Not the desktop I was looking for.
The new laptop came with Windows 95 on it, but on a fairly loud disk. So I replaced it with one of my quietquietquiet 20gb fujitsu disks (with Mastodon on it), only to discover that Mastodon couldn't talk to the pcmcia slots properly. Okay, easy to get around, right?
I couldn't put FreeBSD on, because it doesn't properly support 32 bit pcmcia slots. I could put NetBSD on, and after pushing a bunch of files off to downbelow, I reloaded NetBSD onto the whole disk. But I couldn't get X11 to work. Okay, sez I, I'm stuck working with R*dh*t at work, so I'll sacrifice this machine to the boys in the Research Triangle. R*dh*t is considerably larger than NetBSD, so I did a custom installation and yanked out a whole bunch of p*th*n crap to get the install size down to only (hahahahaha!) 1.3gb. R*dh*t took a lot longer than NetBSD to install (but with the benefit that Linux doesn't have the nasty little briarpatch that ports have become), and let me configure X11 from a the pretty little graphical installer and everything. I configured X11, then finished up the install, rebooted, and (after a loooooong time) the computer came up to......
A login: prompt?
WTF?
I logged in, looked in the twisty little maze of rc files, found no references to xdm. Head aching, I booted up xdm, and was presented by a plain vanilla straight from the !open Group xdm screen, and logging in got me to (ta daaa!) twm, in all of its grotty glory.
Yuck!
Mastodon may be old enough to be eligible for senior citizens discounts, but at least when I configure it for a graphical interface it comes up with a graphical interface that's actually been tweaked a bit to look pretty. R*dh*t apparently won't give you jack unless you install KDE or anti-KDE.
I don't think so. But I think that until I can rev Mastodon up to a 2.6 kernel (and modern pcmcia utilities) I'll be sticking with Microsoft products on this laptop.