Right now, I, Bitscape, am sitting in the living room at the console of Dagobah, the ancient K5-133 with the spray painted case, the LED on the front which reads "1011", and a fresh new 40 gig hard drive. Much needs to be done before everything will be tailored to my liking, but this is definitely a start.

Right now, all I have is console text mode access, and of course, an ssh connection to Argo through which I am typing this. Given all the hours I've spent getting it going, that doesn't seem like much. Many stumbling blocks along the way have been conquered, and many more lie ahead.

Right now, the final moments of the Truth or Dare movie -- the song "Keep it Together" -- have just disappeared from the tv screen, and the end credits begin to roll up. I think I'll throw in another DVD in a moment.

Let's see... It must've been 7 or 8 hours ago that I once again began to embark on Project Revive Dagobah. The first step was to get it to boot from a Debian boot floppy. This proved to not be working very well. It didn't even make it to the lilo boot prompt. After multiple attempts at twiddling the BIOS, and much sporadic behavior, I decided that Dagobah's floppy drive must be bad.

To prove my theory, I went to Argo, made a complete set of boot and driver floppies, and then shut Argo down to performed a floppy drive transplant. With Argo's floppy plugged into Dagobah, I attempted to boot with the boot floppies. Worked perfectly the first time, so I set about configuring the installation.

Part way through the installation, I realized I had missed one of the necassary driver disks, so I had to go through the arduous process of putting the floppy drive back on Argo to make one more disk, bring it back to Dagobah, and start the installation over.

I also did some twiddling with the jumper on the hard drive, and discovered that it had not defaulted to master. Instead, it was cable select. I switched it to master, which actually caused the BIOS to recognize it. Incorrectly. Now the BIOS thought there was an 8 gig drive installed instead of the actual 40 gigs. Not only that, but when the drive was activated, it wouldn't even boot from the floppy! It just froze at the BIOS logo.

I switched the setting back to No Hard Drive installed, booted from the floppy again, and got underway with the installation. (Incidentally, the Debian installer recognized the drive just fine. Quite funny that it was able to detect what the motherboard's own stupid BIOS was unable to figure out. Methinks the Debian developers are slightly smarter than those at American Megatrends.)

Everything went well until it was time to configure the kernel driver modules. I did some research on the new 100base card I had bought, and discovered it was a National Semiconductor chipset. Almost all fine and dandy. The kernel does support it (which it damn well better, given that the card had "Linux" listed as one of the supported operating systems on the box). The 2.4 kernel, that is. The woody boot floppies are still on 2.2. Doh!

So, I was faced with having to come up with another ingenious idea to somehow get Dagobah installed enough to at least be able to upgrade to a newer kernel. Dagobah did still have the ancient 10 megabit ISA card from long ago, so I decided to give that a shot. Only problem: I needed to input the irq and io port, of which I had no clue.

I fiddled and twiddled over that one. Tried to make it autodetect, to no avail. Listened to some Sarah McLachlan in concert, ate some salad, cooked some soup, and pondered the situation. Then, a slim chance dawned on me. A possible way to figure it out without having to power, down, take the card out, try to decipher the jumpers, and restart AGAIN.

I remembered that long long ago, I had had the presence of mind to copy Dagobah's entire /etc partition to Argo before Dagobah was retired. I checked the ancient backup directory. Still there, thanks to my gross lack of diligence in cleaning my hard drive. It didn't take me long to find the kernel module parameters and their arguments. IRQ 10, io port 0x300 for the ne2000 card. YES!

[Bitscape throws on headphones to blast a song he hasn't heard in over a decade. Literally. Digital cable is a wonderful thing.]

Yikes! There come the memories.

I fumbled around in the Debain interface getting the arguments into a form it liked, and the driver successfully loaded.

Then there was the matter of installing over the network. Normally, this would have gone without a hitch. But somehow, I had the luck to be doing it on one of those rare occassions during which some of the Debian mirrors were acting odd.

You know how Debian's mirrors work. You access http.us.debain.org, and the dns server picks one of the mirrors for you. Well, it turns out that tonight, some of the servers returned by the dns were working, and some of them were completely unresponsive. I confirmed this by trying it several times from Argo. Very annoying. Whenever it hit a bad server, the installation would timeout, and have to go through the whole step again.

Solution? On Argo, I used dig to lookup the IPs, found a server that was working, and hard coded its address on Dagobah's config screen. Download succeeded. Finally.

From there, lots of waiting to complete the installation. Either Dagobah has gotten a LOT slower since the days I used her as my primary machine, or my expectations have become significantly higher.

dselect

Sit and wait 5 minutes for things to load.

apt-get install ntpdate

Reading Package Lists... [wait, wait, wait, wait]

I know that in truth, Dagobah's speed really hasn't changed much, if any. (It could be that newer versions of software have more bloat, but not THAT much in 2 years.) It's difficult to accept that my patience quotient has really decreased by such a significant margin since a few years ago.

Anyway, getting back to the story. Next challenge: Get the mouse working. I eagerly pulled out the $20 optical bargain I had acquired. The mouse had a USB plug, but it included a USB to PS/2 converter. I dug into the boxes in my closet, and found a PS/2 to serial converter, and added it to the big messy chain. USB -> PS/2 -> Serial.

Plugged it in, and tried loading gpm. No luck. Switched the protocol. Still nothing. Then I noticed that the little light wasn't even coming on. Was Dagobah's serial port dead, or did I have a defective mouse?

I suspected the former, of course. To confirm, I plugged the mouse into Argo, where it lighted right up. Tried again on Dagobah. No dice.

To check Dagobah's port, I pulled an old mouse out of the closet and plugged it in, using the same PS/2 to serial converter. Magically, it worked straight away. So perhaps there's something in that USB to PS/2 to Serial mess that's just too much for the poor circuts to handle. I dunno. An odd little mystery.

So anyway, here I am, typing away in console mode through the old 10 megabit network card. I want to get the 100 megabit working, pipe my X sessions through it, nfs the home directory, and all that good stuff. Getting the new network is going to be a little more than a simple kernel download and compile though. I'll have to find out how to get the new kernel onto a bootable floppy and mount the hard drive onto the / directory. (The boot floppy I'm using right now was created automagically by the Debian installer.)

Then there will be the matter of setting up X, NFS, getting my nfs-ed /home dot files all nice so they'll work right logging in from two environments. And as I mentioned before, I'd like to get some coding done during the course of the next week too. :)

Here comes another song I thought I had forgotten. Whatever happened to that Bobby Brown guy anyway?

The fun is just beginning.