“…My desktop machine, a K6-2-550 underclocked to 500 to avoid
the “internal compiler error” messages that never are an internal
compiler error, is scarcely cutting-edge hardware. But it’s
blisteringly fast compared to a P-133, though the amount of memory,
256 megs vs. 56, is no doubt a leading factor, too. After many,
many hours — more than a full day in total — I had everything
built and installed. And XFree86 still didn’t work. The
documentation bore no connection to any reality I could find.”
“What’s more, I’d compiled support for my PCMCIA network card,
which is a NE2000 clone, in the kernel before I’d compiled the new
version of pcmcia-cs, whose documents said it might not be such a
good idea to build the support modules with the kernel — that the
ones pcmcia-cs cooks up are better. I took this with a grain of
salt, because everybody says that their modules are better than the
kernel ones, but this is rarely true. In this case, it was. I was
offline.”
“Having just about had my fill of compiling, I was in no mood to
rebuild the kernel and pcmcia-cs. Suddenly OS/2 looked more
promising.”