Compaq armada M300

Seeing that many people at workplace wanted to buy a network storage device (NAS), I thought I would make one. I had this ancient thing lying around in home unused. 

It is Pentium M, 333MHz machine with just 256MB of ram. It actually had come with 64MB. But somewhere I had it upgraded to 256MB. This was my first laptop. It had served me well in the first two years, both for development as well as writing papers. Then my brother used it during his time in college. As we went onto more powerful machines, this was relegated to be used by my father who actually made the best use of it. As a document processor, it was a fine machine. He wrote many a novels there until he too moved onto a better machine. Since then, it was lying unused.

At the minimum, I thought a NAS box would probably have an OS, a CIFS or an NFS server. I looked around for possible OS candidates. Two things seemed like good choices to me: Damn Small Linux and Lubuntu. I went with Lubuntu because it looked same as Ubuntu but with a lot of packages removed. It would be a lot easier to maintain in case I need to install other packages. DSL didnt have samba package listed in their website. So it was an easy choice.

Installing Lubuntu was easy. But it didn't detect my PCMCIA wireless network card Netgear WG511. Google search said ndiswrapper package had some issues since Lubuntu 12 and the workaroud required me to compile driver for my system again. I thought this would take a lot more time than needed. But thankfully I had an card from DLINK. I thougth I will try this one before getting down with compilation. Luckily the DLINK card worked out of box and network connectivity was not a problem anymore. The card claimed a good speed of 51Mbps, so I thought this would be fine.

Then I connected my 1TB Seagate portable drive to the machine, only to see it fail again and again. The drive was not registering with my system. I connected a cheaper externally powered USB drive to see if USB current was an issue. Even that drive could not be detected. dmesg kept on showing hub-port disabled messages. In this entire effort, I had never thought about USB being a problem. I assumed it would work. But this machine was just having USB 1.1 and wasnt able to detect both these drives which were working perfectly fine on modern machines. So, this project with M300 is stuck at this point. 

There's still an unused desktop lying around at home. It hasn't been booted for a long time. And this one supports USB 2.0 and higher CPU clock with dual core Pentium. I am hoping I will have more luck on this machine. As for as M300, it gets back to the storage, having served us extremely well.