[plug] OT - Woooooohooo - a win... Sort of.

[Garry]

I have a dud laptop, an old Toshiba with a P133/4Gig HDD and 80Mb ram. The k/b is rooted. The input on the screen bears only a passing resemblance to the keys pressed. A plugin PS/2 does the trick, but then it's not much chop as a portable laptop... Besides that, even if it were in mint condition it'd be a pretty sad thing to use.  8^)==

Tried to put Woody, then Sarge, then Smoothwall on.. It was not willing to play. The FDD clicks a lot. Then CDRom make noises, flashes lights, but won't make boot floppies or boot on Woody or Sarge or SW CDs. Yes - I tried many many times. Bugger.

On a whim, I gave FreeBSD 5.2 on CD a lash. It went first go. Gotta be destiny.

Followed the Handbook for an installation as per whole disk default, and it worked. mmmm. Even though the device nomenclature is sufficiently abstract as to invoke thoughts of War and Peace in Chinese, going steady and following the Handbook everything Just Worked as promised. The instructions are specific enough to get someone as thick as me up on PPPOE NAT'd ADSL first go! 
VI is VI, fortunately! (ok, not vim, but I got by..)

Yep, pings westnet..

Change the routes on the clients. WOOOHOOOOOO. Slashdot.

For someone who has zero real knowledge of FreeBSD, having a working gateway in a "foreign" OS on dodgy hardware is a big win.. 

Sorry, had to share. Just one of those things really..  8^)==


Garry.



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Backward: A country which is offended by one bare breast, yet has enshrined in the Constitution the right to watch murder as entertainment and the right to carry firearms..