[vox-tech] Slack on a laptop

[Chris McKenzie]

Ok, I have a Toshiba Satellite laptop with about 800mb hard drive and 8mb
of ram.  It useds to have netbsd on it but for various reasons I decided
to put linux on it.  After much effort and frusteration I did a debian
2.2.6 (I believe; just got it off the ftp the other day) on the laptop by
way of floppy disk.  It worked ok and then I ftp'd over slackware-4.0 to
do an install of that.  Why 4.0 slackware and why not debian?  dselect ran
pitifully slow on this machine and I didn't want to bother learning how to
use it(it took minutes to start up, hours to actually do anything).
Furthermore, the modern linux seemed to be a hog compared to what it was a
few years ago for such a system as this laptop (although it does support
more hardware and is better designed,
I did not need the advanced features for this install).  I have been using
BSD for a long time and so am familiar with more traditional methods of
installing software and managing a system.  That is why I chose slackware.
I have used a lot of the distros and I have liked it the most.  I put 4.0
on because I have heard it was a good version and I didn't want to put on
a modern version because I feared it would make the system run slow.
	Ok, enough justification.  Here are my problems.  The laptop has a
PCCARD network card which should be recognized because it is an Etherlink
clone (which one, I forget, but an extreamly old version of debian (like
from 1997 or so) recognized it on another laptop).  However, an ifconfig
-a gives me:
	No usable adress families found.
I was looking at the source and got deep into it and saw that I had a lot
to learn if I was going to fix it that way.  I was wondering if anyone
would know how I could get it working.
I also get a slew of insmod errors with dumps of the help menu and a bunch
of /lib/modules/*'s being unresolved during bootup that mysteriously
dissappear from dmesg (maybe there is a better place for it, I'm not
familiar with this) Being that I don't know what is needed, I have tar'd
the /var/log directory on the machine and g'zipped it.  Also knowing how
corrupt files can be the source of lots of frusteration, I also did a
find / -exec md5sum {} \; > allfiles and that is in the tar.gz also.
And because there seems to be no way in pine to include a file I feel that
I am forced to put it on an ftp.  The IP is pretty stable and the file
will probably be accessible for at least 72 hours or so.  If you can't get
it, just e-mail me or AIM me at m8525888.  Anyway:

ftp://anonymous:nopass@63.199.227.62/pub/logs.tar.gz

It won't be live for about 10 minutes -- still doing the md5sum.  It'll be
there though.  Thanks a lot.

Sincerely,
	Christopher J. McKenzie

	cjm@ucdavis.edu
	mckenzie@cs.ucdavis.edu
	(530) 297-6110
	609 Anderson 161
	Davis, CA