OSes and Applications for Aging Machines?

TellarHK asks: "My aunt and uncle, both completely unfamiliar with computers, are looking to replace a broken word processor with something new. They'd like to either spend as few dollars as possible on a computer, or replace the word processor. Silly me, I mentioned I had a spare PC kicking around. It's a Digital Equipment 'Starion 930' Pentium 100 with 40M, and onboard video of an unknown type. As this machine is going to be used for word processing, I need an OS that will work with my newly dusted-off Lexmark Z11 printer. So what are my options? Will QNX handle the limited video and printer? Is there a WYSIWYG solution for FreeDOS? Is there a chance in hell any Linux distribution can give me graphics? I've got a whopping three gig drive in there. What can I do with it?"

Comments

Do your research

[Hard_Code]

Really, it would do you good to spend just a few minutes researching the alternatives on google. While few operating systems will run as fast as you want it is entirely possible to run Linux or your choice of BSD with a GUI in that configuration. X should run just fine. There is also a tiny X implementation that will run just fine under low memory circumstances. I wouldn't even consider 40 MB of RAM "low memory" as far as Linux, and *BSD is concerned. "Low memory" is more like 4 or 8 MB. Of course with a little handiwork you can strip down the Linux or *BSD kernel to as small as you like. QNX and FreeDOS are other alternatives, but of course you won't get as much application support on those OSes (ok QNX is fairly sophisticated, but still AFAIK, it doesn't have anywhere near the apps that Linux does). Watch out though, OpenOffice is fairly hoggish.

The post even comes off as a bit insulting, as many of us were using Linux+GUI way before 100 mhz + 40 MB was considered outdated. It is by no means something far fetched.

Practical advice:

* Stripped down Linux
* FVWM or BlackBox or Aewm spawn of your choice

Re:Do your research

[joshuac]

---snip
Practical advice:

* Stripped down Linux
* FVWM or BlackBox or Aewm spawn of your choice
---snip

add (from the evil dark side)

* Win95
* Win98
* NT 3.5x
* NT 4

All will run fine on this hardware.

At my parents house I have a 486dx4/75 with 16MB of RAM running windows nt server, working as a dial on demand router between a wireless "symphony" (product made by Proxim) LAN to a dialup ISP (as well as hosting a small local postoffice). It's been in place and running for over 3 years now. Slak would/could not install on that proprietary POS Compaq Presario (known problem, some older compaq's of that era had a known incompatibility I found out about later), so out of desperation, I installed NT. Squeezing it onto the 180-something MB system partition was a challenge, and using the remaining space on the 210MB drive for the postoffice did not leave them with much room for large messages, but it works. Your P-100 with 40MB of RAM and 3GB (geez, what will you do with all of that?) of disk space is spacious in comparison.

Why bother with QNX and work to support the odd video card/printer, when you could just install windows 98 and be done with it? Or for that matter, plenty of Linux distros will work fine (Mandrake for one will not; just the graphical _installer_ on 8.0 complains about resources at the slightest nudge; but there is always the text-mode installer).

Otoh, if what you really looking for for your aunt and uncle is an oddball OS that will shutup any of their annoying friends silly enough to come over to help them with their computer, install OS/2 Warp 3. It will _fly_ on that machine, in fact you have a little too much RAM for that version of OS/2 to use optimally, (some RAM will be forced into disk cache duty only) and I have yet to see any equivalent (in functionality) to the presentation manager/object desktop combo anywhere else (Evolution may be much prettier, but not nearly as elegant IMO). Plus, OS/2 always has had great support for Lexmark printers.

And you maintain the goal of using something which is definitely no longer mainstream.

Linux all the way

[mfos.org]

I've booted linux 2.4 on a 486 with 4 meg of ram and an 80 meg harddisk, didn't get X, but w/ 10 times the amount of ram and 40 times the disk space, you should be golden.

If the video card gives you trouble, just use the generic VGA driver

OS/2 Warp 4

[LordNimon]

You can find a copy for cheap on eBay. It will run great on that machine, give you full networking, and it can run tons of Windows apps, as well as Mozilla, XFree86, and Star Office.

In my experiencing, Warp 4 runs better in low memory systems (less than 64MB) than Linux + X does. I have a 40MB laptop that runs OS/2 great but Linux won't install on it.

BeOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Try BeOS PE with Gobe (a free Office suite).