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Bollskag is an Olivetti Echos Pro133D Laptop with 16Mb of RAM, 2Gb of IDE Disk. It has an 800x600x256 colour LCD display.

The original P133 processor has been replace with a P233MMX and the final product works at about 166Mhz. It might be possible to get this clocked up to 200MHz. Also, it needs more RAM, something I'm going to investigate. Old laptops can be difficult to upgrade.

Update: Monday, 29 October, 2001 - I made the mistake of turning bollskag off. It proved impossible to get it going again. This machine was really in a bad way - the plastic case is falling apart, the power supply seems to not work, the keyboard fell apart long ago and the display is dark and difficult to read.

bollskag has now been retired pending resuscitation and it's duties have been taken up by gizmo, which I'm currently putting together.

When first acquired, bollskag was a Win95 machine, gradually upgraded to a Win98SE machine until the first disk failed around about late 1998.

At some point in 1999 I tried to install Linux on it, starting with Caldera Openlinux 1.3. This wasn't very successful and I had lots of problems with X. Then I found a copy of RedHat 5.2 and put that on with a similar lack of success. Eventually, I got it working, but didn't use it for very much. After that, it was an Open BSD 2.6 machine for a while before becoming a RedHat 6.2 box which it has been now for about a year. I did make it a FreeBSD box for about a day before going back to a very lean RH6.2 install.

It's incredibly stable and I can't remember the last time I had to reboot. Probably after I re-installed RedHat a few months ago.

It's primary function is as a gateway and firewall. It's the only PC connected to the modem and runs pppd as a demand-driven daemon. It also runs apache to serve some webpages, mainly statistics on what it's doing at the moment. Some old Stats pages - ppp dialup log, httpd access log.

Bollskag runs with a very bare install of Linux, with no X, Gnome or KDE.

When I first bought Mojo, it was configured as follows:

• ATX case by Asus
• P2B mother board by Asus
• Adaptec SCSI Card
• Matrox G200 Display card
• Soundblaster 64
• Pentium II 350 Mhz, 100Mhz FSB
• 128Mb Ram (pc100)
• 4Gb SCSI (seagate)
• Yamaha SCSI CD-R
• Floppy disk drive

I've recently upgraded mojo's motherboard and processor as well as the graphics card and some other stuff. The current configuration is:

• ATX case by Asus
• Abit VH6T motherboard
• Celeron 800 (100MHZ FSB) Socket 370
• MSI Starburst 8826 (Nvidia GeForce2 MX 400/64Mb
• SB!Live
• Adaptec SCSI Card
• 512Mb pc133 RAM, (2x256)
• Realtek 10/100 Mbs network card (ethernet)
• Yamaha SCSI CD-R
• Pioneer SCSI DVD
• 2x Seagate 6Gb SCSI (1xLinux, 1xWindows)
• 1x Seagate 9Gb SCSI (Windows)
• Floppy disk drive

Mojo's been updated again recently. Now it's got a Pentium III 1GHz processor, 768Mb Ram, a GeForce 3Ti200 vga card, a 60Gb IDE drive as well as the SCSI drives, a SB!Live DE soundcard, an IDE DVD drive. There's no Linux partition on it. I find it easier to have two machines running constantly than to reboot all the time.

When first purchased, mojo was a Win98 machine. It it was primarily to be used for games. Last year I got so fed up with Win98 crashing all the time, I put Windows 2000 on it.

It's also had linux on it since about RedHat 5.2. At the moment, I'm putting RedHat 7.1 (or maybe 7.2) on it. (There was some problem with the SCSI cable causing the drive to not be recognised.) Now that I have a more substantial Linux box, I may use that third disk for NTFS or for backups.

Thrud is a Toshiba Tecra 510CDT Pentium 133 with 80Mb Ram. It has a very nice 800x600x16bit colour LCD and a 2Gb disk.

Thrud is currently running RedHat 7.2 with the KDE Desktop. It's a standard install - I didn't trim it down like I normally would.

KDE is probably too heavyweight for such an underpowered machine. (Underpowered, a P133! Jeez, I remember when a 386/33 was considered the Bee's Knees.) I should probably strip out Gnome and KDE and put just Windowmaker on there. Windowmaker is very similar to the NExT windowing system.

Gizmo was largely made by cannibalising parts I had left over as well as some new parts. Unfortunately, a 30GB Seagate HDD I had lying around wouldn't spin up, so I had to go and buy a new one (40GB Barracuda) which increased the cost quite substantially. I've also costed those things I had to buy, so you can see how cheap this was. I initially planned to get what I needed for under HKD 500, and I did it for HKD 415, but then the disk wouldn't spin up, so I needed another one.

• HKD 180.00 - ATX case by iCute (with 300WPSU and fan)
• HKD 180.00 - Delta 44x CD-ROM
• HKD 55.00 - Realtek 10/100 Mbs network card (ethernet)
• HKD 820.00 - 40Gb SCSI (Seagate Barracuda) (7200rpm)
• Scavenged - P2B mother board by Asus
• Scavenged - Matrox G400 Display card
• Scavenged - Soundblaster 64 PCI
• This now has the SB!Live from mojo.
• Scavenged - Pentium II 350 Mhz, 100Mhz FSB
• Scavenged - 2x128Mb Ram (pc100) (from mojo)
• This has been changed to 3x256 pc133.
• Scavenged - misc fans and cables.
• HKD 1235.00 - Total (about US$ 160)
• There's an old TV tuner card in there as well.

Note that the new disk tripled the cost of the system. ($415 to $1235)

OK, OK, not everyone is going to have spare motherboards, processors, AGP graphics cards and RAM just lying around.

Gizmo has no floppy disk drive. The bios on the P2B can boot from CD-ROM and that's how I installed Linux.

Gizmo runs Red Hat Linux 7.1. I just installed everything on the CDs, as there's tons of disk space available. Right now, X is coming up with Gnome which I don't really like. I tried KDE, which is a bit slow. I might leave it in Windowmaker, which is a very nice window manager indeed.

The disk is partitioned as follows:

• - 512Mb
• /var - 1024Mb
• /tmp - 1024Mb
• /boot - 64Mb
• / - rest of disk (about 35Gb).

This way of partitioning suits me better than the usual way of separating /home and /usr while ensuring that there's plenty of temp space and that the logs can't overrun. This is fine for a single user system. For a multi user system, seperate /home and /usr partitions. Of course, for upgrading the system, separate /home and /usr partitions are a good idea too. Hmmm, may want to revise my partitioning.

Ok, an update much later. The partitioning is now along the lines of:

	

		
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
		
/dev/hda12            248M   79M  156M  34% /
		
/dev/hda1              61M  7.3M   50M  13% /boot
		
/dev/hda14             11G   33M   10G   1% /export
		
/dev/hda5              18G  3.7G   13G  22% /home
		
none                  125M     0  124M   0% /dev/shm
		
/dev/hda7            1008M  353M  603M  37% /tmp
		
/dev/hda6             2.0G  1.5G  463M  76% /usr
		
/dev/hda11            496M  112M  358M  24% /usr/X11R6
		
/dev/hda13            248M  4.2M  230M   2% /usr/local
		
/dev/hda9            1008M  444M  512M  47% /usr/src
		
/dev/hda8            1008M   74M  882M   8% /var
	

Gizmo shares a Proview 15" LCD Monitor with mojo, via a little switch box.