Re: OT: Laptop and cables, and MacPPP (was: Finally making use of PowerLisp despite several **horrible** bugs it has)

I have no money whatsoever, and I owe $60,000 to credit cards
From: George Neuner <gneun...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Sorry to hear that. I hope your situation improves soon.

You could help a little if you have some extra money available and
need some work done online. Despite my having over 20 years
experience writing computer software, I'm willing to work at the
legal minimum wage because that's better than getting no earned
income whatsoever.

Laptop serial ports are Dsub-9M (aka DB-9M).

I don't see that listed below.

On the back of the laptop, there are several connectors:
- EIA female: 12+13 (icon looks like trapezoid with one part filled)
Parallel port

Hmm, that's strange. That's the kind of connector that is normally
a serial port on external modems, and standalone terminals and
computers that connect to modems. Are these really the same kind of
connectors, or are they slightly different in some way that I
didn't notice? Why waste all that space on a laptop when a DIN
connector like on my Macintosh takes up so much less space?

- EIA male: 4+5 (icon looks like |0|0|)
Serial port

That makes sense, since only 4 pins are needed for uncontrolled
dataflow and a couple extra for flow-control or device ready etc.
so nine makes more sense than the old 25. And the icon looks
vaguely like data in a stream, but it could just as well represent
parallel data sitting side by side since there's no arrow to
indicate flow with time.

- DIN female: UL2 UR2 Bot2 Center1 Top1 (icon looks like mouse+keyboard)
Keyboard and/or mouse

OK, so at least that one is what I guessed from the icon.

- EIA female: 5+5+5 (icon looks like rectangle with bar at each end)
Video

Hmm, I wonder if a VGA monitor such as the one I'm using on my
Macintosh (but with the VGA-to-Mac adaptor removed) would work?
Unplugging the Dell monitor from the adaptor just now I see that
it's the same 5+5+5 staggered EIA_style connector. Should I give it
a try just to satisfy my curiosity? Or is there some known
incompatibility? Would I need to go into root account to configure
the laptop to feed video there, or should it "just work" by
plugging it in?

- Two rows of appx. 50 tiny closely-spaced pins per row, outer
grounding shield is shaped liked EIA even though inner connector
has same length in each row (no icon)
? Need a picture to be sure but most likely mini-SCSI.

My camera-cellphone doesn't have good enough resolution to get a
decent photo, so I'll have to pass on identifying this.
I have a SyQuest drive that connects to my Mac via SCSI.
I wonder if with appropriate adaptor it'd work with my laptop?
Would Mac drivers on SyQuest drive work properly with RedHat Linux?

I assume the DIN connector is for external keyboard and/or mouse,
but I don't think my Macintosh desktop-bus kbd+mouse will fit
there, right?
It's an IBM PS/2 connector. Your Mac keyboard and mouse won't fit.

What sorts of devices would connect to that? Only old obsolete
devices, or anything currently on sale at Target or Circuit City?

The plug-in internal modem uses a connector of 2 closely-spaced
rows of appx. 34 tiny closely-spaced pins each. Do you know the
formal ID of that type of connector? Do all/most laptop computers
use the same type of connector for their plug-in internal modems?
No. Expansion board connectors are vendor specific.

So would any Dell laptop have the same kind of connector, or only
Dell Latitude XPi like I have? Since Dell is the largest (volume)
brand of laptops, there's a good chance somebody else in Sunnyvale
has a Dell laptop. I just need to find somebody with a Dell that
has compatible plug-in-internal modem connector who is friendly
enough to let me try swapping modems.

The plug-in internal hard disk uses a connector with plastic outer
EIA-shape (but no protective ground metal), inside of which is a
rectangular void with two rows of appx. 20 pins each on opposite
sides of the void. Do you know the formal ID of that type of
connector? Do all/most laptop computers use the same type of
connector for their plug-in internal hard disks?

It's an IDC44 connector: 40 pin IDE + 4 pins for power. It's
standard for 2.5in hard drives. However, there are portables
that use other types of hard drives.

What's the chance somebody else with a Dell laptop would have a 2.5
inch internal hard drive like that, so that we could swap hard
drives when uploading/downloading files? (Assuming the other laptop
also has a working diskette drive, or a working modem, or a working
second disk of any type, or a working USB port, etc. etc.)

As far as diagnosing the hardware (modem or serial port), you
might get yourself an old DOS comm program. DOS is still useful
for checking hardware because it's so primitive - it doesn't
interfere with everything like modern OSes do.

How long would it take to manually key it into the laptop? Remember
that I currently have no way whatsoever to move files to the laptop
from any external source except keyboard. The laptop has GNU Emacs
which includes E-lisp, and Java. I think it also has C compiler. I
don't know if it has any any assembler.

http://www.bootdisk.com/ for a DOS boot disk

What good would that do me??

http://home.att.net/~short.stop/freesoft/comm1.htm

Unable to connect to remote host.

http://www.telix.com/delta/deltacom/tfd/index.html

+ Download ShareWare Version 3.51
o Complete Package(610 k)
There's no way I'm going to be able to manually key in over six
hundred thousand bytes of hexadecimal codes by hand from the
keyboard without making a fatal mistake.

Linux's Minicom program is a port of Telix.

Is there any way to patch Minicom to offer a diagnostic as to why
it believes the modem is already online when it's been offline for
the past several years and the whole laptop including the power to
the modem has been powered down for most of that time?

Except it doesn't work and I have no idea how to fix it. When I
start up MS-IE from a CD-ROM, even to view a local file on the
CD-ROM (documentation for the Data/FAX modem), it freezes the whole
machine, requiring cold restart.
A Mac version of IE I hope!

Yup, that's what freezes my Mac Performa if I try to run it.
The only other programs which I know freeze my Mac Performa are:
- Macintosh Allegro Common Lisp version 1.2.2
- MacBugs!
- MacPaint
- B&W version of Risk, but I got the color version which works,
except I need to quit the program after every game because it
fails to return system memory and after many games eventually
enough memory is gobbled to crash the machine.
- ResEdit sometimes after I try to do anything serious with it
all of which worked just fine on my Mac Plus.

I suspect MS-IE checks PPP even before checking whether it'll
even need it. (It won't need PPP to view files on the CD-ROM!!!)
IE tries to open the home page immediately when you launch it. Old
versions frequently did bad things if the connection failed.

It's on a CD-ROM. Is there any way I can set a config file on the
regular hard disk to tell it to look *only* locally for the home
page? But the home page is *supposed* to be the toplevel index for
the Data/FAX modem documentation, not anything on the network at
all. So why does it need PPP at all when just starting up?

You can hit the Command and period keys immediately after
launching IE5/IE6 to stop the home page from loading.

How fast do I need to do it to avoid freezing the whole machine?

If you are really running IE from CD, it won't do any good to
change the default home page, but with %-. you should be able to at
least start it and use it locally.

But why does it need PPP just to load home page from the CD-ROM
itself?? This all seems fishy. I could do a graceful shut-down of
all my programs, to avoid things being in funny states, then try
what you said, but unless you can explain why it needs to run PPP
just to read home page from CD-ROM that IE itself is on, I don't
think there's any value in doing the experiment at all.

I figured you were using IE or Netscape and the graphics were killing you.

No, the only time I tried that was during the free month trial of
AT&T WorldNet in 1998, shortly after I bought the Mac Performa and
the data/FAX modem for it. That's when it took 20 minutes just to
download the AT&T WorldNet home page and 5 minutes to refresh the
screen each time I clicked on the local scroll bar in IE. I had
been using InterNet via Lynx on Unix via VT100 emulator before then
and went right back to that after the horrible AT&T WorldNet trial.
And it wasn't even free as they advertised!! They billed me a
surcharge, which I refused to pay, and after several months AT&T
discontinued my long-distance phone service but continued to
collect the Universal Lifeline long-distance tarrif from Pacific
Bell then SBC for the next eight or so years.

Get a DOS comm program so Linux isn't interfering.

How do I do that on a laptop with no working modem and no working
diskette drive and no CD-ROM drive at all and no USB port and no
other way to hook up an external device of any kind except possibly
a VGA monitor?

I wish there was a cheap/free working laptop with working modem,
that took the same kind of plug-in internal hard disk that mine
uses, so that I could just transfer the hard disk to the new laptop
whenever I wanted to upload/download files to/from that hard disk.
You can probably get away with that if the OS is Linux and you have a
full OS and driver set installation - like from a bootable CD.

Is it possible that the previous owner of the laptop (an instructor
at De Anza College) has copied all that somewhere on the hard disk,
possibly in some protected directory accessible only from the root
account? If so, where might I look for it? Or I wonder if some
random person in Sunnyvale who lets me try my disk in his/her
laptop would have a CD-ROM drive and also have the installation
CD-ROM to have available during boot attempt? Or am I all confused
about where the drivers would need to be present during attempted
boot of my hard disk in another computer?

Hard disk OS installations typically only copy the drivers for
the particular hardware you have. Normally you can't boot the
drive on another machine unless the hardware is the same.

Which models of Dell laptop have the same/compatible hardware as mine?
Only the Dell Latitude XPi P133ST, but not other Dell Latitude XPi?
Or all Dell Latitude XPi, but not other Dell Latitude?
Or all Dell Latitude, but not other Dell?


Thanks for the info about the various kinds of connectors.
.

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