dsl museum piece: opinions
 

Hello, I was lucky enough to acquire an immaculate Thinkpad T20 that doesn't need much restoration.

I'm planning on doing a hard drive install of DSL on it eventually and wanted some opinions on the pros and cons of various releases.

In retrospect, I was on the dsl boards from almost the beginning until almost the end, although I didn't know it at the time. I have modern computers running Trisquel current and Debian Jessie, so this is just a hobby project to amuse myself and show my kids and grandkids, sort of like when my grandfolks went antiquing.

I have most of the .dsl extensions archived on external hard drives and in a DVD that one of the developers was selling to raise money for a project that provided underprivileged kids with computers back in the day.

The lappy only has 128 MB of RAM, but it was running open office .uci just fine off of the dvd.

I'm mostly talking to myself, but would love to connect with others who can relate. Thank you for listening.

Hi there :)
Well, 128Mb is something I saw before...I have set up a MacPUP (derived from Puppy) on something like this...128Mb/2Gb, in fact, it ran like a train...
I'd consider MX as well, as it does run on a 256Mb here...it's my synthesizer...I have no idea if it'll be happy with 128Mb...
Shows ya what Linux can do...
Consider though, that DSL may not be active anymore (no security upates), even though it reports to be alive, I was not able to pick up the page...
Looking on... :)
Melissa

I have used a slightly modified DSL on CD to keep an old laptop alive which has no hard drive and only PCMCIA networking. It is missing the drive carrier and has some damage to the bay so I can't easily repair that. It is Celeron 550mhz, 128MB RAM.

But when I need to deploy a pristine network node with terminal support - it is there thanks to DSL.

I ran dsl on a 166 mhz PII with 64 MB of RAM. ;)

The new-to-me lappy should be perfect for what I want to do. It can go up to 512 MB, but I'm not sure if I want to mess with it. It seems rock solid so far and came with an 11 GB HDD and winblows 2000, so hopefully the former owner just didn't know what he had or how to get top dollar for it.

It can see the samba shares on my network but it can't access them. IIRC, it will work fine the other way around but it might not be the worst idea in the world to unplug the internet and turn off wireless when i want to do that.

Thank you for sharing my adventure. ;)

Puppy is still going strong after all these years. There is even a librepup in beta:

https://archive.org/details/librepup-6.0.2.0

ETA: Melissa, if you're interested this is still alive: http://distro.ibiblio.org/damnsmall/ but I'd recommend getting the extensions (and .iso if you don't already have it) with a modern computer and sneakerneting it over to your vintage hardware. I couldn't switch the mirror to use the mydsl control panel on the lappy but I will admit to getting dillo online to grab samba.dsl from a VM the other day, so do as i say, not as I do. ;)

Hi there,
Thanks! I bookmarked the page. And yes, I usually "sneak" with a USB stick (bootable) to install on low end stuff...seen the tablet I use? Yea, dont get lower than that :)
Melissa

The site is back up today! :) :) :)

The blogs are there and the old forums, as well as ALL the documentation! I'm running 1.3 so there's no way in heck I'm going to take my T20 online (I did it once just to see if she could and she can) but it's enough just to take a trip down memory lane on my Trisquel box with the i5 processor and 8 gigs of RAM, wish I'd known then what I know now, and fill in a few gaps with DSL-specific info.

Those were the days, my friends.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3KE...E&spfreload=10

Congrats!
Good news, always welcome...
And, going down that memory lane, remember VAX/VMS? Well, there seems to be a free version...you may need to tinker though... :)
Melissa