Lab Notes, 1/13/04
Present: Olin Zuercher, Mike Cook, Tom Brown; 6:00 - 10:00 PM
:: Donors
Matthew Daniel and his wife dropped off a monitor, keyboard and mouse --
all usable. Ann Carol Nash donated a computer, keyboard and mouse. I
brought some computers from my basement, donated by neighbors and friend.
My brother-in-law, Bruce Preston donated two computers, mice and keyboards.
The Daniels were referred to us by Julie Goins, a previous donor.
:: Grid Laptop/Tinker's Challenge
One of the computers I brought is a old Grid/Tandy laptop which won't boot.
For fun Olin disassembled the major components so we could see how it was
put together and from what it was built. We satisfied our curiosity, and
its headed for the Barn. Olin challenged himself to take apart the
components using a single pocket screwdriver. He got pretty far but
eventually had to dip into his toolbox.
:: NetVista Project
Mike brought his gear and worked on booting the NetVista (NV) from compact
flash (cf). Mike loaded DOS boot files on the cf. The NV recognized the cf
but reported "file not found" (command.com?).
Mike says the bios appears to attempt to net-boot first. When that fails,
the NV looks to the ide channel. When the ide channel fails, it looks to
cf. This happens rapidly on the default setting, which can be changed to
force faster fail-over.
Mike and I searched the Internet. We reviewed previous material and found
some new material related to net-booting Linux on NV 2200/2800. One of the
docs was howto use NVs with LTSP. Unfortunately virtually all of the
material relates to the 2200L/2800L -- the "L" stands for Linux. The L
series NVs have onboard ethernet instead of token ring which makes life
much easier.
Mike will review the new research material and try one or more of the
following:
. boot a Linux kernel (instead of DOS) from a hard drive
. boot the cf with a Linux kernel
. correspond with authors of NV/Linux howtos
. set up a token ring network (just kidding)
:: Samba Howto
Olin wants to setup samba on his home network. I gave a mini-lecture on
samba. Then Olin and I reviewed installation and troubleshooting docs on
the samba site.
Tom
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