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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?"
I have an old laptop which I use for a similar purpose: an IBM thinkpad 755, which is a 486/75 with 20mb of RAM, and what is possibly the world's most troublesome video adapter.
Despite these shortcomings, I am still able to run Windows 98 with Word 2000. '98 boots up in about a minute, and word takes about 10 seconds to load. For an 8 year old laptop, that's pretty darn good. The only drawback is that the type is somewat laggy, although the system described in this article should be nearly twice as fast.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
No pun intended, but WordPerfect on some form of DOS sounds "Perfect" for the job. I believe that was a common word processor at the time that computer was made ;)
:)
You might also want to look for some really ancient versions of Word, if they'll have an easier time with that. I don't know, I haven't used either.
It's possible to run linux on that type of hardware - I'm currently running Linux on my Pentium 90 with 16 MB of RAM. Go with an older version of Debian, like 2.1 or maybe 2.2.
However, I can't think of any word processors on Linux that are easy and stable enough for someone without Linux experience to use. LyX is close, but you have to learn LyX first (it's so different from most word processors). Forget about running AbiWord, KWord, or especially OpenOffice on that kind of hardware.
Linux will run like a dream on that thing, man. I am running debian w/ graphical environment on AMD K-5 100, 32M, 500M HD.
Loverly.
illegitimii non ingravare
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
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
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
If you do this, welcome to support hell. You will get calls why this does not work. That is not here...etc.
If you want calls about how to get the *nix to work like windows by all means sign them up. I really would like to stress just droping win95 on it. Scream all you want but it is a small foot print, it is stable if your really only using for for word processing, and you not the "only well of knowledge" for that os.
Just my views, I have only put a computer in about quite a few famialy/friends homes and linux in the long run always ends up kicking my ass. That is because they get hooked on the computer and they want to talk about it with frinds, share all the stupid shit that is not going to work on linux without some computer skills to get it to work.
Linux and endless support for "my friends computer does this" how come I don't have the stuff he has...
Install windows and the crash now and then with the virus that goes with it. Install linux and be the only person that can help them, and deal with the why does this not work like everyone else "I" know besides you that runs windows.
Hard choice, make it wisely for your friends. There are cases for both, just depends which set of problems you are going to want to deal with.
Good luck, and get use to being someones free tech support for the life of that computer. The linux biggots are going to eat me alive on this, but that just shows they are like a lot of people I know. They don't use the best tool for the job, they use the tool that they can wave like a badge of knowledge even if it was not the best choice.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
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.
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Joe
You sound like youre underestimating the power of your computers. I have for over a year collected 486 and pentium machines people throw away and used them on the network here. With the VERY cheap token ring cards and hubs available, I have a full lan almost for free.
Use TWM with X, well maybe youll have to fork out some for the RAM. I could get by with 32mb RAM with the latest distro (debian or slackware) but had this pain waiting for the system to work until I upgraded to a VGA card with 2mb+ mem and 64mb ram. With this combination thing will run smoothly. I also set major software to be installed over a common NFS share, which altho gets slower than the HDD, the system can get by even with 256mb hdd, Still need more speed and have highly compatible vga cards?? use netbsd and older versions of xfree86!!
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Some people here have good ideas, some are just giving the party line.
I use and setup equiptment like this all the time, I collect older hardware, and also you find this level of equiptment when dumpster diving, found 5 or 6 386 throu 586 mobo's the other night.
There are really two options, the Microsoft solution or the unix solution.
MS Win 3.1(1) will work fine on that hardware, it is generally above spec for the software. I run it on some slower 386 level stuff fine. For a P100 like you have, I'd suggest win95 or win98 with IE stripped out(win98Lite - look it up). I've been able to shoehorn 95 onto a 386 and 98 onto a lowend 486 and they ran ok(little programs that run in the config.sys that lie to programs and say your on a pentium!)
As for WYSIWYG word processing - use a copy of Wordperfect, it was the standard at that time, the MS products were not that great. Wordperfect does not even require win3.1, it can run WYSIWYG in dos. Use DOS 6.2 not 6.22 that was one after they lost a fight and had to remove some stuff.
The unix solutions are also not too bad. BSD or linux will run fine, just get rid of the useless extras, and use a simple window manager, nothing complex. That said, I use enlightenment on a P150 system with a ati mach32 2meg and it runs reasonably well.
QNX is one I have been playing with for a little bit now, like the interface it has, really slick. But it can sometimes be a pain to configure if it did not detect things right. Once you find and understand the manual, things are OK. I don't know of any word processor for it, but I do know there is a wordpad equivalent.
My suggestion after all that: Try the unicies first, they are cheaper and you will know if you like it. If you find usability is low, just dig up a couple of old MS and Novel(wordperfect) disks at a garage sale or something and install. That is what those programs were made for.
On Arrakis: early worm gets the bird. Magister mundi sum!
and I felt young with my IIe when I hear other people around here chatting about their PDP-8's...
How about starting the search by looking at what software was available when the PC was considered current? You know the software will work OK on it because that's all there was at the time, and it won't really be taxing the machine.
If you're looking to go the Linux/BSD/similar route, you can probably do fine starting with a base install that's more recent (as the core stuff hasn't gotten so heavy a P100 can't handle it fine), just with a stripped-down window manager (no KDE/Gnome), and applications you may want to recompile with optimizations and stripping out things you don't need.
In that same vein, just tell them to get a type-writer. You can find old 30kg models all over the place, and they get an intuitive interface, plenty of flexibility, and no hassles. If they want to be sophisticated, simply steer them in the direction of one of those overpriced 'word processor' typewriters from Brother. I heard they're only $900, and no computer skills are required.
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
First of all, it costs 50 bucks to replace the ink cartridge in your Lexmark Z11. The Lexmark Z11s cost 50 dollars and come with ink. The Lexmark is totaled. I sort of keep a running tab of alternative word processors, and quite frankly, the best ones (appleworks, Nissus, TexEdit, to name three) are only available on the macintosh. Abiword, OpenOffice, and Star Office are all too bloated / buggy to be satisfying. KWord is nice, but will require KDE... which you really don't have the cpu for. The most interesting possibility which has been mentioned several times is BeOS with Gobe Productive. Gobe Productive is available for demo on windows, if you want to test it out, and is by the Clarisworks / Appleworks people (the office suite I most respect). And if all of this is too much, spend the 200 bucks to buy an eden from wallmart.com, and install mandrake. It will probably save you headaches in the long run.
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
Quick, easy and stable, and all your kit should just work out of the box. The remote manageability and increased stability of NT over 3.x (gack!) and 9x (urgh!) make this a nobrainer.
Cheers
Jon
NetBSD (http://www.netbsd.org/) runs like a dream on older hardware - I've had it running on an 8Mb 486DX2/66, and once the kernel was recompiled (on a nippier machine I might add), it worked quite smoothly.
SIAG Office (http://www.siag.nu/) relies on the Athena libraries - but the much more attractive NeXTstep themed ones rather than the ugly originals. NeXTaw is maintained by the SIAG Office author, so it's not going to suffer the same bitrot as other Athena based toolkits. This means none of the overhead associated with Abiword or Staroffice and their considerable dependencies - all in all, it's a neat software package.
Chris
Lots of people have pointed out that Linux, *BSD, QNX, FreeDOS et al. will work fine on such a machine, and for most I can tell from experience that they do.
However, a painful point to consider is that when using Windows 95, IE4 and Word 97 also run fine on such machines, whereas Mozilla and OpenOffice (although great software, I use both every day) absolutely suck rocks as far as resource efficiency is concerned.
These applications are not usable on anything lower than a 300Mhz Celeron with 64Mb RAM (128 for OpenOffice not to feel too sluggish; StarOffice 5 is a little better here).
In the browser area, Opera may be a good alternative, but I don't see one for word processing.
It would have been great if Corel would still sell the SCO version of the (character mode) WordPerfect 5.1; it would probably run fine on Linux with iBCS, and together with Lynx you could even make a 4Mb 486/25 with a text-only video adapter useful this way.
All generalizations are false, including this one. (Mark Twain)
Somebody else already mentioned Siag office.
[Science] is one of the very few things that raises human life a little above farce and gives it the grace of tragedy.
I have installed Slackware 8.1 a Cyrix K5 133 MHz, 40 MB PC100 ram (8 + 32), 1080MB HD, Win 95 OSR2 preinstalled. The integrated video is an S3 Trio64, and XFree86 recognizes it just fine. The machines is five years old this past August (ancient in PC years). For a printer, it has a Deskjet 632, which seems to work fine.
I used Gnu Parted to shrink the existing Fat32 partition, added an ext3 root and 80MB swap space (for a total of 120MB virtual memeory).
From slack, get the following packages:
a/ - all packages
n/ - tcpip1, tcpip2 and ppp, not inetd or any other servers
x/ - xfree86, xfree86-fonts-scale, xfree86-fonts-misc (thats it)
xap/ - fvwm2, mozilla (yes, mozilla on a 133!)
ap/ - sudo (!), hpijs and ghostscript for printing,
l/ - as needed when programs complain about missing libs
d/ - nada (glibc devel package is > 100MB)
I set up pppd to start in demand dialing mode (15 mins idle time) at boot time. I set up sudo to let all users "killall -HUP pppd", reboot, and shutdown. Then I added the same three commands to the window mgr config.
The machine is primarily a web and email box, and it works well for that. Abiword (and the rest of Gnome and KDE) is on the Slackware iso, but I haven't tried it out yet.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
Is this really an entire thread pushing non-Open Source apps & OSes on Slashdot? Or did I end up on Bizaro Slash?
Available from Breadbox Computing. (They call it New Deal Office 2000.)
It's an operating systemish thing that runs on top of DOS. What you get is a complete Windows-like operating environment with virtual memory, long filenames, threads, outline fonts, WYSIWYG word processor, drawing package, database, spreadsheet, loads of applications, basic web browser, email, PPP, etc. It runs in bugger all memory. Minimum useful spec is a 386 with 4MB and 20MB or so of hard disk space, but it'll run on a 286 and up with 640kB or RAM (but it won't be pleasant). All the applications can deal with documents too big to fit in memory.
It is, unfortunately, payware. But it's 100 USD, it's a complete integrated solution containing everything from high-level apps to printer drivers, it's easy to use --- the user interfaces are all customisable; for experts you can rearrange the toolbars, for newbies you can turn most of the buttons and menus off to make something dead simple --- it's an excellent choice for low-end systems. It'll run like a storm on your machine.
(I did my fourth-year project writeup at university on it. 300 pages in a single document. No problem whatsoever. The built-in word processor is a hell of a lot more flexible and powerful than a lot of commercial products I've seen. For ease of use it beats Word into a cocked hat, and it's got most of the useful features --- frame-based text flowing, built-in vector drawing tools, built-in bitmap drawing tools, rotatable & transformable & editable text, wrapping text around graphics, spelling checker and thesaurus, hierarchical paragraph styles...)
You will have to support them, including installing it on the empty machine. However, they'll need much less support than Windows or, heaven forbid, Unix will. It won't run Windows apps, which is a plus. It will run third-party GEOS apps, but you probably don't want them to.
It's ideally suited for a turnkey system, which I think is what you want here.
---snip
Back then, we flew kites while listening to transistor radios. Isn't FM cool? You don't get static during thunderstormns!
---snip
I just hope for your sake you were not noticing FM's immunity to thunderstorms/spark gap transmissions _while_ you were flying kites. )
I'm doing something similar with my mother-in-laws old computer, which is a Packard Bell with almost the same specs. I upgraded the RAM to 64M, since the graphical installs on most modern distros really want to have that much. Yeah you can get around that, but it can be a little painful. I recommend you do the same, as FPM/EDO prices are pretty low right now. Things should work without doing that, but it will likely make your life a little easier. Actually, my biggest roadblock was the broken CD-ROM drive, which would lock up any boot disk that tried to load drivers for it.
;-P
Also, 3GB is an infinite amount of space for what you are planning to do. My full SuSE 8.0 install on my desktop at home is barely over 3GB, and it's about as bloated as a Linux install can be, as I figured I'd start with everything and slowly par it down to what I want.
QNX would be almost lost on a drive that big. It's designed for embedded systems, and in that world a system like yours is quite luxurious. The QNX4 demo fits on a 1.44M floppy. I actually have several systems running QNX4 within spitting distance at the moment, and none of them have hardware significantly different from yours, and they are quite responsive (they'd better be, that's what real-time is all about after all). They're single-board "industrial" computers, all with Pentium 90s or 100s, embedded VGA, and anywhere from 32M to 128M RAM, depending on their specific purpose. With a full QNX install, plus all of my companies proprietary software, plus the usual cruft (saved log files and core dumps, system upgrade sources, etc) only one of them is managing to use up more than 500M of disk space. I haven't tried Neutrino yet, but I'd be surprised if it were much more demanding.
It's a little hard to find info about 3rd party apps for QNX, so I don't know what kind of word processing apps might be available, but hey, it'll run Quake3 and Unreal Tournament, and what more do you really want?
The real bad news is that the Lexmark Z11 is not listed on their supported hardware page. There are a ton of Epsons and Cannons listed, though, so you may be able to swap with someone who has one of those. That could be an issue for Linux as well. Lexmark has put out Linux drivers for most of their newer printers, and I think the Z11 is new enough to be one of them, but they don't include the drivers on the install disk and they make them difficult to find on their website (unless you start at the Linux driver page, but only the printer setup wizard in YaST seems to know where that is).
Anyway, good luck. You shouldn't have too much difficulty, but I do recommend a RAM upgrade if you've got a few extra bucks.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
If the references to S3refresh.exe here are anything to go by, your machine probably has an S3 8xx video chip (my guess is that it's an 805). XFree 4.2 doesn't support those (yet), so you'd need 3.x if you want to run Linux/*BSD with X on it.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
My grandmother had a similar situation.
So I put MS-DOS 6.2 on it, loaded up WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS. WP6 is WYSIWYG and has its own graphics, mouse, and printer drivers.
Set it up so when she turned it on, it would automatically go into WP.
Sweet thing about WP is it's incredibly customizable. I allowed my Grandma access to two shortcut keys: F2 printed, F3 quit. (Well, really what it did was to run a macro that would save and quit so I could recover the file if needed.) There were no menus, the alt key did nothing. Anything with the remote possibility of confusing her was removed. Of course, I did leave access to Shift+F1 (Setup) but I didn't tell her that.
You might have trouble getting a Lexmark Z11 to print from WP6, but you can try some of the drivers on Corel's support site.
You know, WordPerfect gives you the power to do everything, including limit that power to do almost nothing. I use WP10 now, I hate M$ Word.
As for OS, I've successfully run WP6/DOS in graphical mode under dosemu in Linux on a 486DX2/66. It was slow, but it worked! I think it should run under just about any free dos version.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
StarOffice 5.x was integrated. To the point of being scary. StarOffice & OpenOffice 6.x aren't as tightly integrated, I hear.
In 5.x, if you wanted to draw a picture in StarWriter, it used the StarDraw program within writer to do it. If you wanted a table in your email, it used the spreadsheet program to do it.
M$ Office isn't that tightly integrated; you want a table in Word, it uses a tables module that has nothing the power of Excel. Drawing capabilities are rudimentary. OK, so you can use Word as the editor for Outlook, but Outlook has other problems (IMAP support sucks the big fire hose, for ex.).
IMHO, the best DOS wp ever written was WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS. The current Win versions are better than Word, I think.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Seriously, this combination should fly on the system you're describing, and there IS a y2k patch available for win3.1 - run a search on google for it. If you install Calmira (calmira.org), it looks and feels very much like win95, is reasonably stable, and can run lots of old win3.1 browsers and word processors - tucows can help you with this. I suggest running DR-DOS win win 3.1, but I guess that MS thingie will do in a pinch. You'll never have this be a gaming box, but for what you need, it should be fine - the OS will take up well under 40 megs of hard drive space, and 4 megs of ram is plenty for win3.1, let alone 40.
I'm the stranger...posting to
Since you were talking about QNX, you seem to at least not be hostile to the idea of running a UNIX-like operating system. I can assure you that running Linux (or a BSD-flavor) on such a box is entirely possible. 3 GB is an enormous amount of HD space, and 40 MB core doesn't sound bad either. I am running Slackware 8.1 on a 486DX2/66 with 28 MB RAM and 1 GB hard drive, and it works just great. Of course you can't expect to run GNOME or OpenOffice on such a box, but WindowMaker (or icewm if you'd like to make it look like Windows) and AbiWord do the trick for me. And AbiWord has reasonably good compatibility with the leading word processor, something that cannot be said of WordPerfect on DOS, which is something I've seen suggested. Of course, DOS works, too, insofar as DOS ever worked at all...
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
First, I'd like to thank everyone for replying. This seemed to get a lot of answers for an article that my submission history says was rejected. I had no idea that it was being posted until a friend pointed it out today, long after anyone saw it. So, I figure my post now is pretty pointless but it'll at least make me feel better.
A couple of the caveats to this entire process that I didn't get to put in the intro are rather limiting. The first one is the fact I have absolutely no money, and neither do my family (an aunt and uncle in this case). They -will- be buying a new computer in a few months, but any investment over fifty bucks is probably out of the question. This is largely a temporary situation, unless I somehow get something on there that gives them no hassle at all. The next one is that they're totally and utterly religious. If they even get a hint that anything isn't legal software-wise, they'll tell me I'll burn in hell, because God knows I did something wrong.
Since I'm broke, and they're broke, I'm stuck with what I have. I'll try and address some of the ideas I saw posted to the thread, just to make things clear. Just in case.
1: I got the machine used, for free. No software, no nothing. So I'm limited to Win98:SE and anything I can download.
2: FreeDOS would be great. But I can't get WordPerfect. Bleah.
3: I have no problems with giving them a locked-down Linux. I'd probably set it up to be so limited they couldn't get any more than a solitaire game and a word processor. They're using it to replace an old, broken word processor, and not really expecting to get a computer out of it. Eventually they will get a new system, probably an eMachines.
4: The printer will very likely be replaced if I can find an OS that'll support the new one. QNX is so far the frontrunner, but if I can find BeOS that'd overtake.
Again, I just want to thank folks for replying. Sorry I didn't notice before.
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