In case I forget.... (PAV80)
Whilst hunting high and low for the Wifi extender (that I did find in the end!), I managed to do a lot of tidying up of my home office...and during that tidying up phase I found a few old laptops/netbooks/handbooks.
I also found the old Netgear Wifi router that still has WEP security on it (only way I've found (so far) to get the old DOS equipment on the Wifi network). It's a pretty simple setup, as detailed at the bottom of the page HERE, except I foolishly (or not?) did a factory reset on the Netgear router and therefore "lost" all the previous config setup. I did what I thought was logical based on the screenshots from before, but it was still eluding me. I created a new WEP key, I added that into the DOS autoexec.bat, but it just didn't seem to want to connect. I set the Netgear router up to only allow the MAC address of the Wifi card, so I'll hopefully reduce any drive-by opportunistic sniffers jumping on my network (not that I'll be leaving this one on all the time). Anyway, it turns out that on the DOS device itself there is an INI file that contains the router SSID and it was previously set to 'HoneyPOT' and now, because of my factory reset it was reset to Netgear...so a quick change of that and a reboot... et voila! We have internet connectivity!
I also noticed that mTCP has a new release of the software - that is awesome, it was last updated in 2020, one of the nice new features is the ability to run a web-server, now that is amusing...not quite sure how useful it'll be, but y'know....
I've also been playing around with this book and Linux for the past few months:
So who knows, I just might be setting up Watcom c++ onto the Handbook486 or, and I do have the original box & disks, Borland C++ for DOS and see what interesting things I can code and do.... (knowing me, nothing, it'll sit on the shelf for another 6 years gathering dust, by which time some house clearance company would have ditched it into a skip along with all my other goodies...but hey, it's 2021, let's stay positive and I think I'm going to "force myself" to remember to "have fun" and "play" with these gadgets, rather than just focus on work/work....we'll see)
Anywayz....back to the real purpose for this posting:
One of them was a Packard Bell PAV80 - I have absolutely no memory of purchasing this little device, but I must have done so at some point in the past. Because I am sometimes organised it had the PSU still attached to it... I plugged it in and powered it up, it flickered a few blank screens at me, but then flashed up that it was booting into 'Joli OS'... and it stopped at a login prompt. Hmmm..... above the login were the words, "Login group Guest", so I tried a random set of logins, eventually I found that guest/password logged me in.... woo!hoo!.... a few screen flashes later and then it just sat there, I was able to move a mouse around and I could select a 'start' menu that just allowed me to shutdown. A quick bit of research and I found out that 'Joli OS' was one of the first Cloud based OS's, a bit like the Grandaddy of ChromeOS. They shut the service down a few years ago, hence my laptop was just sitting doing nothing, there were no servers to communicate with. An interesting lesson there about relying on Cloud based software, if it gets switched off, you're f*%cked, especially if you didn't back up (which begs the question of why are you using the Cloud in the first place, if you are then backing your files up onto a local USB stick.....cough cough).
Anywayz.....I then had some fun and games attempting to stick a Linux Distrobution onto this device. I think some of it might have been down to user error & faulty old USB sticks, but I'll record what I did here, so that if I ever have to do it again I can just zip back to here and repeat. You laugh & question why I should bother? Well, y'know that Gateway 2000, Handbook 486 device from 2014/2015 that I got all setup in DOS and connected it to the Wifi and to the internet etc... and then promptly tidied up and somehow it managed to go up into the loft for 4years? No, well, it did & whilst looking for that Wifi extender, I re-found it and thanks to the article I wrote all those years ago, it took me about 10 minutes to get back up to speed on what on earth I had done to set the device up and configure it - I was amazed at myself, I genuinely was.
Right, well, a quick <F2> and change to boot from USB was done. I downloaded UNetbootin and installed it - now, initially I did this on my (work) Mac... and I think that may have been the cause of me wasting a lot of time and failing to get the USB drive to boot.
I switched to my Honor Magicbook running Deepin Linux, (great laptop for the price and my usage) and used UNetbootin to prep on of the new USB sticks. I purchased a set of 3x16Gb USB sticks from Sainsburys (green/pink/blue) for £11 I believe, how could I resist at that price?
Now, as I say, not sure if it was OS or the USB stick, but I seemed to get further now. At least I could create a USB stick that would boot, but didn't go any further.
I did the install for Debian linux. Now and this is the bit I need to remember. Select the HDImage version (as I was not sure about the CPU in the PAV80, I selected the non-64bit version, this may or may not have been correct? But, it's only got 2Gb RAM in it anyway)
Now, the trick is....you select the Debian HDImage install, this places the correct 'boot' files onto the USB stick. It has NOT put the .ISO image of the Operating System onto the USB... so if you stick the USB stick in and attempt to boot from it, you'll just get to a blank screen with the word "boot>" displayed. Although that is progress, it's only 1/2 the job. As I say, I wasn't sure about the CPU, so I thought I'd stick with the nice and lite GUI, so I would opt for the XFCE interface, it's nice, clean and simple. minimal fuss. I know this won't put too much burden on the PAV80.
What you need to do is go and get the 4 files to copy onto the USB stick too, these are and can be obtained from:
debian-live-10.7.0-i386-xfce.contents
debian-live-10.7.0-i386-xfce.iso
debian-live-10.7.0-i386-xfce.log
debian-live-10.7.0-i386-xfce.packages
https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current-live/i386/iso-hybrid/
But, alas, life is never that simple is it!....If you boot from the above, you go through the setup of country, keyboard etc... and then it fails on the network card/Wifi - it complains that the device has closed source wifi and needs different drivers. However, if you go to this location, delete the previous 4 files and replace them with these ones (or just put these ones there in the first place!), you'll be good to go:
debian-live-10.7.0-i386-xfce+nonfree.contents
debian-live-10.7.0-i386-xfce+nonfree.iso
debian-live-10.7.0-i386-xfce+nonfree.log
debian-live-10.7.0-i386-xfce+nonfree.packagesThe install goes nicely through, you get to connect to your Wifi, setup user accounts, etc...etc... and it all boots up nicely. I must say, it is rather "snappy" this little machine and after downloading "nmon", I found out that this is actually an Atom Dual core CPU with 2GB Ram....so not too shabby at all.
The device (when the battery pack is not attached - I removed it as it was dead as a dodo, no re-charging going on at all) is actually very light, probably weighs as much as my Phone does! It has a great 10.9" screen and a nice keyboard and mouse. For something that was tucked away under a desk for the past however many years, this is a great little find and I'm sure I'll find some meaningful usage for it during 2021. I've done the usual eBay task and ordered 2 new battery packs (1 of them will probably be wrong, or they may both be okay, either way, I'll have a spare!).
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