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I wanted to transfer some freeware programs that I downloaded to an IBM 
Win95 166Mhz desktop in another room.  If in the same room I could have 
used a parallel transfer cable (with BL3 floppy and plip) or even serial 
nullmodem cable.  These are both rather slow.

(No they did not want linux instead of Windows to do homework on, and play 
games).

I could have used a parport zip drive, installing IOMEGA files via floppy 
disk to the Win95 IBM and copying files to zip drive using imm.o or ppa.o 
in BL.  Also rather slow.

Ethernet is faster but I don't have that long a cable and don't know how 
to use it in Win95.  The IBM is REALLY heavy and not to be lugged closer.

I copied the files to USB flash drive using BL ext2 with a 2.4.31 USB 
kernel.  mount -t vfat with long file names.

The Win95 computer has no USB card and I can't find a way to get it open 
to add one.  No visible case screws.

Instead of setting up a second desktop computer that has USB in that room, 
to transfer files via, with a second monitor and keyboard, I pulled out 
the Hitachi 133MHz laptop with USB port and PCMCIA, and PCMCIA network 
card and crossover adaptor and a cable, and connected the laptop (which 
has BL3 ext2 on it with USB kernel) and the IBM via NIC.  The IBM 
fortunately came with a working 3COM ISA pnp 3c509 card.

BL2 floppy version comes with 3c509.o.  I could have added it to disk 2 of 
BL3.5 after downloading from the BL3 site. Boot the IBM with BL2 floppy, 
insmod 3c509.  No need to specify io or irq, it found both.  Lovely card.

Boot the Hitachi laptop with BL3 ext2 and USB kernel 2.4.31 (in order to 
get both USB and PCMCIA support).  I had already added my two PCMCIA 
network cards to pcmcia config.  Load USB storage modules and mount
/dev/sda1.

Start PCMCIA.  ifconfig both eth0's in the two computers.  With the first 
ethernet card, the laptop would ping (both ways) but not send to the 
desktop, though it would receive.  -c Host not found.  It has worked until 
now.

Next I tried my 3com ethernet card, and though it kept timing out and 
giving error messages, it did send everything.  Both NICs are 10MB tBase2. 
The desktop ISA one may be failing.  I could have attempted to use it 
directly in Win95 but BL was more familiar and CLI.

The Hitachi has some DMA problem if you warm reboot which may be related 
somehow to the error messages.  Or the 10 MB/sec is too fast for the 3GB 
drive in the IBM, to which I transferred directly from USB.

This method should work for Win95 through ME.  Newer computers will have 
NTFS but also USB ports.

BL is the world's best linux Swiss army knife.

Sindi Keesan