Linux on old laptops

So they tossed out an IBM ThinkPad 600E at work and I scarfed it on the way to the dumpster. It was stripped: no floppy, no hard drive, the CMOS battery was dead and the main battery was missing. This model doesn't have any USB ports, but it does have a pair of PCMCIA slots. It did have a CD-ROM drive...

I wonder if this thing will run Linux? So I hie me over to the Puppy Linux web page and start downloading Live-CD images. Using Nero on my Windows XP Pro machine, I burn several CD-ROMs to try them out. In particular, I look at 2.14 and 2.15CE.

I boot the thing up using a power supply I use with my ThinkPad 380ED and it boots but man is it ugly. The resolution that Puppy chose is clearly wrong. It also takes forever and I soon see why: the thing has been stripped of it's RAM, leaving only 32MB installed! I do a quick re-think and decide to try Puppy on the 380ED first - it has 80+MB of RAM!

The 380ED is a Pentium MMX 166. It has an integrated floppy and CD-ROM drive as well as PCMCIA. No USB. I use this particular machine as a logging computer for my amateur radio contesting. It runs a legal version of Windows 98 and I'm quite happy with it for this use. The 9 pin serial port is very valuable for hooking up to a GPS receiver.

So through various trial and errors, I figure out that the resolution is 800 x 600 x 16. 35.1562KHz with a 56.25Hz refresh. It takes quite a few probes to work out the one I can read, but it's not so bad. Once Puppy 2.14 loads, I see that there's 35M of RAM free. That doesn't bode well for a machine that only has 32MB of RAM! The next step was to try to get the PCMCIA Ethernet card working. It turns out that I loaded 2 modules: pcsnet_cs and axnet_cs and that was the combination that finally did the trick. Since that machine has a hard drive, I let Puppy store its configuration file there for future use.

Then, back to the 600E. The 800 x 600 x 16 worked and so did the drivers, but man is it ever slow. The monitor window shows 11.6M free, but the CD drive just keeps trundling and it takes a long, long time to load the browser (Seamonkey.) It's a 2645-4AU, dated 09/1999. Pentium II 366MHz. It's taking so long to load Seamonkey that I'm going to post this and see if it comes up by tomorrow...

There's an excellent ThinkPad specifications web page here. IBM has a PDF describing the details of their discontinued 'numbered' models here.

FireGPG

I use Firefox and I have used PGP in the past. A recent mailing list discussion (no, really!) made me reconsider integrating Gmail and PGP. I started looking around and found FireGPG. It has a few quirks, but it's integrated into Gmail (a bit.)

As a prerequisite, you'll need some form of OpenPGP. At home I use Windows XP Pro, so I chose to try GnuPG. In particular, it loads in the Windows Privacy Tray (WinPT) which is a quick way to generate keys, import them from friends, etc.

Once you have OpenPGP of your choice installed, generate your keys. Be very aware that your private key is critical and you ought not lose it!. Back it up. Publish your public key on a key server if you like. I used Veridis. Uning WinPT, choose Keyserver from the menu. Right click in the window that has the existing keyservers and choose Add. Then in the key manager window, right click your key and choose 'Send to keyserver.'

An alternate mechanism is to post your public key on your web page. Using WinPT, click your key, then click the icon on the top right 'Copy key to keyboard.' Here's mine:

pub 1024D/47BA6B91 10/21/2007 Buck Calabro
Primary key fingerprint: DA31 A4AD 9BCE 420E C400 9C41 DECA 71C9 47BA 6B91

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (MingW32)

mQGiBEcbaT4RBADqmM9OgXil65pjrxclJpxuAF6vraI3kkmJbEHb5ElL7EquHE3Q
DuFqFgIB4NZLHDbVAh0AD5exAX+r+xg//UvtBc2k34HROnCpWTMnIOaSVhhVjpYE
bZGLz6wfrRpu4Qyn45iaKT4F0qcHo+0LrGQPef3xrFkUhxURgzY5zgo6+wCg/XjY
J155witPWB2CbNf6RAm9QT0D/jSp6YhvE3xPE12aBuRYM678JTbaQfuYv4HUfug1
Wz/0zH5btfEihWVN4wbKaoQ/H/29v2TP/Lyh8XTVd3Z0rz4iaSD5fGicn81WPANB
eIepLB8vpfEik6UhHpN1DJkz6Ryw2mgx8p53LhHVCk4Jt0HP2TAl3f7QTXGFOiFz
JwEqBACsHk/gFpKAHdv7n4vJoHqp0RNgOOyhnTThlulPilt6tAaSe10FOrrugBuL
Mn7wXBANQ1ApmIb5yNjhYqPREj65OVv2MUbw8H2HnQs//Z6aodyR/kzU2q2G9A/Y
FI1LL0m/gvaVbEj/wE0ybBgFkrcoEFeStkqS5HzLEFGUDFXhD7QfQnVjayBDYWxh
YnJvIDxrYzJoaXpAZ21haWwuY29tPoiFBBMRAgBFAhsDBgsJCAcDAgQVAggDBBYC
AwECHgECF4AFAkcbdMokGGh0dHA6Ly9rZXlzZXJ2ZXIudmVyaWRpcy5jb206MTEz
NzEvAAoJEN7KcclHumuRfngAoNXU6AXqyTR8FRuoXKBGS4k7bPUEAJ912WKSkjpC
t0axjrq6j22e5XgWzbkCDQRHG2k+EAgAnLXJ9hOqedgsIYM3LuomBBNN+7WTFSVa
J3Rqz8XVZtJvLL0bIRAvpVK9L9rYXlCRcPAm0YNK6H2DR7sQxWlxEH4mWB+jTCTA
LpcVq+Kpfbw5qDdn+9DVMS7tBOchtTlPSGgdKgn7sTObra8cHtX/ddTB6OLzHeTX
r4PZbUwVeQdIStdwMmozKBQvgjXWKi1GiuYbwYkCM/zJEUCsJ36BIE4li9xohJ5O
4iKC20YVckMJfZLbn1a2gVgn6Re8C5ezNewT0qM8ZDCUNENWAxsU/c9JUCFQ2QcM
U+25b84D5yPxnEKna5U9Fz2JjRjWy5ZKZx2+WhZj0r2Tw6/kGb28AwADBgf/WBsn
JSMHxyVfg+LKLHpdANwa9jdrKOt2WjJbWOiJ9l7SmqD0oi3c22FFxRXKsFfjCikL
k9wbLZKHSqqnOePvMMHqNcqQTSv7+ARjxnBH4g6dhqg+zmebKpt8zV2awQzYSSm4
YY6IqzkWmPNAN7BUzUtSAfL4UU2PljTnT9m443aVCTXMne5l90HQv/gdJ121owg5
KuGE6LodTpoR4hn9nbdKWtfYpDNoykvR+GN5y335yF2Zp/j6QgdxWezjou5Y3/6P
UZLEsJagWe9hAcKb1eiO2bmg+1bFYu0Tg5Mvb27nqfFeHHFysC7a7sXtxp/pqNLN
DcK6j/7Th6vF7/n98YhJBBgRAgAJBQJHG2k+AhsMAAoJEN7KcclHumuR9SgAnRuJ
WHon4GP58xbqCiFR/jSUfvRgAJ47KZ1UNoXgdftoePnbrZu6W+poEw==
=7hcK
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

All that is well and good, but it doesn't do much as far as actual encryption goes. There are two sorts of things one can do with encryption. Encryption will actually convert your text into something only the recipient can understand, while signing will append a digital signature to your text. That digital signature will prove that the message was sent by you and not tinkered wit, between the sender and recipient. You might be asking what the heck is the purpose of signing text. What if the recipient is a mailing list? You might want to send cleartext, but still prove who you are. Listers can verify who you are by looking you up on a keyserver.

Another consideration is that you might not have the recipient's public key. Again, a mailing list is one of those instances. A public key is mated with a single private key, so unless everyone on a mailing list shares a private key, it would be impossible for all of them to read a message.

OK, so to use FireGPG to sign a message, type your message, edit the spelling :-) and when ready to send it, select all the text in the message and then click the 'Sign & send' button. Encrypting the message works exactly the same way, only after choosing to encrypt, you are asked for the public key of the recipient.

One additional thing that FireGPG gives you is a right click context menu that will let you encrypt/decrypt text on any web page. Highlight/select that right click.

You can do all that work using only WinPT, but you have to bring up the clipboard editor and work with it that way, then you copy/paste to your application - which might be an OS application like vi :-)