[CS-FSLUG] That Console Feeling

[Ed Hurst]

I've been wanting an excuse to live on the console for awhile, at least
part of the time. My brother loaned me an old Toshiba Satellite 4020CDT,
for which almost no modern distro can run in graphical mode. We're
talking a 300Mhz CPU, 160MB RAM, C&T 65555 graphics with 2MB VRAM.

BTW, not a single Knoppix-like distro will boot, even after extensive
testing with numerous switches.

However, Debian Etch installed just fine without X. There is so far
almost no way to get the thing to suspend, much less hibernate. I'm
still looking into the possibilities.

One of the darnedest things took me two hours to figure out, though: How
to get the trackpoint system to paste on the console. I googled myself
silly before I found it mentioned in passing in the 'gpm' man page you
can force a '-2' switch to call it a two-button mouse -- this older
trackpoint can't be pressed down to paste  -- and get a paste from the
"right" button. While it was there all the time, the information was
presented as if it was completely unimportant, a remark at the end of a
long paragraph.

Anyway, for the next couple of weeks, my only mobile will be this old
beast running without X.

-- 
Ed Hurst
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