Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

New Linux Box
Thanks to the persistence to Peter L. I now have a Linux-based machine to play with.

Peter managed to install a recent version of Red Hat 7.2 on what was Erika's notebook. I say "managed" because Peter ran into some real problems installing Linux on this machine. Apparently installing Linux on Toshiba notebooks can be a real fiddle. He initially tried installing Red Hat 7.2 on it more than once, but continually ran into problems when the PCMCIA module tried to load. It always failed. Even recompiling the kernel with a special patch to take care of a known issue with Toshiba notebooks -- specifically relating to PCMCIA problems -- didn't do the trick.

Peter tried installing Mandrake as well, but ran into the same problems. In the end he finagled to get Red Hat installed on the notebook and get it to run, but only after modifying the start-up script so that it bypassed checking the PCMCIA port.

(It may well be that the port is kaflooie – more than once a running kid has trampled on the networking cable leading to the unit. We've already gone through two PCMCIA networking card about three or four connector dongles due to this. Having kids is a great reason to think about wireless connectivity, at least where notebooks are concerned).

So now I have a test machine for checking out Linux-based versions of popular browsers for my book. Yay! Now all I need to do is to get that used iMac (or maybe that funky new eMac?).