Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

I expect to be seeing postings soon from Jonathan, who picked up his 
computers yesterday.  The first thing he discovered is that my floppy 
disks won't work in his old computer, nor his floppy disks in the new 
ones.  He will learn to use floppymeter.  He had commented that many of 
his floppy disks appeared to be bad when he tried to transfer files with 
them.  That was our symptom too, when we tried to format them with a 
worn-out drive.

I gave him ALL the old sound cards with Crystal or Opti or Reveal that I 
could not get working.

And two extra video cards and 14.4K modems.

And two 200MB hard drives with assorted linux experiments on them.

And two ISA ethernet cards, 3c509.

At which point I asked if they wanted another computer, so he and his 14 
year old brother learned to install cpus, RAM, floppy drives, drive rails, 
hard drives, master and slave jumpers, PCI and ISA cards, spread out all 
over our stoop because all the available surfaces indoors were covered 
with other projects.  His brother was a real whiz at this but knows little 
about software so is not likely to join the list soon.

The next project is for him to transfer files from his old Win31 computer 
to the new linux computer.  The parport zip drive is one option (though 
the linux boot disk that David designed for it and I wrote to disk won't 
work in his floppy drive, he can copy the DOS files to run it to hard 
drive).  But he asked if we had a nullmodem serial cable for file 
transfer, which would be simpler (though I warned him it would be slow).

I suggested a split program, but remembered he has a floppy drive problem.

We have discovered you can make the tails of two serial mice (4-wire, but 
only 3 seem to be needed) into a serial transfer cable that works with 
laplink pro but not as nullmodem cable with linux.  Do any of you know how 
many wires are needed for that?  He would like to try the laptop as a dumb 
terminal, possibly sharing an internet connection.

We don't have extra 9-pin modem cables to rewire or even use with 
adaptors.  We do have one 9-pin end of something attacahed to a ribbon 
cable.  (Can one solder to a ribbon cable?).

This particular new list member may be the first ever who will not be 
repeating the typical newbie questions, because he is methodically reading 
through the entire archives, and last I heard was near the end of 2004!

keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org