![[img]](http://viator.si/phtp/07-07-21__wd8_talks_computers/?a=pic&size=normal&pic=07-07-21__wd8_talks_computers/IMG_1500.JPG)
![[img]](http://viator.si/phtp/07-07-21__wd8_talks_computers/?a=pic&size=normal&pic=07-07-21__wd8_talks_computers/IMG_1506.JPG)
yesterday we went to Ilz to a used computers shop, where we got a 166 pentium for 9EUR complete with hard drive, ram and network card + keyboard mouse and mains cable. so much stuff for 9EUR! the computer is a HP Vectra! not Opel, but Vectra anyway!. they man in the shop added another two pieces of ram, so it turned out to have 96mb of ram instead of 16. all good so far. the heat was full-on. so i stayed inside (the hotel) and worked on installing debian onto two old machines. it turns out that the one we bought in the shop just didn't want to cooperate. whenever i come into the debian installer and try to go on with the process the machine freezed no matter what parameters i passed to the kernel/installer at boot prompt. after some time and number of ideas i decided i'll put it aside and try to work on the other (old cym's) machine (shark4). after i failed miserably here too with installation we had some good veggy soup outside where some wind appeared. and cym tells me that this other machine already has debian installed. wuh! so i continued with that machine and updated the kernel, installed alsa, new pure data and enabled the soundcard (sb16), aplay worked, and i wrote a little test patch on my laptop that runs without the gui, copied it to the shark4 and voila, test sounds coming from the speakers!
one more to go.
after more fiddling and trying different options i ran our of ideas and decided to call it a day. turned off the machine and worked a little on a simple pd patch that turns a webcam picture into floyd-steinberg diffusion dithered 1bit or 4 colours picture using [shell] object and pngquant tool. it's quite slow, as it has to externaly process the png. i'm sure one could write a pdp external for this that would be faster and more efficient. possibly in forth. but not me.
![[img]](http://viator.si/www/wd8/pics/desksnap_2007-07-20_235126detail.png)
after the night lurkers met in the kitchen and ate some icecream, i almost went to bed when i thought i want to try one more thing. i removed some ram from the machine, especially that 64mb block and tried to install debian with only two blocks of 16mb ... and.. it worked! i had to try couple of times as there were some problems with partitioner and running out of memory, but at the end it worked with installation.
![[img]](http://viator.si/phtp/07-07-21__wd8_talks_computers/?a=pic&size=normal&pic=07-07-21__wd8_talks_computers/IMG_1517.JPG)
and now, new day and more working and playing around. i have big problems with ISA now to be able to use a sound card.