Category Archives: random updates

I just saw an uptick in traffic from Oldlinux.org

Posted on by
Reply

And even a quick shout out!

2012-10-21
A long time passed! I found someone is also interested in the old things. Neozeed built some Linux 0.00, 0.1x images running on Qemu emulator . I also put them HERE for people to find them easily. Thanks Neozeed. And during this period of time, I also find some valuable old things. The first is the source code of lib-0.12 for kernel 0.12. The other is the full ancient Linux system using kernel 0.98 patchlevel 1 released early by SLS, the 0.98pl1 system .

For anyone who doesn’t know, oldlinux.org is a historical repository for the early start of the now wide spread Linux operating system.  In a somewhat ironic sense of being available on the internet much of the early stuff is lost, however thanks to the work of these fine folks, and some less than scrupulous shovelware dealers, and hoarders much of it has been pieced back together.

I suppose much of it is really of no practical use today, although at the same time the pre 2.0 linux stuff was incredibly small.. And capable of running in ultra minimal configurations.

So I had to move providers again.

Posted on by
8

I don’t know what on earth is going on with all these VPS providers getting DDOS’d as of late.. So here I am on VPS #4.  I lost my last post so I’ll have to recreate it later on.

Right now I’m just trying to get my old vpsland archive back online.  Sadly my DSL is rate limited to a whopping 64KB/sec so this will take … a long long while.

Thankfully I had a recent-ish backup of my blog, so all is well there!

Just to let people know I’m still alive!

Posted on by
5

Sorry I’ve spent so much time looking for that old OS/2 beta stuff, I didn’t realize it has been a while since I posted…

In the meantime I was working up something about the evolution of Windows 3.0, to 3.0a and the multimedia version, along with what features I’ve been able to discern about the OS/2 2.0 beta..  Like did you know that MS was going to put TrueType fonts in it?  I guess that is why IBM went with Adobe..

And of course there was no plans for SOM, or the Object desktop in OS/2 2.0 it was going to look/feel more like OS/2 1.21 or Windows 3.0 than what eventually shipped as OS/2 2.0  .

I don’t know what it is interesting about that time period… And I scored a real copy of OS/2 2.0 for $5, I was going to do more of a teardown of that, once I get some kind of scanner… Or maybe try to flip it on ebay in some kind of workable manner vs being old dead stuff in a box?

I donno.

So yeah I got DDOS’d …

Posted on by
4

I don’t think it was me specifically but my hosting company got hit hard.

Needless to say I’m finally up right now.  I had a monthly backup scheme going, clearly I’ve got to get something going daily ….

I’ve also found a company down the road from me that can colo for ~ $100 a month which I may jump on as I’d like to host a bunch of stuff in a semi reliable manner, and having an 8 core / 16GB machine to do it would be nice.

Upgraded my Mac Pro to include Wifi & Bluetooth!

Posted on by
5

There! Done!

Trust me if you’ve ever attempted this, then you know not only just how difficult this whole process is, but to not only get it working was a major accomplishment!

And I only lost ONE of the screws.. Sigh they are just too small, I finally broke down and got an eye glass repair kit after losing one of them (no idea where it went to, I shook the case like crazy then it stopped rattling, so its either wedged somewhere good, or I’ve thrown it somewhere around here….).  The trick was to use a small plastic sleeve to jam the screw almost all the way in, with enough of the stem showing so I could carefully get a few twists of the tread into the hole…

But of course I didn’t start it out that way, instead I thought it’d be easier to clip on the antennas to the wifi card (BCM94311MCAG) first, then slip it into its slot, then screw it down, but since it goes in at an angle, it forces itself up & out so you end up fighting it.  This is where I lost the one screw during installation.  The ‘trick’ was to use my iphone’s camera light so I could see what I was doing, then try to press down on the wifi card while trying to screw in the board using one of the plastic sleeve things from the repair kit.  Surprisingly after enough false starts I got it to thread and was able to finish screwing it in with the driver.

The Bluetooth module (A1115) was much easier, as it is just a simple daughter card, that you just push onto the board, then screw in.  Because its not actively resisting you, it was much easier to get into place, and screw in…. I just hope mine lasts ok as its only got the one screw.

As always have a clean work area, and take your time.  Working with stuff this insanely small is going to take longer than you expect..

How do you plug an RJ45 into an Etherlink II (3c503)

Posted on by
7

So on the heels of my prior post, someone was asking me, where do you exactly plug in an RJ-45 style cable to something like an Etherlink II?  It had never occured to me that many people today would have no idea what thicknet/thinnet were, or what the magical world of the AUI port is.. Sure there are transceivers still in use, but typically in larger networking equipment, and more so to choose what king of fiber optics to use (single mode? multimode? etc..).

So looking at the back of the card, we see this:

It’s not a joystick port!

Sorry for the poor quality but.. thems the breaks.  So anyways back in the day ethernet revolved around this big bulky cabling lovingly called Thicknet.  And you had to use these ‘vampire’ taps to plug into the cable, and the cable had markings that you could only tap into it a certain points.  So luckily for us, the transceiver component of Thicknet was external, letting us in the future plug in different transceivers for different media types.

Say something like this:

3Com rj45 transceiver

And that is how you can plug a cable into a card that is older than the rj45 ethernet standard!