Aniversary
Today is a special day. Exactly 3 years ago in the south of Belgium, Maria José and I decided to start our relation. You can imagine that we have been talking about those good ol’ days in this romantic surrounding…
Today is a special day. Exactly 3 years ago in the south of Belgium, Maria José and I decided to start our relation. You can imagine that we have been talking about those good ol’ days in this romantic surrounding…
In December last year, I described on this site how I installed MuLinux on my IPC Porta-PC laptop. I installed the WKS, SRV and X11 add-ons, so I had a working graphical user interface and the necessary e-mail (mutt) and web (lynx) applications. The only thing missing was the internet connection, and I wanted to configure my PCMCIA modem for this.
Unfortunately, this was the moment that things started going wrong, I was not able to activate PCMCIA. As everybody knows, the power of Linux is that it is open source, so you can fix everything yourself. However, I am not a kernel hacker, so this option is unusable for me. Instead I put all the error messages in an e-mail, and send it to the muLinux mailing list. Within an hour I had some responses, one of them being from Michele Andreoli, the creator of muLinux (try this with Windows!). They gave me some more options to try, but the conclusion was that in creating a tiny linux distribution, Michele had to cut out PCMCIA modem support (ethernet cards are supported however). Game over…
I do have a ‘normal’ serial modem which I could use to connect to the internet, but I want to use this modem as well for my desktop system. So the options are: using a serial modem or install another operating system which does support my PCMCIA modem.
A long time ago… In 1994 I was studying chemistry at Utrecht University. I was doing research to the use of Partial Least Squares Regression for the automated interpretation of infrared, anmd for this I needed a powerful computer (Apple Macintosh LC II) which had a great feature: Internet!!!!! I quickly discovered the usenet groups (untill today the most underestimated internet application) and started posting in several groups.
Today I run across one of these messages, dated 10 Nov 1994. There should be more messages wandering around, and possibly some of them are older… In this message I am using a DDS e-mail address, and if I remember well, before this one I was using a HackTic address.
Last Saturday millions of people protested against the plans to invade Iraq. Here in Lleida about 20.000 people protested. I was one of them…
People here are not used to cold weather. Houses neither. Today at −4 we did not have water to flush the toilet of our office. Luckily we have a big swimming pool, so for the comming months we will be able to flush. This was the first time that I used our swimming pool!
The last years I haven’t done a lot of sports. When I was younger (yes, I’m becoming an old man) I used to cycle every day to school (11 kilometers) and I have been playing tabletennis and volleyball. After I finished school, the only sports I did was the weekly paaltjesvoetbal at Jong Nederland. But now that I’m living in Lleida, I even stopped doing that, but it is time for a change… As the title of this message already suggests, basketball became the sport of choice. It is one of the most popular sports here in Lleida, and the local club is quite succesful. I am not playing in that club, but only incidently on Sundays together with some friends. We play on the square of the school oposite of our house, which I call our virtual garden (we only have a balcony). Last Sunday was the first time I joined the basketball group. The waether was great, it felt like spring. And my muscles still tell me that I was playing too fanatically. Next weekend I probably cannot play (good start, isn’t it?), because Maria José and I plan to go to the pyrenees for some snow fun.
[Update 2004.01.21]: Changed link to JNH
After all the troubles described below, I decided to try to install freeBSD. Since my laptop does not have a CD player I tried to install it over a serial cable connected to my other laptop, which does have a CD player. The laptop with the CD player runs Windows 98, which does not support this kind of connections. Therefore I booted it from my muLinux floppy and entered the basic configuration details. Funny how an operating system on a simple floppy disk can accomplish many things I cannot do with a 100+ Mb Windows installation.
Before this I already prepared two freeBSD boot disks to start up the setup procedure. I booted my laptop from the first disk, inserted the second disk when promted, hit enter to start the setup program, and… reboot!
Time to read the manual (I know, I should have done that part before). Tried the same thing again, this time with the boot -h option, but with the same result. Mmmm… Maybe my floppies are corrupt, since I do remember having some troubles creating them. So I enter them in the other laptop, and they function perfectly…
I guess I’ll have to do some more reading. One of the things I am thinking of is that my old laptop does not have a lot of memory, so maybe it is not able to contain the whole setup program.
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