Mystery lowend machine lowend grunt work lowend even temporary OS anyone 220

Held out for the 3com PCI card, available for $5 at a weekend show here.

Finally cracked the case ,.. well not so finally. Needed to fully open the case, which took a day longer. The new card in place, ifconfig recognized it right away (no -a needed) and I managed to execute an FTP transfer under University Linux, so it is demonstratably on the network.

Guess what I'm looking for now would be two more distributions.

The first would let me boot solely from a floppy and do two things:

- Get onto the network, and

- Prep the hard drive (now a DOS animal that allows University Linux to visit) for the full-bore distribution that I'd download from the network.

Does this make sense to you guys?

Feeling flush,I had thought that I'd also try out fatboy's recommendation and pick up a CD ROM for $4, even if it won't go in the case.

But I neglected the cables, and now that I see the innards of this thing, it seems so cramped even without the PCI card that I don't think I could hook it up. Further, I don't see enough wires to let me power the CD without unhooking the hard drive that I want to install onto.

Anyway, today's task is to be overwhelmed by the array of floppy-based distributions and tomorow's will be to figure out which one will do the best job of installing its replacement over the network.

- John Campbell