New Life for Old Notebook

[DoctorPepper]

Well, I guess I got tired of playing around in MS-DOS on my old Dell Latitude XPi 133 notebook. I downloaded the OpenBSD 3.9 boot floppy image (for notebooks), transferred it to a floppy disk and installed OpenBSD 3.9 over the network using my old Linksys 802.11b wireless PCMCIA card. It worked like a champ, and I'm currently sitting at the login prompt.

Note: The OpenBSD on-line installation manual is excellent, if anyone else wants to follow in my footsteps.

This notebook does not have a CD-ROM drive installed, which makes it much more difficult to install software. Having the network work well is a major plus. Also, this notebook only has 32 MB of RAM, and a 1.3 GB hard drive, so I opted to skip the installation of X. I'm very comfortable at the Unix console, so this will work for me. YMMV.

[ahm]

I'm a huge OpenBSD fan. Unlike most contemporary Linux distros,
with OpenBSD it's possible to load a minimal operating system,
and just add what you need via binary packages:


# pkg_add http://archive-site/3.9/packages/packagename.tgz

[DoctorPepper]

I'm a huge OpenBSD fan. Unlike most contemporary Linux distros,
with OpenBSD it's possible to load a minimal operating system,
and just add what you need via binary packages:


# pkg_add http://archive-site/3.9/packages/packagename.tgz

Yeah, I know. I've been using OpenBSD for several years now. :-)

It really works great on a low-end system.

Hey ahm, I forgot to add this:

I exported the "PKG_PATH" variable in my .profile script. I set it to:

'ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/3.9/packages/i386/'

And now all I need to do (while connected to the internet) is type in:

pkg_add package_name.tgz

And it will find the package and install it for me.