Debian on a Compaq Armada 1100


A friend of gave me the device for 30 Euro, the battery doesn't work,so i decided to get is as an DSL-router.


Hardware

DeviceDescription
CPUIntel Pentium 100 MHz
Memory16 MB
Videoi'll check this ;) no X is running so i'm not sure
HarddiskIDE 640 MB
CD/DVDnone
PCMCIA2x PCMCIA Slots 16Bit
Display10.4 Inch, 640x480
Soundno sound
Communication2x 3Com PCMCIA
Floppy3,5 Inch Floppy built in



I think this is a nice job for the small one, the hardware was enough to run debian distribution, so it went to download.

Let's start the survey ;)

Because of the non-existing cdrom, i had to install from floppy, what was a real survey. I wish to mention that any one try to do this should better get 50% "floppy-overhead", what means you better get some more floopies because the quality is not the same as on my Atari 1984 ;). I'm not sure if it is problem with the drive or the disk.
The installation by itself went okay. The harddisk is large enough to take a webserver as "add-on" :), i created 3 partitions, the "/" with 540MB, "/boot" with 32 MB and a swap-partition of 64MB. The filesystem is ext2, what is okay for the slow machine. I had some trouble with harddisk-access, because cronjobs and syslog using heavily harddisk get the laptop stop responding for 1-10 seconds. The hdd leaks support for DMA, and PIO is known slow. I disabled as many as i can (okay, no webserver). And now it seems to be fine. There is a daemon for less sync-activity on the disc but i never tried it.
After the base packages where installed from floppy, the system was installed over a DSL internetconnection, this works well. The complete system contains 110 MB for me on the "/" filesystem, what leaves enough space for other things. It can be smaller, but less comfortable ;).
For networking i use 2 PCMCIA 3Com (module 3C59x.o) both cards where detected correctly when inserted in the PCMCIA-slots.
I installed an external ISDN-Adapter on the seriell port, my good old Zyxel Omninet :) , which works well for dialout in case of dsl-problems. I used wvdial for configuration which is a great interface to ppp-connections with seriell modem (the ISDN-Adapter is used like a modem, because it speaks AT-commands).
There is no sound, no extra on this device, but all build-in devices works well at the moment, the hdd-problem is not really solved, but i can live with it.






Last modified Dec 29 2005 08:40 am.

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