Without that grime all over the place, this laptop is looking rather nice.
It’s faded and worn in a lot of places, but mostly intact. There’s a nasty hole punched through the top lid and a few cracks here and there, but otherwise it’s happy.
I disassembled most of the shell and blew out all the dust and grit from the interior. I scrubbed a couple of pieces that came free, and closed it back up. A word of caution: My experiments with ethanol over isopropyl alcohol suggest that the former will strip paint from plastic. 
You have been warned. …
I also found the easy way to access the hard drive — through the keyboard — and I’ve changed out the original drive for my spare one.
I’ve been testing it with a few distros, mostly live ones, just to see how it will respond. I may have run into a few problems already.
First of all, there seems to be some kind of issue between the 2.6 kernel and the PCMCIA bus — something along the lines of what this poor fellow ran into. There’s no response from anything PCMCIA-borne, wireless or otherwise, and if that thread is any indication, there probably never will be.
So far though, it’s not a huge issue. I can circumvent the problem by sticking to 2.4-kernel distros. Damn Small Linux, for example, can find a Xircom Realport wired adapter just fine. I expect it means that ultimately I shall be learning Slackware, since it’s at the 2.4.33 kernel, I think.
One way or another, this machine will be online and running Linux. I don’t know if it will ever run Lowarch (I know it can’t do straight Arch, since it’s a K6 machine; I’d have to recompile a mess of things on one machine and then move them across), but I wouldn’t mind sticking to DSL or even Slack with it.
Next stop, blanking the spare drive and installing the full Ubuntu 7.04 setup, with or without a network. 
0 Responses to “Much nicer after the bath”