A while back, my nephew gave me an old laptop. The machine is flakey; it dies every so often — I cannot trust it for anything important. It cannot be used for work. Also, by comparison with my current laptop, it is very slow.
As far as I can figure, the machine's problems come from three sources:
Given its problems, this old laptop is superb for experiments. I do not care what happens to it.
Today I connected my main machine, a much faster laptop to the Internet through a fast wireless connection. Then I realized that I could attach the old laptop to my main machine with an Ethernet cable. (Actually, the two are connected via two Ethernet cables with a crossover box between them. Patch cables cross lines similarly. Likewise, `hubs' or `routers' cross connections as well. This is how you connect more than two machines on a local area network.)
My main machine served as the `gateway' for the old laptop, and the wireless router served as the `gateway' for my main machine. This is all rather commonplace, but I am still continually surprised. Then again, I am always amazed that I can fly, that clouds look so neat. All in all, the world is wonderful.
Then I gave the two Debian commands apt-get update and apt-get upgrade and the old laptop started to upgrade. I had not done this for a long time, so it needed to download more than 500 megabytes. The amount seems small to moderns, but I remember when many computers lacked hard disks; and those that existed could not contain many bytes, even though they were big physically, and delicate. With the fast connection, the download proceeded quickly.
The install is taking a long time: the old machine is very slow. So far, I have had trouble with only one package, an old editor named `joe'; its Debian post-installation script was not able to update some menu. (I don't think I had ever heard of `joe' before this; I remember `jove'; but that is a different editor. I should probably get rid of this program.) In any case, the `update-menu' command, for whatever reason, was not executable. That is a good reason not be able to update a menu. So I made the command executable (`chmod ugo+x update-menu'; i.e., change the modifier bits for user, group, and others to add execute to them).
The installation is proceeding. When it is done, the old machine should be identical in what it can do to my nice, newer machine, except the old one slower, has less memory, and dies on me unexpectedly every so often. It will be useful for experiments. And the characteristic of computers, that they are `universal machines' is nice; you can copy different software to them and they thereby become different. You cannot do that with a horse-drawn wagon or sailing ship.
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