I'm kicking back, living la vida loco, cleaning out some of my old crap.

I find that I have a P-100 processor (with heatsink seemingly welded to it), an Asus P5A-B motherboard, a stick of 32MB RAM, and various hard drives (500MB and smaller).

So, I'm thinking I'll throw together ANOTHER computer (like 14 aren't enough).

But the NIC's I have (8bit SMC, 16bit, ISA SMC, and a pair of ISA Intel's) don't seem to be working well (not supported off of the installation floppies Im using from Debian.

Rather than overtax my limited mental facilities (this is a Sunday morning, remember?) I decide to just buy a cheap PCI NIC and help fund the economic recovery (every $19.95 helps).

So, I get the NIC, get it home, un-box it, put it in, and I'm looking at the box (happy smiling children and daddy staring at a floating network interface card....) when I notice that the box has "system requirements". Specifically:

- Pentium 150Mhz
- 32MB RAM
- One PCI bus mastering slot

Okay, I can understand the slot, but 150Mhz? 32MB? For a NIC?????!!!!!

Was I asleep or something? Did I miss something? This is a D-Link DFE-530TX+. A generic PCI NIC. How can it reuire 150Mhz processor?

Better yet, will it work in my 100Mhz processor system?

Or is this a simple case of someone having space on the box to fill and filling it with whatever they could think of?

Yep, if I had been willing to wait, I could have gotten one via mailorder fro $9 (+shipping/handling).

FunFunFunFunFun!

Let's see, first off, the machine would boot to the Debian floppy, and hang during the decompression.

So, mess with the BIOS settings.

Now machine won't get past the BIOS messages.

Oops.

So, move the NIC to another slot.

Still hanging on the BIOS messages.

Hmmmmm.

Go into BIOS setup and put everything to default.

Cool. Machine boots to Debian floppy and the installation completeswithout a hitch.

Now, install "man". That works.

Next, install "ssh". Oops. Something isn't working right. I'm getting errors on the script.

Hmmmm, the floppies I used were the "fixed" ones from the "proposed updates" directory. Perl 5.005 is on there, but the stable versions look for perl 5.004.

Damn.

Okay, "vi /etc/apt/sources.conf". Switch everything to "unstable".

apt-get update

apt-get install perl

Now, waiting for it to finish that (slow DSL line).

Once that's done, I'll finish the "apt-get upgrade".

*sigh*

And the only reason I'm using the "proposed-updates" images are because the regular images gave me weird errors about a script file that wasn't installed. (this happened a few weeks ago)

It looks like I'm going to have to hack on the original disks a bit and get them fixed for the next Linux User Group meeting here. I like Debian, but I want it to be a bug-free installation.

And all this started because I had some left over pieces.

Why do I get myself in projects like this?

I've re-installed several times.

The good news is that I found the 4 - 72 pin simms that I thought were 32MB total, turn out to be 32MB each. 128MB of RAM I didn't know I had.

Anyway, after swapping out the RAM and just about everything else, I think I have a somewhat flacky processor. I'll get a 90Mhz tomorrow and try it again.

Damn.