AMD K6-2 laptop

dav7 · 2008-10-14 06:55:58

So the council were recently having a cleanup, and I noticed a laptop, it looked particularly chunky so I immediately knew it was very old, and grabbed it. I love old hardware for some reason.

It turns out it's a 333MHz AMD K6-2. Which my hardware geek friend explained by using what appears to be from a mailing list:

Of course the code produced will not run on anything but a k6-2,
>> which as I understand it is a 686 core with 586 interface/timings,...

I tried to boot the Arch install CD but for obvious reasons it wouldn't work.

Sadly, this laptop also has no ethernet port, and appears to have a broken mouse as well - it boots to Win2K setup (I'm assuming the previous owners knew nothing about computers so at the first install reboot where the system reboots to finish 2K setup they just stopped, hit the power button and said "it r good!!11") and the mouse refuses to work there (in setup), and after booting to a copy of Xwoaf (X windows on a floppy, amazing stuff there - it doesn't even use up 1.72MB or 1.96MB, just standard 1.44MB!) the mouse continued to not work. I've tried everything that looks logical (keyboard, BIOS options) but no go. The laptop also has no numlock key, so I can't use the shift+numlock trick.

But... back to the point, should I just give up with Arch and try LFS on this thing, especially considering the lack of ethernet (it has a USB port - get this, it's covered with a little latch! - so I can use my flash disk if I must) or could I possibly Arch it to work especially considering the architecture differences?

PS. Moderators - should this go into the hardware forum?

-dav7

Last edited by dav7 (2008-10-14 08:10:33)

.:B:. · 2008-10-14 07:21:42

Lowarch?

Something a forum search would have turned up too

dav7 · 2008-10-14 08:10:49

I see. >.>

-dav7

Mr.Elendig · 2008-10-14 13:58:31

You could try uArch, but personaly, I rip out the hd, and trash the rest

dav7 · 2008-10-14 16:36:36

Heh. I plan to "rip out the hd" too, at least digitally: I'll be backing it up (it's only 4.32GB LOL, backing THAT up will be easy ) before I install whatever I end up installing on it.

There's something about old hardware. I just love it. I think I'm a nostalgia freak or something

I've been thinking... both Lowarch and uArch will work for a while, but since they're designed to be updated regularly, I'll eventually have to go grab my flash disk and do 100MB of updates... over USB 1.1. I might cope with that for a week, or a month, or even two, but eventually I'll explode. And go bonkers. So it probably won't be something Arch-based; I'll probably - like I said earlier - use LFS. Possibly. And maybe an Arch partition might be able to be fit in there too

But at any rate, I like this lappie, and am definitely keeping it. Here's a thread for the mouse issue (which suddenly got very interesting): http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=433937

-dav7

fwojciec · 2008-10-14 17:51:28

dav7 wrote:

But... back to the point, should I just give up with Arch and try LFS on this thing, especially considering the lack of ethernet (it has a USB port - get this, it's covered with a little latch! - so I can use my flash disk if I must) or could I possibly Arch it to work especially considering the architecture differences?

Before taking the plunge with LFS I'd try something like i586 version of CRUX: http://crux.nu/Main/Download

dav7 · 2008-10-14 17:53:51

Oh, ok. I'll do that then!

-dav7

fwojciec · 2008-10-14 17:58:10

Or Slackware could be a very good option as well -- perhaps even better than CRUX considering that the laptop has no ethernet port. Slackware comes with a good range of precompiled packages on the CD/DVD.

dav7 · 2008-10-14 19:13:24

Ah. Good timing.

I was just coming back to say that CRUX looks a little on the more... difficult side for me, and after reading towards of the prt-get info page, I started getting a bit suspicious that prt-get was a little bandwidth-happy. Your mention of the lack of an ethernet port confirmed that.

Okey dokey then, on to slackware.

-dav7

dav7 · 2008-10-14 19:48:15

I haven't installed it yet (I need some sleep first ) but I really am liking this slackware thing. I've been meaning to try it out for a while but haven't had the diskspace or hardware really...

It's just.... nice. In an old-but-nostalgic way I like. I can understand why I read that one person's "distro priorities" have slackware at #2 (with Arch at #1 of course)!

Whether I can make slackware like my mouse will be another issue though, but we'll sort that one out when we come to it.

-dav7

dav7 · 2008-10-15 17:32:47

Hi again. This post does not bear good news, unfortunately.

For those who don't know, the Slackware install CD comes with three kernel images, "huge.s", "hugesmp.s", and "speakup.s". hugesmp.s is the default kernel for (I think) 686 CPUs, huge.s will boot on a 486 and up, and speakup.s appears to work on my K6-2 and also claims to have kernel support for speech synthesizers; however a kernel could support THAT is beyond me, but oh well.

First up, let me establish that:
A Linux kernel will boot; Xwoaf contains a (considerably old) linux-2.2.25 kernel, but it does work, and it gets me to a login prompt, which I can login to, and I can get a shell.
Xwoaf includes Xvesa, which works, at least without a mouse.

Also, I tried the Slackware boot floppy image (I have one working, non-corrupted floppy at the moment, yay) and it does work, to the point that it asks me for a root floppy.

Now, with that established and in everyone's minds let me head off into the depths of this sorry tale.

First up, I weighed up whether I should go down the put-HDD-in-other-laptop-with-ethernet route vs. the dd-4.32GB-image-to-2GB-flash-disk-over-USB-1.1-in-3-pieces route, and decided upon the first, so took the HDD out of the Toshiba and put it into my T22, another laptop I have which has a broken display inverter so I simply don't use it since it isn't really a laptop without a working LCD... anyway, I haven't used it in a while, but it got a fair bit of usage recently

So, with the HDD in the T22 and the Arch rescue CD booted, I did some preliminary tinkering with netcat and setup netcat as a server on my desktop and used the copy of netcat on the CD to dd the data off the HDD, gzip it mid-stream and send it over the network, where on my server I gunzipped it mid-stream and redirected the output to a file. This took 25 minutes, and transferred at a nice speed - 3MB/s, definately faster than USB 1.1. Later, I used sha1sum to verify that the HDD was indeed an accurate copy, which took a staggering 1 and 1/2 hours to test on the HDD itself vs. 3 minutes on my desktop's saved image, haha, but the sha1sums were the same.

So, with the data on the HDD copied over the network, verified as correct and saved, I could have some fun with the disk, and I didn't have a lot to lose, which is quite a good thing, as you'll read. It turns out the mouse issues I mention above are just the start of this laptop's issues...

First up, I headed off to the slackware site to continue doing some reading (I'd already done a bit of reading the the night before) to get myself familiar with this system I'd be installing. After grabbing and verifying the ISOs and burning them, I excitedly inserted CD #1 and... BAM. First problem. It won't boot; it's for a newer CPU. Fine; I'll boot the huge.s kernel. Second weird issue. It says "Loading ...bzImage........." as normal then "Loading initrd.img..................snip..................ready."

Then... nothing. At around that point, the kernel is, er, supposed to say "Uncompressing Linux...", but nada. I notice that the HDD LED flickers just after the "ready." so I think "great, something's up with the hard disk." Some consternation and thinking later, I decide to remove the hard disk - it's just two screws, and I've done it already, so yeah - and get this, it boots up just fine. "Great," I think, since I, like, want to install onto the hard disk.

I'll skip over some uninteresting and not really life-changing details, up to the point where I discover (by accident, I took the CD out and I was cleaning it when I noticed) that the kernel will indeed say "uncompressing linux" if given a decent amount of time, so armed with this new key, I do some more digging.

Some more skipping over insignificant details later, and I've tried booting the kernel with and without the HDD in; regardless of the HDD's connectedness to the laptop itself, the unit pauses for what feels like a minute at "checking if image is initramfs...", then it says "it is" and freezes.

My next major idea was to install Slack on the T22, and then put the HDD back in the Toshiba and hope it works. This would be all cool, except for one small issue: the T22's DVD-ROM drive doesn't like my Slack install CD. After blundering up and accidentally sha1summing the CD, I then md5summed it and, agh, the CD was actually burned correctly. This was a horror to me since I was really hoping the CD was burned incorrectly because not only did the Toshiba hesitate suspiciously when loading the kernel, ISOLINUX on the T22 failed to load both the huge.s and hugesmp.s kernels, and although the speakup.s kernel appeared to load correctly from an ISOLINUX perspective, I got this wonderful rarely-seen error message:

Uncompressing Linux...

invalid compressed format (err=2)

 -- System halted

At that point my practical idea generator ran out. My impractical/crazy/insane idea generator was still running though (it's running pretty much all the time and generates most of the ideas I get that require a minimum of $7000 to make) and I considered very briefly of the concept of installing slack into a VM, and using the T22 to dd the image onto the HDD, hoping it'd work. It'd probably take a year though, since my PC would be equivalent in speed to a VM running on one of today's more modern CPUs as it is, heh.

A slight modification idea is to install onto another PC I have, a 400MHz Celeron, which also contains a 4GB HDD (the only one I could really mess with the data on), and a network card. I don't consider that box too stable though, so wouldn't want to try it.

So... I need help/ideas/suggestions.

As a last possible resort I could try an older version of Slack; I read the report of someone who installed Slack 8.1 on a Satellite 2540XCDT - this is a 2540CDS, so is probably exactly the same without some hardware - for example, that user mentions he turned off his internal winmodem, and this laptop appears to have no apparent modem in it, or an RJ45 socket of any kind.

-dav7

Last edited by dav7 (2008-10-16 04:09:01)

anrxc · 2008-10-15 21:13:58

I have a K6, Presario 1247, and I used it when traveling up until this year. It ran Slackware for years and served me great (with USB eth and PCMCIA wifi). When I got it Slackware 9.1 was around and I installed that, later I did upgrades to 10 and 10.1 - which is on it to this day... with an exception of the kernel which I gradually upgraded to 2.6.13/14. Guide for TuxMobil http://sysphere.org/~anrxc/local/Presar … -1247.html

todd_is_not · 2008-10-16 03:37:08

I had luck with something very similar to what you are talking about running OpenBSD. Before I could get everything working the power supply connector broke. It hasn't been too long since they removed 386 support. If you don't care about being bleeding edge, you can set up a nice little system with it.

dav7 · 2008-10-16 04:15:35

anrxc: Fun. Thanks for the link, it'll probably help a bit

todd_is_not: I see. I've actually been considering a BSD - a while ago the FreeBSD 6.2 install CDs were downloaded onto my server (someone wanted me to burn and send CDs to them, but that didn't eventuate), so maybe that might be a good start? I hear OpenBSD excels in networking, and I feel I'd only be wasting OpenBSD by not being able to use what it was so good at (since this laptop doesn't have ethernet - wifi has issues with this house, and a USB or PCMCIA network card could go on the list but wouldn't happen for a little while, at least a week).

So, my plan is to do each of the following, cascading onto the next if the previous fails:
1. Shuffle partitions around until I'm happy with a setup, write this to the hard disk by putting the HDD in the T22 and booting the arch install CD, format the swap partition as FAT, uncompress the install.zip into the new FAT partition, and try and boot.
2. Burn FreeBSD 6.2 CD #1 and boot it; if it appears to work good, burn CD #2, try installing it.
3. Find a copy of Slackware 9.1 or 10.1 and see if that works by burning CD #1 of each; if it does, burn the following CDs and try to install the whole thing (in an I'm-on-a-4.32GB-HDD kind of way).

One of them has to work!

-dav7

Last edited by dav7 (2008-10-16 04:19:03)

dav7 · 2008-10-16 10:58:21

Sigh.

I reversed the order of progress a little: after Slackware 12.1 failed, I tried 11.0. Which did install, but it's just really, amazingly crazily slow. Or feels like it. Especially compared to Arch, which doesn't take nearly that long to boot, even on my 400MHz Celeron with 64MB RAM (it used to have 32MB and it felt faster), heh.

And the mouse still refuses to work. Can someone post some links, keywords or similar bits of info that might let me probe the hardware to see if the mouse is actually working in there, just hidden away in some obscure part of the bus?

Anyway, I'm giving this a tiny rest for a while, then I'm gonna try FreeBSD 6.2.

-dav7

Last edited by dav7 (2008-10-16 10:59:33)

k.mandla · 2008-10-16 11:16:33

Can I add a belated +1 to the Crux suggestion? I had a K6-2 450Mhz that turned into a whiz-bang Internet hero with Crux. Okay, maybe not a hero, but at least it became quite usable. ...

creslin · 2008-10-16 12:33:37

k.mandla wrote:

Can I add a belated +1 to the Crux suggestion? I had a K6-2 450Mhz that turned into a whiz-bang Internet hero with Crux. Okay, maybe not a hero, but at least it became quite usable. ...

Weren't the compile times insane? I would probably stick with a binary distro on a rig that old regardless of how lightweight+awesome the distro is

dav7 · 2008-10-16 12:40:20

Well, I'm not really looking for anything "Internet-ey", but I do know what you mean.

However, I really am considering an LFS installation. It might or might not work out, but yeah. At the worst I'll give up and use uArch and Lowarch.

-dav7

Arch Linux

#1 2008-10-14 06:55:58

AMD K6-2 laptop

#2 2008-10-14 07:21:42

Re: AMD K6-2 laptop

#3 2008-10-14 08:10:49

Re: AMD K6-2 laptop

#4 2008-10-14 13:58:31

Re: AMD K6-2 laptop

#5 2008-10-14 16:36:36

Re: AMD K6-2 laptop

#6 2008-10-14 17:51:28

Re: AMD K6-2 laptop

#7 2008-10-14 17:53:51

Re: AMD K6-2 laptop

#8 2008-10-14 17:58:10

Re: AMD K6-2 laptop

#9 2008-10-14 19:13:24

Re: AMD K6-2 laptop

#10 2008-10-14 19:48:15

Re: AMD K6-2 laptop

#11 2008-10-15 17:32:47

Re: AMD K6-2 laptop

#12 2008-10-15 21:13:58

Re: AMD K6-2 laptop

#13 2008-10-16 03:37:08

Re: AMD K6-2 laptop

#14 2008-10-16 04:15:35

Re: AMD K6-2 laptop

#15 2008-10-16 10:58:21

Re: AMD K6-2 laptop

#16 2008-10-16 11:16:33

Re: AMD K6-2 laptop

#17 2008-10-16 12:33:37

Re: AMD K6-2 laptop

#18 2008-10-16 12:40:20

Re: AMD K6-2 laptop

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