Probably the only thing to consider is that debian
I am not familiar with BSD but i know debian uses the same init.d structure
as SunOS. So knowing debian, I didn't have to relearn anything to
start/restart services on a Sun machine. So if you are familiar with BSD,
you might find debian easier to learn than Red Hat.
Are you saying your laptop doesn't have a serial port? I have a laptop that
I use for exactly the purpose you describe below. It's so old that it
doesn't have USB. But it does have a serial port. I run debian on my
laptop and then when I want to connect, I use kermit. I set up a couple of
aliases to pass a config file to kermit when starting it up.
I have also used a USB to serial converter cable to connect 2 machines. That
was extraordinarily easy. When I plugged in the USB cable, the kernel
detected it and loaded the appropriate driver. Then I was able to run kermet
on that device and log into the other machine. Way cool and very easy.
I have another newer laptop that somebody just *gave* me because the
battery is dead. I want to set it up as a talking dumb terminal in our
server room. But my boss doesn't want me to mess around with that. Some day
though...
----- Original Message -----
From: "Martin McCormick" <martin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Linux for blind general discussion" <blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, July 12, 2007 4:12 PM
Subject: Dell Inspiron2600 Laptop and Linux
My wife had one Windows crash too many and bought a new
Mac. I will soon inherit the laptop and hope to put Linux on it,
giving it a whole new lease on life as there appears to be
nothing wrong with the hardware.
I plan on using this primarily at work on those
occasions when I could go to a building and connect to a serial
port on a FreeBSD server which is, for whatever reason, not on
the network. Of course, it will hopefully be useful for
anything else one would use a portable computer for, but this is
my main plan. As it is, I would need to buy one of those USB to
serial converters for the serial port, but the system does have
a sound card which I will probably need to use for the speech.
Are any of the free distributions likely to be best to try
first?
I'll certainly let everybody know how this goes. Thank
you.
Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group
_______________________________________________
Blinux-list mailing list
Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
_______________________________________________
Blinux-list mailing list
Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list