This is my computer

I bought my computer in May of 1994, It is a Compaq Concerto laptop with a 486SL33MHz chip, 250MB Hard drive, and I upgraded it to 8 MB RAM. If you are not familiar with Concerto's it is fairly small, about the size of a good sized science text book. It has a 9 1/2' monitor and is grey scale :( But it does have a pen mouse that is really cool, and fun to use. It came with the wonderful DOS, and Windows 3.1. While not having much experience beyond programing in Apple basic(remember those Apple ][?), I quickly learned and loved it. After moving to college a month or so later, I got hooked up on the internet, and with the help of friends and some time reading help files and tutorials, I learned a lot about unix. Too make a long story short.. I trashed DOS and replaced it with linux.

Compaq really didn't want anyone to run something other than DOS on the Concerto, I had to replace the Master Boot Sector, before it would let me boot from a linux boot disk. But after much learning and a lot of work I got everything installed, and got hooked up to the net through punk.net. Linux does not support the pen mouse yet, but there is a guy working on it. And I am hoping to be one of the first to get it working. As of February 8th, 1996 I got the pentest to work in console. I can't use the pen to do anything yet, but the pentest works and it follows the pen where ever it goes. From him I got the an XF86Config that let me get 640 X 400 rather than 320 X 200 (which was the best me and my roommate could get).

For a good link for anyone intrested in linux on laptops check out http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/kharker/linux-laptop/ it is a pretty cool place.

Now that I have the basics working, I have been slowly learning and starting up all kinds of daemons, such as ircd, and httpd. I am having lots of fun, but a limited hard drive is all that keeps me from getting a lot more :P

Currently, (well 11/1999 that is) my laptop is running redhat 5.2 I think, though it isn't being used for much 'cept munching on distributed.net blocks, very few actually, you never realize how slow this thing is until you upgrade your desktop to dual celeron's running at 450Mhz. :)

Update (12/04/2002): I have recently noticed if you search through compaq/hp support for the Concerto, you can find Service Manual, and some win95 drivers. I am currently thinking about getting a larger hard drive, and doing a fresh linux install, if I do, I will start looking into writing a pen driver for it. But I doubt I will be getting to it.