[RULE] New member

[Ingraham, Ed]

I'm a new member, new to RULE, new to Linux. Here's my interest in the
group: I've acquired a couple of old Itronix XC6000 notebooks--50MHz 486,
monochrome LCD, 8MB RAM, 2GB HD, 1xPCMCIA slot, cell radio--in very rugged
metal cases. They came with DOS 6.2 and Win 3.1. You can buy these for less
than $20 on ebay.

Initially my interest was for Amateur Radio use. I'm interested in getting
more up-to-date functions on these, like networking, wireless networking,
...  And I thought Linux sounded like a way to achieve this. (Yes, I do have
a local Linux fan who cheered me on.)

While searching for a distribution, I came across the RULE project which
sounded like a good match for my interests. The idea of using the Red Hat
distribution for installation, possibly with necessary changes, was very
attractive.

So I downloaded the RULE ISOs and the RH9 ISOs. I pulled the HD out of the
notebook, installed it into a desktop, partitioned it, installed grub,
copied the slinky boot files and RULE CD files into hda1, copied the RH9
ISOs into hda3, and reinstalled the HD.
 
Then I booted the notebook into RULE kernel and ran the installation. The
only wrinkle was getting the i386 kernel installed off the RULE CD image. I
am using only the basic text mode, no windows at all.

The installation went pretty smoothly, and it runs well. I got my networking
running with little trouble (both wired and wireless). My hat is off to
Marco, Michael, and any other contributors! Great job!

Now I'm interested in trimming the HD size down from its present 280MB to
~100MB. Then installing it onto a 260MB version of the same notebook (that's
an internal PCMCIA HD which some models have). Along the way I'd like to
look into installing Linux from a Compact Flash card in the PCMCIA slot.
Then looking at what I can do with the AX25 support offered by Linux--I have
a few friends who also have these notebooks. (An update to Fedora Core 2
would also be interesting to keep that local Linux fan entertained.)

Regards,
Ed


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