, so I didn't even bother trying something newer. Back in the day, I would use netscape 4.x, but I'm going to give dillo a try this time around. I considered forgoing the gui alltogether, but knew I would want it for browsing, if nothing else.

Turns out that yum uses a lot of processor power when it resolves dependencies. Or maybe it gets into infinite loops.

**UPDATE 2004-09-12:**The battery is quite dead, and I'll never get the winmodem to work. I may have to invest in a pcmcia modem at some point. But everything else seems to work perfectly.