idiotnot's Journal: Adventures in Debian

My latest project at work.....

In order to get news for a web portal we're now affiliated with, I had to figure out a way to grab news from our AP wire. Sounds easy, right? Heh, sure, except that we don't like to spend money on anything, and the AP software is still on a DOS machine.

I decided, partially as a challenge to myself, and partially to angle for a raise/fulltime gig, to try and a) build a box out of the spare parts we've got lying around, and b) have it run linux, dosemu, and Samba to grab these stories off the wire and publish them on the web.

The box:

- Strange 486 Motherboard
- AMD 5x86-133 proc
- 16 MB of assorted RAM (72 pin SIMMs are tough to find, y'know?)
- RealTek 8029 PCI Network card (ne2k-pci)
- Adaptec 2940 SCSI Controller
- 2 gig IBM SCSI HD
- Misc Samsung ATAPI CD-ROM
- Cirrus Logic 5430 PCI Graphics (1MB, woohoo)
- NO MOUSE

First, I decided to try an old Mandrake distro I had lying around (this thing is going to be running behind a firewall, so I'm not overly concerned about the scr1pt k1dd1ez). No dice. The autoboot didn't like the CD drive. I tried making a boot disk, and worked....sorta. For whatever reason, though LILO wouldn't play nice with the DOS partition.

In the background, on another system, I decided to download an ISO of Debian stable.

Debian got up and running okay (after I replaced the CD ROM drive.....Mandrake might have played nicer if the thing wasn't broken).

At the moment, I'm still fsck'n around with the odd network card, but I have been able to get the software running pretty reliably under DOSemu and MS-DOS 6.22. It only starts acting funny when you try to run two copies (direct COM access). It also requires direct video access to look right, which I'd like to disable, because I'd like people to be able to telnet in and run the program remotely. Maybe it'd look better in a term window, but I'm not sure.

VNC?

Any other suggestions, perhaps?