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| Author |
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| 25 new of 205 responses total. |
keesan
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response 150 of 205:
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Jun 7 00:05 UTC 2002 |
It is already happening. We find bags of clothing from Jim's former next dor
neighbor on my enclosed porch, children's games behind my house, one time a
kitchen sink faucet (nobody admitted to it yet), a small hand truck.
Leeron offered us his ten pentiums to share with another grexer but we have
to go to Livonia for them, which might be arranged.
After several hours we determined that all our floppy drives and cables are
okay (one had DS1 set wrong - would not work with twisted cable) but we still
could not read drive b: The same drive worked as a single. It destroyed
floppy disks put into it. We finally did an autoconfigure to fail-safe, which
had fixed another computer with hard drive recognitions problems. That fixed
our floppy drive recognition problem. We then did optimal configure and it
still worked. We will do that with every new computer from now on.
In the meantime someone showed up with yet another bicycle, and a friend
called with another bicycle, and we fixed a bike for a 9 year old we were
passing (his brake pad was missin ever since he rode off his back yard) and
somehow the day is gone and the garage is fuller than ever. Also I found an
elderly neibhbor just out of the hospital headed in the general direction of
downtown hoping she would run into a copy shop (it would have taken her 2
hours each way if she made it) and we got to use the spiffy color fax printer
copier that Tim Ryan gave us, to keep the ink from drying out from disuse.
And she has a bicycle to give us. I had better not post my address.
Got to go fetch a cordless phone with a dead battery. Good things come to
those who wait.
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jep
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response 151 of 205:
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Jun 7 02:42 UTC 2002 |
Compaq merged with/took over DEC several years ago. HP/UX and Compaq
recently merged in a big combative move that was heavily covered in the
business pages.
DEC's Unix version was called Digital Unix at one point, then OSF/1 at
another. The after the Compaq acquisition, their Unix was called
Tru64. I wonder what's going to happen to it now that the company is
being absorbed by HP, which already has the more popular HP/UX?
Hey, Marcus, what's the relationship between the old Apollo and HP/UX?
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oval
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response 152 of 205:
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Jun 7 04:40 UTC 2002 |
are there any mac users here who run linux? if so, what's your machine and
what distribution? i'm considering slowly making a full switch to the
non-proprietary world, and don't know which one to go with. i have a pismo
but may switch with cal and use his wallstreet ..
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bdh3
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response 153 of 205:
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Jun 7 07:30 UTC 2002 |
mklinux I think.
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jaklumen
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response 154 of 205:
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Jun 7 07:49 UTC 2002 |
resp:151 that's what I thought.
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oval
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response 155 of 205:
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Jun 7 07:53 UTC 2002 |
no way am i running mklinux.
heh
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scott
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response 156 of 205:
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Jun 7 12:48 UTC 2002 |
I've been running Yellow Dog Linux on my new iBook, but I'm not entirely happy
with it. I need to try a couple other distros out before I say anything more,
though.
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keesan
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response 157 of 205:
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Jun 7 18:55 UTC 2002 |
We see to have succeeded in getting two pentiums working and loaded with all
my office software, despite a minor 'boot problem' due to using the
autoexec.bat from the old computer on the new one which had different
hardware. We made sure to set CMOS to optimal configuration before proceeding
with the new computer, then discovered we had to make a few changes such as
disabling com2. Jim will now attempt to get one of the two clones working
with DR-DOS while I work on the other one - something is sure to go wrong.
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coreyh
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response 158 of 205:
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Jun 7 20:43 UTC 2002 |
I've heard that gcc doesn't compile very good code for macs. So Linux doesn't
perform very well on the hardware.
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oval
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response 159 of 205:
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Jun 7 20:49 UTC 2002 |
you heard wrong.
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scott
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response 160 of 205:
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Jun 7 22:16 UTC 2002 |
It's not gcc. The issue is that a lot of the popular Linux apps are
precompiled for x86 architecture, but not for PPC. You can get source easily
enough, but then you end up tracking down specific versions of various support
libaries to match the sources. I still need to find a specific version of
gdb before I can finish getting Palm OS development working on my iBook. :(
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keesan
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response 161 of 205:
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Jun 8 02:38 UTC 2002 |
LK will drop off his 'computers' tomorrow and we are delighted to hear they
are not really computers but rather collections of parts some of which may
work, plus more parts. After a point we don't really need more working stuff,
we can learn more from the broken stuff.
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coreyh
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response 162 of 205:
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Jun 9 00:54 UTC 2002 |
Read that on google groups at one point. If you do a search on gcc ppc and
efficient you can find it. Its from 1999 though so I don't know if it still
applies. SuSE sells a PPC version. I found SuSE pretty easy to learn. I
used macs till recently and SuSE had nice GUIs for installing and configuring.
I'd didn't have that much trouble. I used it on a PC so I don't know how
different the PPC version is. Make sure your hardware is supported before
you start.
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jazz
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response 163 of 205:
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Jun 10 17:11 UTC 2002 |
Have you considered creating a conference for items of this type? It
seems popular enough that individual requests for assistance might get lost
in the flurry, and that it's difficult, if not impossible, to really tell if
any suggestion helped.
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bhelliom
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response 164 of 205:
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Jun 10 17:30 UTC 2002 |
Hey, that would be great actually. A computing conference.
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keesan
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response 165 of 205:
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Jun 10 23:36 UTC 2002 |
Let's call it the 'computer conference'. But are there not a few of these
already? I feel like too much of a dummy to post my ignorant requests for
help in any of them, plus they get read more widely here.
Today my b: drive in the computer which we had fixed to read b: refused to read
a floppy disk: general failure reading drive b: . We had spent a day fixing
this problem. Jim suggested, before junking the computer, that I try the
following quick test. Type (with disk in drive) 'format b:'. It formatted
and now I can read the disk. Apparently the 360 floppy disks can eventually
lose their formatting information.
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bhelliom
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response 166 of 205:
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Jun 11 13:07 UTC 2002 |
Honestly, Sindi, I'm not sure. One could always check on the conf list
and find out. Of course, it could be defunt, like a lot of old conf's
and could perhaps be started again, right?
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keesan
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response 167 of 205:
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Jun 11 14:15 UTC 2002 |
Bhelliom, I thought you were joking and that you knew grex already had several
conferences for various aspects of computer software and hardware. But they
are full of experts and my questions are sort of dummy type.
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jaklumen
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response 168 of 205:
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Jun 11 15:00 UTC 2002 |
Interesting point.. and I'd say you're a lot more involved than I am.
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bhelliom
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response 169 of 205:
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Jun 11 16:19 UTC 2002 |
I probably knew at some point, Sindi, but since i'm not a real prime
computer person, I tend not to remember they are even there.
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keesan
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response 170 of 205:
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Jun 11 19:49 UTC 2002 |
Well, I hope all the other dummies are finding it interesting to read a bit
about computers in this item and in 69 (the hardware and software aspects tend
to get mixed up as we seem to fix hardware problems that are really software
and vice versa).
I just found someone online at columbia edu who steered me to a whole bunch
of useful files that will let us view text (in DOS mode) in up to 200 columns
(if you have 1600 resolution video card and monitor) or at least 132 columns,
with most of our video cards including S3 for which I had never found anything
that worked. Tseng, Trident, Cirrus, Oak all have their own software for this
but S3 did not post anything. Maybe I should have search on Diamond Stealth64
instead, or Speedstar, as they seem to differ. So now we can see tiny little
characters but more of them, when dialed into grex or using lynx for DOS.
This ought to work in Russian as well.
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jazz
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response 171 of 205:
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Jun 11 20:03 UTC 2002 |
I wasn't saying "take it to computing", just stating that it might make
things easier to read and work with; though Agora has a much larger
readership.
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bhelliom
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response 172 of 205:
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Jun 11 21:05 UTC 2002 |
One dummy at your service. :)
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keesan
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response 173 of 205:
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Jun 12 00:41 UTC 2002 |
Maybe I should entitle an item in Agora 'Computers for Dummies'.
Today we went through a vanful of donations from Leeron (lk). We did not yet
check out the 12 cases with motherboards in them (they are missing most of
what else plugs in) but I did a count of all the other nice things he gave
us - hard drives much bigger than the 500M ones that were our prizes until
now (one is even 1.5G), a real genuine 360K floppy drive which I still use,
some spray cleaner to help fix things, big to small and small to big keyboard
convertors (and 9 more keyboards to replace the ones we just recycled), a
motherboard without a cpu and a motherboard marked 'board probably bad cpu
probably good' that is nearly identical and set to the same speed, a bunch
of Cd-ROM drives some with speeds marked and some with Play and FF and REW
buttons, a whole bunch of helpful universal floppy drive frames, assorted
boxes marked VGA or modem containing things like sound cards and even VGA and
modems (2 S3 cards!), some more cpus including DX4 (you need a special board
for them), IBM and Cyrix and Intel cpus, and a box of really obsolete stuff
like 386 motherboard, something that plugs into a 386 to convert to a 486,
a memory card that lets you put 16 1M SIMMS into an ISA slot, etc.
The computers themselves are various degrees of obsolete - one has what looks
like an EGA (Herc?) card, one has the remains of some cable on it that got
pulled off, one had a ladybug in it (he warned us there might be bugs), but
most of them look newer than anything we are using and might, if we add enough
other parts from the puzzle, be something we can fix up and either use
ourselves (tho we already got one working from Tim and one from Jep, just
today with the new drivers, perfectly) or set up for a friend with a 486, or
a friend who we upgraded to P90, or a neighbor with no computer, or Krj if
we find one over 166MHz. We will start by recycling 10-15 486s and any of
our own hard drives 200MHz or below - anybody want a 40, 2 80s, a 116..?
(Scott gets the magnets for his metal walls otherwise).
This was only half of the computers, he said. I hope the working ones have
SIMMs in them as we don't have many extras. But we do have enough to build
4 with 32M, thanks to Friedman's.
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keesan
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response 174 of 205:
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Jun 12 14:29 UTC 2002 |
Leeron also steered us to a page where we can download manuals for the
motherboards of all these computers. I never thought of doing this for all
our other mystery boards.
Last night we took a quick look at two computers that will be recycled. One
has a CGA/EGA card and MFM hard drive and may be an XT. One is upgraded to
a 486 but still has a 1985 full-length two-slot video card that may be MDA.
The third was a winner, a working Pentium 75 in Socket 5 (the newer ones that
we have are Socket 7, different voltage?) which turned out to have Win311,
Autocad 13 (our neighbor has 11) and a total of 120M of files on a 2.5 G hard
drive. Jim is talking about taking LOTS of photos (at 50K each, 16 per
'roll', how many would he need to fill it up?). The other 9, newer ones,
have things missing such as CD-ROM drives, floppy drives, video cards, screws
in the power supplies, hard drives, etc. Lots of empty bays and slots. A
big puzzle with an indeterminate number of pieces. He gave us enough pieces
to make quite a few computers assuming there are some working motherboards
with RAM in them.
The guy doing WPDOS asks which S3 cards work with the latest WP VESA driver
he has posted, so we will have fun testing out at least 6 of them (trio32,
trio64, stealth64 (several), virge) with WP42 on a floppy disk in the Pentium
75. He says that his S3 card does dashed underlines (unlike the Tseng cards)
and wonders if they all do that. The VESA driver is for doing better previews
(to see how the page is laid out). What do the 32 and 64 mean? These are
all PCI cards.
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