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120MHz, 80MB RAM (one 64MB SIMM, probably 70ns EDO, buried under keyboard 
and other stuff), came with 3GB hard drive (sold with 1.3GB) with Win98, 
circa 1996.  Lovely screen, keyboard that feels like an older desktop 
model (which I like), hardware brightness control.  Built like a tank but 
without CD-ROM drive or USB. PCMCIA slots.  1MB video RAM, no framebuffer, 
ES1688 ISA sound chip.  Eraser-head mouse (blue head).

Puppy Linux ran into a lot of problems with this one.  Not enough memory. 
Xvesa displayed completely scrambled (Xorg worked).  It auto loaded 
drivers for USB and CD-ROM and cupsd and even after removing them and 
blinky and rox-filer it was overloaded without running a browser.  (It 
wants 128MB).  It did not detect any PCMCIA cards even after I told it 
which modules to use.  Sound configuration took too long to bother trying 
sb after es1688 failed to work.  Their minimum target is 300MHz.

I booted to DOS from floppy (non-booting hard drive).

BL3 with P1 kernel and booted with nomce (machine check exception - needed 
for Armada 120 and 233 MHz 4 as well) had a Kernel Panic after finding an 
unsupported inode size:  256.  (I think it was partitioned with PQMagic 8 
- I moved over a nonbooting drive from the Thinkpad since they both took 
the thickest style, but this one came with a more recent thinner drive).

BL2 with P1 2.26 kernel said 'fatal, kernel too old'.

So, though there is no USB or framebuffer, I booted BL2 with my 
bzimlafb.431 kernel (I will switch to bzimagla.431 eventually).
vga=91 is unsupported.  I chose 0  25 lines.  Xvesa works at 800x600 
15-bit (or maybe 16-bit).  I think it is chips and technology video.  Boot
screen mentions Opti VIPER.  Very nice looking full-screen text without 
framebuffer (as opposed to scrawny ugly text or half-screen text on things 
like the Winbook or Thinkpad).

Xvesa works.  Sound works (as sb, standard settings).  PCMCIA works with 
orinoco wireless and pc_net.cs wired network cards.  Opera 9 works (it 
takes a while to process ebay pages due to the javascript) and while it is 
at ebay only 40MB memory are in use.  Mplayer rc1try7 crashes if used 
online (as on the thinkpad).  Did not try 0.93 mplayer yet.

I need to assemble a new list of radio stations since most of the old ones 
have disappeared.   Please suggest your favorite classical stations and 
they no longer need to be 32K or less.  (Though too many bits will 
overload the cpu).

The onboard speakers (in the screen) sound crummy, but external speakers 
make this a nice kitchen radio, with an apple airport base station 
plugged into the network cable in an adjacent room to add local wireless. 
A bit heavy for lugging around in a backpack but nearly indestructible.

The person who gave it to me to maybe set up for her daughter's home 
schooling says to keep it.  The students need at least 800MHz 256MB RAM 
with Flash, Adobe PDF reader, IE or Firefox 3......  For $100 she can get 
something used with XP, and spend her time doing security updates and 
virus scans.


Sindi Keesan