OCC 2026
This year I participate to the OCC
Details of my little project
As the OCC is on a short period of time and that it's the first time I'm participating, I want to keep this project simple : I've got an old IBM Transnote laptop for years and I want to finally take proper care of it, setup with NetBSD and hopefully make it my daily driver.
- Hardware : IBM Transnote from 2001
- OS : Currently Windows 2000, targeted NetBSD
- CPU: Intel Pentium III 600 Mhz
- RAM: 320MiB (!)
- HDD: Travelstar IDE 10GiB (model: DSJA-210)
Day 1 - Sunday 5 July 2026
I thought the first day of OCC2026 would be on monday but no! It's starts today!! With little time left on this sunny Sunday, I went to the cardboard room and unearthed the leather case with a colorful IBM logo on it. I took time to set up this website ; I'll try to power up the mighty Transnote tomorrow.
Day 2 - Monday 6 July 2026
So little time today, I could only spend one hour with the Transnote. I started by removing some white residue (mold ?) on the power cable with isopropyl alcohol to prevent any further damage to it and the leather. The leather folio containing the Transnote is stored in an external black leather case with a strap. I've got this lovely machine since 2010/2011 so it's been with me for about 15 years and has been released in 2001 so it's 25 years old. Despite its age it still boot! Its CMOS battery as been removed years ago as its battery (to prevent any leakage) so there's error on boot and it refuse to go past the BIOS (which is 1.02 which seems to be the last version). Interestingly there's a mention of a debug port in the BIOS which needs a special cable that I don't have. Maybe some sort of UART?
I've downloaded the technical manual to see where the HDD is located and how to remove it. It's at the rear of the machine, behing a flap from which the soft plastic hinge is disintegrating. The flap hid both a HDD door (with two screws to hold the HDD in place) and a PCMCIA slot. I removed the HDD which is a 2.5" Travelstar 10GiB with an IDE interface (laptop-style so 44 pins). I hooked it up to a USB to IDE adapter and plugged it to my Linux computer and to my surprise it mounted without any error! A simple "sudo dd if=/dev/sdc status=progress bs=100M conv=notrunc of=HDD_Transnote.img" later and in about 10 minutes after I've got an image of the HDD! I replug it in the computer and try to boot again but the "Operating system not found" message is still displaying. In the boot order I see "Removable devices" is before HDD (which is recognised in the BIOS) so I guess the BIOS doesn't skip the first one and stay stuck there. I reboot and press F12 to select the boot device and select the HDD and then... the Windows 2000 Professional logo appears and 5 minutes later I'm on the desktop! The little machine hums well and I enjoy a quick game of Pinball. I think I'm gonna keep the HDD as is and won't format it. I'll be looking for a new HDD (or IDE to SD adapter) or even a compact flash card as the Transnote has an embedded reader (I'm not sure it can boot from it though) to install NetBSD on.
Day 3 - Tuesday 7 July 2026
Foraging in my old devices I found a new in box 32GiB Transcend industrial CompactFlash card. It's top of the line and I would have wanted something smaller like a 16GiB or even a 8GiB card, but I didn't find any. Booting on the NetBSD ISO was easy : I did it the modern way with an optical drive emulator (an IODD ST300, which is a really versatile device and I'm impressed it worked so well with an old computer like the Transnote with its USB 1.1 ports) on which I've put a NetBSD 10.1 ISO which sits at 246MiB. As a NetBSD install seems to be around 90MiB, I thought it was the full ISO. I was wrong and that wasted me about half an hour displaying errors after errors saying that the sets (files needed for the installation of the system) weren't found. I also encountered a segmentation fault with the installer while trying to partition the CF card with multiple non BSD partition (a FAT32 partition for an hypothetical Windows 98 install and a FAT16 partition for FreeDOS) so I went in the end for a whole disk partition for NetBSD. With a full NetBSD ISO (sitting at 650MiB) the install went well and after about 30 minutes I had a working system. I had to change the order of boot in the BIOS to put the CF card before the HDD otherwise while selecting HDD as a boot device, the Transnote would boot Windows 2000 from the HDD and not NetBSD from the CF card.
Next up for tomorrow, plugging the network to it to install (compile?) a desktop environnement (or maybe doing it air gap style by importing packages, I'll see) and maybe putting back a working CMOS battery to allow the BIOS settings to be saved.
It's all baby steps I know, but my days are really full this week so I'd rather doing small increments, going farther that I aimed, than overpromising to myself and underdeliver :^)
Day 4 - Wednesday 8 July 2026
Still the future.
Day 5 - Thursday 9 July 2026
Come back soon.
Day 6 - Friday 10 July 2026
Last day before the holidays.
Day 7 - Saturday 11 July 2026
Finally getting some sleep!
Final day - Sunday 12 July 2026
I hope the nights would be colder than the days.