Re. http://mail-index.NetBSD.org/netbsd-help/2004/01/27/0006.html

No answers for why you're seeing what you're seeing.  I'd lean towards
guessing hardware problems.  Can you try putting the 8MB back in and
see if the problems go away?


Re. the OpenOffice suggestion: Be advised that OpenOffice is big and slow.
I don't know if it will work well on a 486.  (Though if your Evil Empire
machine is more powerful, it might run acceptably there.  On an 800MHz
Athlon, I found OpenOffice so painfully slow that I would try to avoid it
if at all possible.)

You could dual-boot you Evil Empire box.  (I did that when initially
converting to NetBSD after a very brief stay in Evil Empire land.
I found that I very (very) rarely needed anything from the Evil Empire
side.)

If you don't need to extract extensive markup, etc. from an Evil Empire
office document, you can get the raw text out with "strings" on NetBSD,
followed by some cleanup.  (Generally, anyway.  Those documents actually
have a bunch of other junk in them---sometimes literally---and I seem
to recall reading that they actually use a linked-list structure
internallky, so that the parts of a large document may conceivably be out
of order on disk (though that seems unlikely).)

This will probably work about as well as pasting raw text into a telnet
session.


Next, I doubt that the MS telnet client killed the server.  (^&  (But
anything's possible.)  Though the telnet server might have died for other
reasons.

One thing that you might try is configuring NetBSD to support a serial
line.  For allowing logins, it should be enough to add/modify a line in
/etc/ttys to allow one or both of /dev/tty00 or /dev/tty01 for logins.
Then hook up a null-modem cable (or standard serial cable and a null-
modem adapter) between the two computers.  This is a raw login, not a
network connection.  No telnet.  (^&  From the Evil Empire side, you'd
need a telecom program (a.k.a. a terminal emulator or "comms" program),
which should largely be similar to telnet.

The downside is that a serial line won't set any speed records.  But
you will be getting away from the telnet server, which may remove one
suspect---and also ever so slightly reduce your system's memory load.


Last: You could install CygWIN on the Evil Empire machine.  From there,
you can run an X server and use ssh over ethernet to connect to the
486.  You might or might not find it bearable to try to run graphical
X window client software on the 486, over ethernet.  (You can disable
the encryption, I suppose, if the 486 is too sluggish; I don't know
how much that will buy you.)


Good luck.  I hope that the above ramble is of some use to you.  (^&


-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/