So I'm in Morpeth for Christmas, staying with my mum. Until today there was no internet access here - they had been paying for an ADSL connection since May, but hadn't managed to get the modem to work with the computer. After a trip to the shops for a nice ADSL wireless router, I can now type blog entries from bed.
There was an existing computer to get working with the router as well. It looked like it had an ethernet port on the back, so should have been easy. However, it was running Windows 98, and I couldn't see it in the hardware list - no drivers. After a bit of prodding around with a Debian live cd, I realised that the integrated network card was even turned off in the BIOS. After that, I had to fiddle around with downloading drivers on my laptop from 3com's website, transferring them via a USB keyring and the Debian live cd (no built-in USB mass storage support nine years ago) to the HDD, and then brave the install procedure.
The machine itself is a 200MHz Pentium MMX with 128MB RAM, so it wouldn't even be able to handle the modern Ubuntu installer. Not that I'd want to do that.
Welcome to Northumberland.