Half-top

The Half-top is an old Toshiba Satellite with a Pentium 4 HT (I think it's a 2.6GHz C?) that used to be a laptop my best friend used to use in high school (something like that I think).

If I remember correctly, something happened with the screen, so he removed it (albeit not very cleanly), and when I got it from him, he had already retired it.

I referred to it as the "Half-top", since it was a laptop that was missing a screen, so it was half of a laptop. I think my best friend and a friend of his used to call it the "Hitler-top" (I don't remember why).

At first I wanted to use it for some simple video viewing with Knoppix (4.x), but I had a lot of trouble getting anything to play. I think this is also where my dislike of KDE stems from. Anyway, this is the first machine that I used any sort of Linux on and is where I started with Linux.

After tossing it aside for a couple or so years, I decided to try to get it working as a proper machine and trying to keep it as basic as possible. From what I remember, it didn't like any Linux kernel above 2.4, which made it very difficult to try to get Wifi to work. This was when I was testing small distributions, but mainly Puppy Linux.

When I acquired the cluster computers, I decided to make it the front-end node, and it seemed to work pretty well that way until I had to set aside the cluster project.

It then sat for a couple years, until my best friend wanted it back for whatever reason (of which I don't remember).

When I think about it now, I think it was a bit more hassle than it was worth.



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