This Space for Rent

Another fun thing about building new computers

Is that I've pretty much abandoned floppy disks at Chateau Chaos. Of all of the machines in out house, a grand total of, um, 1 machine [other than laptops (the laptop I use most often doesn't have one) and testing machines (up in my office and haven't been turned on since soon after the start of the new millenium)] has a floppy drive, and that's Julie's machine in the library. The Oggomatic has a mini-itx motherboard on it, so it will boot the OS of choice {either NetBSD or FreeBSD, since Mastodon hasn't been upgraded to a 2.6.x kernel and all the other crap that 2.6.x carries along for the ride) from a bootable CD, but the electric picture frame case has an old Advantech SBC in it, which doesn't support booting from CD, and thus has to have a floppy disk cabled to it so I can load up Mastodon and maintain the cosmic balance.

So what I have to do is find a few floppy disks, use Julie's machine to put a INST0067 bootdisk on all of them (floppies are kind of unreliable, so I need duplicates in case one of the floppies goes south on the trip to the baeement. run downstairs, and plug the computer in and hope it actually can read from the floppy.

If the install works, well, I can pull the floppy connector and go back to trying to wedge the CD drive into the case. If not, I'll whip out my handy dictionary of obscure profanities and improve my grasp of the english language.