Two kinda old Dells

My grandparents sent me their old Dells, Dimension 3000 and a Dimension 4600. I'll get to work on them when I get back from vacation.

Oofleschmoop has a good copy of DSL

I got the CF card (10$) and the CF card adapter (20$), and I put a liveusb copy of DSL on there and put them in Oofleschmoop, so now I have him running. Kinda.
CLI only seems to take up 640x480 of the 800x600 pixels on screen, and X only works with 640x480x4.
Painful.
The worst part is that DSL's toolkit doesn't run in 4-bit, so I can't open most of the useful little dialogs like wifi setup so I could get a better Xserver that supports the Trident Cyber9382 in this thing. It also turns out that the DWL-G650 I ordered is not C2, which is the version that works with DSL, but B5, which will require me to use ndiswrapper + proprietary driver if I want to get it working with kernel 2.4.31.

Luckily, if ndiswrapper doesn't work (going to try it over the weekend), I have another option:
Debian Etch netinstall. If I do this, hopefully it will work with wifi and I'll be able to install packages. I might need to buy a 64MB stick instead of the 32MB stick of RAM that's currently in there because the Debian wiki recommends 40MB RAM, which is exactly what I have (and I don't want to cut it that close). Since I've successfully used the DWL-G650 with Etch, this shouldn't be a problem.
I'll update this with pics tomorrow and hopefully a success story over the weekend.

Well that failed

Do you remember those D-Link ethernet cards I got? Well they came, but Linux 2.4.x doesn't like them. DeLi spits out a bunch of unresolved symbol errors when I try to modprobe the module (which is 8139too) and DSL doesn't even recognize its existence. I have yet to get the module for BasicLinux so I can try it on Nettlewark, but I imagine it won't be much better.


And even worse, I think the 486's power supply is shot. When I turn it on I hear a low frequency clicking noise, and it gets to a higher freq if I switch it to 110.

I just realized something...

The Smart Boot Manager image isn't 1.44MB, it's 104KB. This means I can easily put it on a 5.25" floppy and boot the 486 with it, then select a different floppy to boot from.
Now I need a 5.25" floppy drive...

(What I'll probably end up doing is reconnecting the two floppy drives, and then getting the BL DOS image on the machine via the network card [when I get it], then making 5.25" floppy images with SBM via the 486.)