GEEK ALERT: If you’re not interested in the old old technology of computer networking at a whopping 1200 baud over amateur radio in case the Internet goes down for some reason (insert your own scenario here) you can safely ignore this post.
Welcome to 2011. This is my first installment of smashing my head on my keyboard as I attempt to LEARN how this old stuff works with a mix of old hardware and new software.
On the hardware side, I dusted off the old (and I stress OLD) 833 MHz computer and decided to make yet another go at trying to make this work. I’ve unloaded about six PCs… I only have two “spares” left here that I can do this with… I installed a serial card and a network card so both expansion slots in the PC are now full. This “box” will be the base station, connected from the serial port to a VHF amateur radio via an OLD Terminal Node Controller (TNC) and my local network by the network card.
Now that I’ve got the hardware situated… it’s time to move on to the software. The first step is obviously to install Linux… Linux can be compared to an erector set… I call it the erector set of computer operating systems because you can do so much with it… My choice for this go-round is Ubuntu Server 10/04LTS, which just means it’s the April 2010 version that will be supported for 3 years. Since the PC is an older one, the installation of Ubuntu takes longer than it does on some of the other stuff I’ve installed.
I’ll be adding to this as the project progresses.