Old 486 computer & external CD reader advice needed

[Les Mikesell]

On Wed, 2006-02-01 at 14:14, Mike McCarty wrote:

> It's worth a try, anyway. I like Knoppix. But I've not
> had much success getting it to run on old machines.
> I have a 90MHz Pentium machine which can just *barely*
> run Knoppix. It takes like 1/2 hour to boot. Knoppix
> really needs a swap with only 32MB of memory.

That is mostly from KDE - gnome would probably be even
worse.  I've used it on an old laptop with 32M and
it worked pretty well in 'X -query' mode as an Xterminal
with the desktop and apps running on a faster machine.

> I haven't
> gotten it to run on my 486 at all. I'd like to set it
> up as a server, and use that as a connection for backing
> up the discs over there.

I'm not sure what versions will still work on anything
less than a pentium.  If it doesn't boot at all, the
compile options are probably the problem.  You'll also
have trouble auto-detecting devices on an ISA bus.

> What I've done in past is reboot my main Windows 98 machine
> using an MSDOS floppy and use pkzip to zip up one directory
> tree after another, then transfer the files using Interlnk
> over a serial cable. As you can guess, this is slow. But
> it does allow me to back up that machine on CDROMs. I'd like
> to be able to use a network connection and transfer files
> that way.

> There's probably a way to get those files to my Linux machine
> using something, but I don't know what that is, and haven't
> searched for it. Maybe I'll do a Google in a minute...

Look for the LanMan client for DOS. You can probably still
download it from MS and it will work with samba within the
old dos 8.3 filename restrictions.  The downside is that
it has a huge memory footprint. I sort-of remember a dos
ftp program that ran over packet drivers and a free tcp
stack but I'm not sure where to find that stuff now.  I
glued together a version of gnutar that ran under DOS and
talked TCP to an rsh server long ago, but the GPL restrictions
on gnutar prevent redistribution even though all the parts could
be found for free.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com