Something Random

[Mercutio]

Man, I don't think anything Compaq made deserved a decent reputation even into the mid-90s when 486s started to become mainstream.
I should note that was the point when product lines started to segregate and we got consumer and business systems, but Compaq was always one of those companies that could fuck up making ice. Its business machines would be full of different-sized Torx screws and easy access to nothing, which made them an absolute nightmare to work on.

I'm sure I've made this point before, but I remember being able to boot off USB on the very first IBM desktops I ever saw with USB ports. I had an extremely exotic 4GB 3.5" drive in a USB enclosure for doing data transfers in 1998 or 1999. Seeing that it was a boot option on those guys led me to install DOS on it and sure enough, that shit could start that PC. Which is the world of difference between how IBM did things and what Compaq was doing with its engineering. I have an IBM laptop from that era that could also boot from USB. Thinkpad 600, maybe?

(I actually have a collection of Thinkpads in my bedroom closet that's about four feet high. They're the retro-hardware I'm most likely to keep)

Regarding the drive size limit, Compaq (and later HP) had a bunch of BIOS programmers on staff, so when working with their products back in the day, it was extremely common for fixes to be BIOS updates instead of OS patches. It's very possible that your laptop had an update that's been lost to time since I'm sure those updates are long gone from the internet at this point.

 

[sedrosken]

I've seen some ridiculous uptime figures and heard stories of Deskpro ENs in particular living through stuff they really had no business doing. Yeah, the torx screw thing is annoying, and is where you can see the Compaq DNA in HPe machines today easiest, but they're also slotted, and I like the way they enclosed the slot rather than cutting the entire way through the head like IBM did on their hex-head bolts. I've had a handful of Aptivas and PC300GLs and such and they all use that annoying hex head with the slippery slot for a flathead.

I can't really blame Compaq for not doing something that basically no one else did aside from IBM at that time. Look how many times they'd been wrong about the direction of the PC industry by that point. MCA, anyone? Maybe a sprinkling of OS/2? USB booting wouldn't become common until the Core2 era, maybe the late P4 timeframe. And considering I can write a plop image to a floppy or CD and force platforms to boot from USB that really shouldn't (even a 486, if you stick a PCI USB card in one) I find it's a forgivable flaw in $currentYear.

I'm not saying Compaq went south for no reason -- buying DEC was probably a misstep, as much of a sure thing as it seemed at the time -- but I will always lament that it was Compaq that died out, and not HP. Notice how once the acquisition was pushed through, the Vectra line just sort of quietly went away... Almost like it was forgettable in the first place.

Interesting point about the BIOS upgrades, but I bet it's a moot point on this, where the name of the game was clearly to shit it out onto the market and capitalize on the sub-2000 dollar notebook market as much as they could before the internals were hopelessly obsolete 6 months from release. The Presarios were consumer grade machines, I'd be willing to bet the BIOS updates only really came for the enterprise gear where support contracts would have been involved.

 

[Mercutio]

MCA, anyone? Maybe a sprinkling of OS/2?

sed, have you ever actually used OS/2? It really was a great idea for its time, especially if you were looking at it versus Windows 3.1 or even NT 3.5. The big down side at the time was just getting a PC with the resources to run it alongside the DOS and 16-bit Windows software you probably wanted to use on it, but if you had a moderately nice PC, it was fantastic. Tannin can come along shortly to elaborate; I moved from OS/2 3.0 to Linux in 1994, but having access to non-stupid multitasking on a home machine in the early 90s was HUGE and made me really hate having to deal with Windows 3.1.

MCA was over-engineered but it did work and it was fast. IBM saw things wrong with ISA and attempted to address them in the IBM-fashion of the day, which was to just do things and assume everyone would follow along because that's how mainframe tech worked. MCA was both technically faster and offered device-to-device I/O. IBM was proud of it, and it cost more than getting EISA, but remember we're talking about an era when an average PC would've cost $5000 in today's money. Those cards were a drop in the bucket at time of purchase. The biggest hassle was digging up the configuration floppies those PS/2s needed to have something changed.

This whole thing has reminded me of a song that you've probably never heard, so here you go:

 

[sedrosken]

Right, I'm not saying there wasn't technical merit to either one:

- MCA was kind of brilliant especially for its proto-PnP arrangement. It was just too expensive and not enough companies made peripherals for it because the licensing was onerous. The only relatively common cards you'll find were made by IBM themselves, usually Token Ring NICs or SCSI cards, or are modern clones of original, much rarer cards like the Snark Barker MCA. The objectively correct solution to the issue of ISA wouldn't be puzzled out for a few years, and it took Intel to do it, but... MCA walked so PCI could run, I personally think.

- OS/2 is a technical marvel, and it'd better be considering how much DNA Windows NT still has from it today, but the mere whisper of Windows 95 killed it dead in just about everything but ATMs and the homes of superfans. I've used it, but only ever successfully managed to get Warp 4 running -- even on my IBM-manufactured 486 Blue Lightning motherboard with its IBM CPU, I never quite got anything earlier to run without issue. Maybe it's that that system uses VLB instead of MCA.

But in typical IBM fashion they were -- I guess I'd call it arrogant -- about it. As you said, they were used to making a decision and everyone falling in line. But by the time they were making these decisions they did not hold a controlling stake in the PC market anymore, and everyone else rightly told them to kick rocks. On the other hand, if IBM had held such an iron grip over the PC platform from the beginning, it's likely it would have faded into obscurity by 1985 as the clones were what made the industry what it is.

 

[sedrosken]

In other news I've learned the display on the Presario is actually one of those funky Hitachi High Performance Addressing things, a missing link between passive and active matrix that massively improved image quality, but didn't do much to prevent ghosting. The improved image quality is why I initially thought it must have had an active matrix screen -- I've seen real passive matrices before, they look like complete garbage compared to those. Apparently HP used some of those HPA panels in some mid-market Pavilion laptops as well. They're still useless for games where the screen moves... at all... but, they at least don't make me want to rip my eyes out looking at a still image.

 

[sdbardwick]

I like having sed around. Keeps reminding me of all the stuff I used to know and keep updated in the grey matter, but no longer have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.

 

[sedrosken]

This probably seems obvious to you all, but it just occurred to me that I can move my steam/wine folder in my /home to a microSD card and hardlink the folders; hell, I could probably even get away with mere symbolic links. This would allow me to install a bunch more stuff on the chromebook and, since it's just my games, it wouldn't crash my X session if I accidentally bump the side of the computer and eject the card. I can also add nofail to the options for the fstab entry for the card, so it doesn't spend forever trying to mount it and failing if it's not there.

 

[sedrosken]

I should probably qualify that statement: before, I've tried having /home on a microSD card or even a small USB drive. Bumping the sides of the machine would disconnect the drive briefly and make the entire X session crash. I can handle that for some games alone, but not the entire X session.

 

[Mercutio]

It's easier to remote in to a session that's on a single coherent system than to try something like that. I've never had good luck with true portability.

 

[sedrosken]

well, my fstab is more NFS shares than actual physical volumes anyway, so...

A separate /home volume makes a lot more sense when there are multiple internal drives. Back when I used to do a split-storage setup -- 512GB SSD root and a 2 or 4TB drive for /home -- it made a lot more sense. I would really prefer to be able to just stick another drive in this -- even having access to 64GB of storage would put me in a much better spot than the 32GB emmc leaves me in -- but alas, weird problems demand creative solutions.

 

[Gödel]

That reminds me, back to the stone age, of my 18+-year-old PC (GB mobo, Pentium E5200 O/C'ed from 2.5 to 3.2 GHz, +28%).

(I hardly ever connect to it any more, but it's still fighting cancer on the World Community Grid.)​

Anyway, I had the dimly brilliant idea, back in the days of rotating HDDs, to put /home on a different disk than root.
That way, I'd separate the data seekage from the app/OS seekage. (Mercurially , they are Seagates, my last non-SSDs.)

 

[Mercutio]

Segregating /home from your other data is a pretty good idea regardless. It's a lot easier to switch your OS when you know your user data is on a completely different drive from the one you're installing to.

I wish the Windows installer would make user folder location a standard part of the install process instead of an automation option, but Microsoft can't even understand that not everyone wants OneDrive by default, let alone that someone might not want a C:\users folder.

 

[sedrosken]

That's true. Not everyone religiously backs their dotfiles up to their NAS like I do, making restoration relatively quick and painless beyond the tedium of typing out a long mount command to pull up an NFS share. But I find segregating /home a little silly on a machine with a single physical drive -- while the bulk of my application data is surely going to live under ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common, it feels a little... constrictive to arbitrarily limit the size the rest of my root can get to, like /usr/share and such. Then again I was once told it used to be common practice to make a special, separate /var partition so runaway system logs couldn't crash the system, as a root partition with no free space is wont to do apparently.

Then again, I'm a lot less liable to distro-hop for no reason these days. I don't have the time or the energy for it. I'm only running Arch on the Chromebook because Debian stable didn't ship a new enough kernel to have the module for my sound hardware in-tree and I didn't feel like building a new kernel. Trixie launched a couple days ago, I could probably swap back, but I just punched the couch cushions into position here and don't feel like moving. I'll probably do it when I cut myself on the bleeding edge next and some update or another nukes my bootloader or whatever it is Arch updates like to do apparently.

 

[Mercutio]

Yes, we used to segregate /var, although one of the biggest reasons to do so was that mail spools live there if your system was running any kind of mail server.

Chromebooks are kind of goofy on Linux in my experience. I always seen to run in to headaches with either touchpad gestures or the touchscreen. Usually both. I tend to prefer ARM SoCs to Intel and I'm sure that doesn't help.

I've been an OpenSUSE user for desktop use for a long while, but my last few systems have been Fedora 42/KDE since it's been updated more recently and works well on every sort of contemporary hardware where I've tested it.

 

[sedrosken]

And the Intel ones use funky sound hardware that needs special firmware and such, like this does. Would you believe that it took this long for the modules to get integrated in-tree? I used to have to use a script that'd strip the modules from a regular ChromeOS kernel or something. Insanity.

My main gripe is with the keyboard layout. It completely screws with my muscle memory, though I've been able to get back nav keys and printscreen with a layer added in keyd.

 

[Mercutio]

Sometimes the order that OSS projects does in fact seem pretty goofy. Guessing Chromebooks have funky sound to skip out of paying somebody a licensing fee on a low cost device. Sound is something I absolutely expect to work but I might not notice on if it doesn't on a Linux PC.

One of the reasons I'm not messing with the currently release of OpenSUSE is that it ships (shipped; I see they finally updated the standard kernel in their distro two weeks ago) with a kernel that doesn't support some of the hardware I'm likely to use for experimentation, notably Celeron N150 and AMD HX370-based systems that I use for classroom and demo purposes. Yes, I can put the drive in a different machine and compile my own kernel, but in 2025 that seems silly when I can also just find a distribution nice enough work at install time.

 

[sedrosken]

Even after all that tomfoolery I still never got sound out of my headset jack and discord won't pick up my built-in mic. Thankfully generic USB-C dongles work and bluetooth works fine -- which is weird, usually bluetooth is the bit that likes to not work right for me under Linux.

 

[sedrosken]

I'm a moron. I didn't give my user membership of the audio group. I'm shocked I had working audio at all.

 

[Mercutio]

No harm done. At least you didn't misconfigure sendmail or accidentally alter routing tables to point to the tertiary backup ISDN line or something.

 

[Mercutio]

The Windows News widget is giving me air quality alerts today. We really are living in the worst possible timeline.

 

[sedrosken]

My headset jack still doesn't work right -- it registers something plugging in but never puts sound out to it. But that's relatively minor. My built-in mic is picked up on now in applications.

I've acquired another PIII era laptop, this one is another nice little subnotebook -- a Compaq Evo N410c. It has the customary 1.2GHz CPU and 1GB of RAM of the very late i830-based subnotebooks, but this has a Mobility Radeon M6 in it with 16 megs of RAM. It beats the pants off of i830M video at least in theory, but I'm a little apprehensive about dealing with ATi drivers, and the 16MB of RAM it has is probably going to be a limit compared to i830M's ability to just steal more system memory when pressed. i830M had personality, it remains to be seen if this will be worthwhile or not. At any rate it should handily beat the Rage Mobility M3 or whatever the hell is in my Latitude CPx.

At least these don't like to desolder themselves like the Mobility Radeons (whole range, all of them) like to in the Thinkpad T42. I believe this machine is pre-RoHS which was the main problem with those.

Sound is significantly less interesting as these machines are post-AC97 Audio Apocalypse and they have ADI SoundMAX codecs. It'll work, and Timidity or VirtualMIDISynth will ensure I don't have to live with the poverty-spec Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth, but it won't be interesting in any way and quite possibly the output will be a fair bit noisier than I'd like. I wonder if there's some kind of EAX/A3D emulation layer I can install similar to ALchemy on NT6+. I'll have a glut of extra CPU power going mostly unused with this GPU in most games anyway.

Something I want to play with is seeing if its native composite-out does the color artifacting with CGA games or if it'll be too 'sharp' for that. I always wondered that about VGA/SVGA cards with composite-out.

Another interesting bit is this has full-size 9-pin serial and DB-25 parallel... on a 12.1" laptop. I still have some network gear that has serial console output, and it's incredibly annoying to lug around a USB RS-232 dongle for connecting to them. I wonder if this would just... work with a null-modem cable and a DB-9 to RJ45 console adapter in PuTTY.

I'd be more annoyed about only having one PCMCIA slot, but the things I'd want those slots for are all built-in (10/100 NIC, 56k modem) except for WLAN, which Compaq had an option for that used a proprietary connector, but only went up to wireless B. So honestly all I need the slot for is WLAN anyway. Also it's a subnotebook, asking for 2 slots feels like a bit much.

For OS I haven't completely decided yet. It's COA'd and badged for 2000, actually, which is surprising since I'm fairly sure this is a mid/late-2002 machine that should have come with XP. I gather around that time a lot of businesses were still standardizing on 2000 as XP hadn't yet 'grown the beard' that it would with SP1. It depends on if I can massage some of the tools I want to run on it into working on 2000 be it via the extended kernel or what-have-you, but with a gig of RAM it's surely eminently capable of being plenty responsive under XP. I do have a couple too many XP machines at this point, but I could throw 2000 at one of them to compensate later on if 2000 on this Evo doesn't work out.

 

[Mercutio]

The 2000 to XP crossover was a weirder time period than you'd probably guess. A lot of big organizations weren't just switching their Windows version, but also going through a tough but necessary switch away from Netware to Windows Servers and NDS to Active Directory. AD needed a different level of planning and establishment of best practices that weren't necessarily out in the world, even among system administrators, partly because a lot of work was done to limit the size of Novell directories because its underlying protocols were extremely chatty over WAN links. Active Directory required a whole new type of thinking and testing since no one was completely sure what we could get away with early on.

There was some resistance to migrations to XP not just because it came so quickly after Windows 2000 but because there were still management kinks to iron out above the client level that XP really did squat to address. XP was around so damned long everyone got there eventually, which really makes me feel for the poor SOBs who did Vista and 8 migrations.

In 1999, I had to do a platform migration TO Banyan Vines from Netware/NT4/Unix LDAP services to standardize a customer's environment so that they could uniformly switch to Active Directory after a corporate buyout-in-progress. The hilarious part of that is that NDS at least had the concept of organizational units and Vines couldn't even nest groups inside of groups like pre-2000 Windows domains, so we wound up exporting everything that had been working to plain text and sticking it on clearly labelled floppies for the poor bastards who would wind up contracted for the next phase of the implementation. Getting Vines to work over WAN links just barely better than running the works largest and stupidest Windows Workgroup. It didn't even have a way of confirming password changes synchronized.

 

[Mercutio]

I have Arch installed on an Ideapad Slim 3 and it also doesn't have working internal audio. Bluetooth audio works and I'm reasonably certain audio worked in the past, but since I use this thing about once a month, I have no idea when it quit working. This thing has a fairly common for Chromebooks Mediatek 520 SoC rather than a Celeron.

 

[sedrosken]

Thanks for the insight into the era, Merc. You'd be surprised to hear it but it's not an era a lot of people talk about -- the late 90s, sure, maybe the run up to 2000 in the non-Windows NT world as the various UNIX platforms are apparently more interesting than the one that'd come to dominate the corporate IT landscape.

I catch bits and pieces of it now and again, but even my boss has only been in the field since just after XP finished landing in corporate IT, and he's considered seasoned now.

I need PowerShell for some Shenanigans(tm) so I guess I'm stuck with XP. I'll probably inexperience patch it. I'm probably going to put 2000 on my Geode machine in turn, there's nothing it needs to run that 2000 can't.

You can shoehorn PS1.0 onto 2000 with some doing, but that won't be sufficient for what I have in mind. Well, at least XP should be reasonably performant on a gig of RAM. And I won't have to fuss with third-party wireless config tools or worry about WPA2 support.