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I spent the day installing BL3 to this computer.  (After my partner spent 
yesterday fixing CMOS battery, keyboard, and power jack).

I had made a BL3.tgz of all the files on a working BL3 laptop on my USB 
flash drive.  63MB (includes Opera 8 and 9, mplayer, timidity with lots of 
patch files, netpbm, gs, zgv, dbclient....., glibc 2.2.5).  Original 
pentium 1 2.2.26 kernel.  No USB.

Booted BL3 2-floppy (non-framebuffer), copied pcmcia network module to 
floppy disk and inserted it from there.  Inserted fine but could not 
contact the router.  Tried two known-good cards with known-good cables and 
router.  (They worked in the adjacent laptop).  The same hardware worked 
with Win98 on the Armada.  Why not in linux?  udhcpc and ping did not 
connect.

It has a CD-ROM drive in the now-working base but I have not learned to 
burn files to CD, just iso images or music CDs or copy CDs.

I could have used Win98 with browser on here and httpd or ftpd on another 
computer.  The previous owner got all the hardware working by downloading 
drivers for Win98.  The laptop came with Win95 in 1997.

Instead I attempted PLIP.  Everything worked on the Armada but not on 
three other laptops.  HP would not insert parport_pc (and it works very 
badly with a parport scanner).  Toshiba and Thinkpad did not have the 
directory in /proc/ to which to copy IRQ 7 after inserting parport and 
parport_pc.

PLIP is fussy.  I then tried DOS llpro.  After about 10 attempts with 
random disconnects it transferred 2/3 of 63MB file then disconnected 
again.  It was always the Armada that disconnected.

I got out the two parport zip drives and copied iomega software to DOS 
partition. 2/3 of the way through file transfer clunk clunk and it quit.
scandisk started clunking at 49%.  Then the drive would no longer read any 
disks so I used the other drive and transfered BL2 ramdisk and the BL3 tgz 
file.  I used BL2 ramdisk to unpack it (after PQMAGIC shrank Win98 and 
made a 250MB ext2 partition - how would I safely shrink FAT32 using BL3 on 
2 floppy disks?).  Edited fstab to /dev/hda2.  It booted fine.

Xvesa works.  No framebuffer support.  SB-pro emulating ess 1888 plays 
midi files perfectly if a bit tinnily with timidity through the larger 
speakers in the base.  Mplayer plays mp3 files at half speed (????).

Win98 plays midis correctly - did not try mp3s.  XMPlay works in Win98 in 
16MB memory.  Are there any good free Win98 midi recorders?

I have libc5 and libc6 Rosegarden for recording and editing midis on my 
electronic 1986 Yamaha piano.  The base has a midi port.  I have never 
seen a laptop with one.

The 900MHz HP N5415 (only needed a key, a foot, and a CD-ROM drive 
replacement and a good dusting to stop the awful fan racket) that I tried 
to transfer with has USB, PCMCIA, onboard winmodem and built-in tulip NIC, 
none of which work with BL2 or even Puppy 2 (all but pcmcia work with 
Puppy 4.3).  This is the first laptop I have run into that works with 
Puppy but not BL.  From 2001.  Very difficult to remove network cable or 
pcmcia cards (use a sharp instrument).  512MB RAM.  Can you run BL 
entirely in RAM?

The Thinkpad 600E that I tried next works with BL except for sound (Puppy 
4.3 installs drivers for CS4236 but no sound either).  Puppy 4.3 works but 
4.2 and earlier do not find their files.  Upped it to 220MB RAM.

These both have useless winmodems but the Thinkpad works nicely online via 
pcmcia network card, except for no sound, and the HP should make a good 
DVD player with mplayer since sound works.  (The Puppy gxine DVD player 
needs more than 1 GHz - loses sound and the video plays much too fast.)

The 266MHz 335CDS Toshiba works with BL, except USB storage does not work 
with my kernel and modules.   USB storage does work with David Moberg's 
1-floppy BL3 2.4.31 kernel.  He included more (all?) of the USB storage 
drivers.  Upped it from 32 to 64MB RAM.

I put BL2 and loop BL3 and ramdisk BL2 on all of these while trying to 
find a way to get BL3 on the Armada.

I could have temporarily put the hard disk in another laptop or in a 2.5 
to 3.5" adaptor.

The older Compaqs are much sturdier than the newer Compaqs and HPs.  We 
have had one 75MHz, three 120MHz, one 233, one 333, and one 400 that work 
well with BL, and about 20 faster ones that don't work (defective solder 
around one small chip).

BL works well on a Hitachi, Gateway, and DELL (all 133-200MHz), three 
Toshibas (100-266MHz), and Thinkpad 250 and 400MHz.

The 900MHz HP was a disappointment.
Do any 21st century laptops work well with BL?

Sindi