thelinuxlink.net

We found some old p1 machines with various cga and ega monitors at a school with no budget. We hated to see them just thrown away and the school left computerless. The systems have also have isa nics, so they can be networked. We decided to put a cli environment on them and appropriate applications. Most of them may turned into diskless client so as not to worry about dealing with hd failures and disk imaging support. We have a p3 that can be used as a server. Here is what so far what we have:

Links2 - internet
Bashpodder - audio podcast collector
Alpine - email client
Irssi - inter relay chat
Centerim - instand messaging client
Oleo or Sc - spreadsheet
Vim, emacs, or a dozen other programs - word processing
Antiword - deals with office based documents
Screen -multiple seesion tool
Ledger - accounting (seems to be based on gnucash)
gpm, mc, synaptic, sed, awk, sort, ncurses, bash ,ssh, wget, curl, or other command line tools.
Sqllite, mysql, psql, plus man other - databases
Hnb - outliner to organize ideas
freebasic, gcc, python, pgp, pgp-cli, perl and many others - computer programming language tools.
Too many to list here - games.
Moc, mplayer, cmis and may others - music players
Espeak or Festival - voice synthesizer.
Nget and may others - news readers
Cdrecord - cd buring program

Any additional suggestions?

twidge
boxes
tetradraw
pal
cadubi
opensched
figlet
aplay
ffmpeg
sendEmail

What distro did you use for the install, since many will not support PI anymore because packages are compiled for 686?

How did you do the install, did they have CDROM drives that were bootable?

My goal is to stay out the the sneakernet support as much as possible. I can support the server remotely. We have not done any of the systems yet. I want to see if there is any more software to collect. I did find one program called arachne that is supposed to be a graphical browser from the command line under linux. I used it several years back with freedos. I am trying to compile it now to see if it might work under linux. That would be awesome if it did. Someone suggested an extremely light self contained gui desktop that we might be able to use, but I have not tested it yet.

As for the distro I may test it with debian etch first. If debian lenny will work on my nslu2, it should work on these machines. I know I did a test install with testing a while back and it seemed to work on a p1 with vga. Things do change......

There is a three floppy net install for Etch which I have used many a time for pentium 1 's. With Lenny they discontinued it last I looked. I could also an use etherboot floppy which emulates pxe boot and load the net install image from a tftp/dns server. However we will probably use a drbl/clonezilla server on a p3. which works like a terminal server, then we only have to set up the server and all the client machines will be diskless. There will be no need to build any images at all after the server is done. Though I might use ipcop or the like on one of them to use as a firewall/proxy/etc. Non-gui clients load extrenely fast. They can even be viable for a small 10m network. Though I still would use a 10/100 hub and 10/100 nic in the server. I am still going at learning all the server stuff.

As soon as we have proof of concept on this particular setup, I will hollar horray and then upload a pic! I probably will not make time to build the server till next week. I have used drbl/clonezilla a with both gui and non gui setups plus I have used p1/2's as thin clients on ltsp, so I do not expect any real issues. (cross my heart). As long as the video works we should be home free.

Just out of curiosity, you could try running a lightweight GUI and see how bad it is -- we used to run X-windows on 486's back in the day, although I reckon that the typical X server was much smaller at that time. But anyhow, it sounds like your machines don't have enough video/monitor to make it usable, and besides, I'd rather run TUI than GUI on machines like those.

You might want to see if the console video mode can be set to a slightly larger number of columns and lines if the monitors are big enough that the font is still readable (try "vga=ask" on the kernel boot line).

I'm not familiar with drbl/clonezilla, but it sounds like you're going to need that "etherboot" floppy to make the workstations boot from PXE. If they have hard-drives in them, perhaps you could just image the hard-drives in another machine and then stick them back in -- it might boot faster than the combined floppy/PXE. Alternatively, there must be a lightweight distro that installs to HD from a floppy boot -- IIRC puppy can. Turn off any unnecessary daemons, of course.

Sounds like a nice project!

Thank you for your comments. Actually, one of the goals was not to have to deal with gui. The systems have old old CGA (Color Graphics Adapter) not VGA (Video Graphics Array) adapters. Besides there will be no missing mice to deal with. There is no harm in becoming adept at using the keyboard. Anyone can be a mouse jockey. Terminals without a graphical user interface should aid to increase reading and writing skills.

Having used ltsp and drbl enough to know that speed should not be an issue, gui-less clients actually boot up pretty quick. The network interface card specific etherboot floppies only take up less than twentyfive kilobytes. For the price of free for the system, no one is going to complain about the speed. Anyway, at most you are loading a fraction of what a full desktop would load.

It is prefered not to have to deal with imaging drives, for now and when the existing drives eventually fail. Windows admins thrive on doing imaging. The available drives can be combined to make the server a raid box and therefore less prone to failure. That leaves only one box to image. As to puppy and dsl, you are right they are excellant distros for what they do. Debian will probably be a bit better more supported.

I believe Debian still supports the i386, and Slackware supports the i486 (though it does enable an optimization switch for i686+ processors). Usually, unless it's specified in the distribution's system requirements, the i386 is supported.

Thanks for that info. I almost forgot two other programs: festival and ps2ascii. Sound drivers need to be installed of course.

For the following code:
# convert pdf files to ascii(text)
ps2ascii infilename.pdf outfilename.txt
vim outfilename.txt
or
# Hear text files spoken
echo Now speaking $1
cat $1 | festival --tts
or
# Hear pdf files spoken.
echo Now speaking $1
ps2ascii $1 | festival --tts

Update:
Debian does work in text mode with those old monitors. In the meantime, vga monitors and vid cards were donated to the cause. I kind of like using the old cards as you had composite out that would go to a tv really easily. I am sure you could do the same thing with svideo on a vga card, but at least that is a potential use for tv's and old composite monitors like for the old eight bit computers being outgrown by the digital age.