Any ideas on what to run on small low-end box with one NIC?

T

tom61

[H]ard|Gawd
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Feb 3, 2001
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I have a really small board that I'm intending to cram either into a few DVD cases or a dead DVD rom. It's rather limited in abilities and expandabilities. I'm looking for something cool to run on it

The board has:
A 'Pentium class' x86 processor
I'm not sure on the RAM, but I'm guessing about 8MB
One 10Mbit NIC
VGA out
Three serial ports
Might have a parallel port, if I solder on the header for it
32MB Disk-On-Chip
IDE connector
40-pin LCD header, that I have no idea what the pinout for it is
Two PS/2 ports
An 8-bit PC104XT port

That's it, other than a place to solder on a 'DP3A' sound chip, if I could find one. No USB.

Storage options (pretty much limited to what I have laying around); 32MB Disc-On-Chip, 256MB CF card in an adapter, or a 1GB notebook drive with an adapter.

So, ideas on what to run on it? (both apps and dist)
 
DSL has a 24MB overhead. you'll need a swapfile just to run the OS.

try running DSL in text mode.

 
It'd work as a DSL router/firewall, and that only requires one network card, and only that it's faster than the connection.
M0n0wall, perhaps?
 
I already have a router/firewall.

Oh yeah, I found out I may have been wrong about the RAM, I was thinking that it had 8 1 megabyte chips, instead, it has 8 1 megabit chips (1MB total). I'm not even sure if you can load the linux kernel in that little of RAM anymore. :/
 
If you find a floppy image from the 2.2 days it may be able to run that. Not much use there, though.

Have any pics of this? It sounds like a fun little gadget, even if it is mostly useless.
 
Even picoBSD, which is based off FreeBSD 3, needs 8 mb RAM, sorry. (If you do get more ram on it, it might be an interesting place to start. It's quite minimal.)
 
I've used some of those. They're really meant to interface with other cards in a stack to provide memory, HD, video, etc. I used to work with a full PC104 stack of them for a weather instrument. Normally the processor is a Cyrix MediaGX, from what I've seen. Or similar.

Don't know what you could run on it. We had ours hooked up to a solid state hard drive running XP Empedded or Win2k.
 
Hmm... There are PC104 RAM cards? Might look into finding one of those.
 
tom61 said:
Hmm... There are PC104 RAM cards? Might look into finding one of those.
Click to expand...

For certain base boards, yes. I don't know if there are any that would work on that particular system though.
 
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