I recently inherited a Toshiba Portege pentium 3 laptop after buying my sister a new Acer dual core one running Vista for Christmas. The Windows 2000 operating system on the Toshiba was making it seem very slow, especially since the extra RAM slot was broken and hence it had a maximum of 64 megabytes. After installing Windows 98, the original operating system, it was working much better, and booted in about a minute rather than five minutes.
The other day I decided to install Linux on it as well, and luckily had an original set of Redhat 7.3 CDs to use. After partitioning the disk, the install took about forty-five minutes, but was then up and working, including X-Windows, without any problems whatsoever.
The reason I had wanted to have linux on that machine was so I could experiment with serial communications. This is hard to do on a modern PC that has only USB ports. Previously I had tried writing Windows 32-bit software to connect to a telnet server and relay the information to a terminal, with some limited success.
In Linux, I set up a process in the configuration files called 'agetty' which allowed a serial device to be used as an extra terminal. For my terminal I used an old Atari Mega ST computer with an original monochrome monitor, experimenting with various shareware and freeware terminal emulator programs. Once I had got the baud rate right, and was receiving recognisable text, I found that I could get complete emulation with a shareware program called CONNECT and partial emulation with other simpler programs, which was okay as long as I disabled colour in the Linux output, and steered clear of interactive text-user interface applications like PINE that would confuse a simple terminal.
The whole experience has made me appreciate better the complexities of what I previously saw as trivial: the correct coding, encoding, processing and display of text based user interaction.
