Palmax PD1000 - at last!

Who would have thought it but I’ve got lucky and found a second unit. This time the PD-1000 plus.

These are sweet little machines and truly of the era.

This time I got amazing value as I picked it up for £20z

Now I need to experiment with both maybe try a Linux build on them.

My first unit the PD-1100 is running Windows 98 initially I used a CF to IDE but I had a spare msata (using an ide adapter) so I’ve swapped it out after cloning the disk and re-writing it to the msata. Works great and I’ve partitioned the disk in two possibly to dual boot.

Now to get this second machine running on the CF to rid of the noisy IDE disk that’s sounding a little bit cranky after all these years.

Now if I can find the dual drive dock I’d be very happy indeed.

But for now they work well with the cardbus slot and usb for mouse - the pen input while good doesn’t beat a mouse for speed.

Palmax pd1000 pd1100 together



Mike

Nice, Mike!

Although this really makes me miss my ol' PD-1100.....was big mistake selling it years ago....

Have fun with this dynamic duo!

You might want to try antiX linux.....works great on old 32-bit machines.....unfortunately, many linux distros have dropped 32-bit support now.

Keep us posted on progress.

Mark

Nice!

Here's a link to what a purple PALMAX PD-1000 looked like in COMPUTEX TAIPEI '98 (Japanese site)
https://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/article/980604/cmptx3.htm

Site in English via Google Translate



ArchiMark,
Thanks for sharing the distro name with us.
I want to try it out on some older machines.


Edited by stingraze 2021-08-06 2:51 AM

Thanks I’ve got a friend who is working on a modern Linux for older machines called AOSC Linux (actually it’s the retro branch AOSC retro) so I’m going to give that a go.

Just got to figure out best way to install it with the partition on the PD1100

Still patching the PD-1000 for Win 98 to bring it up to date.

It seems to have its moments and I’ve had Windows crash a few times these CyrixGX chips have their quirks.

But I’ve got the video and sound installed correctly which is better than when I received it and no clunky hdd.

The touch screen works a treat also!

Mike