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Free Software Operating Systems for Old Laptops?
X-Nc asks: "I have an old 486 Laptop that does not have a CD drive and , if I remember right, a very small hard disk (a few megs), and maybe 4 megs of RAM. I would like to let my 6 year old son use this for him to play and learn on. What I'd -really- like to do is install Linux or one of the BSD's on it with enough apps to run a simple editor and a few other things. I have other systems that are able to run learning software and games. This would be for him to learn computer fundimentals. I remember in the old days that you could run X11 on this kind of system (my first Linux box was a 386DX-30 with 2meg RAM and a 20 meg HD). I have been digging around in some of the lists of distros to try and find something to load on the system but I can't seem to find one that's right. So, does anyone know of a Free Software (or even commercial) OS that can be installed on such a system that can do more than be just a terminal?"
Not that this is any help, considering I can't remember the version numbers, but I remember having a slackware box with specs very similar to yours and it ran great. If you look around for some of the 1996-1998 versions, they should all work fairly well on limited hardware. Are there mirrors of old distros out there?
Have you thought about RULE?
You'll be hard pressed to do anything with less than 40-50MB, but if you've got more than that, just install debian. You should be able to install using PPP over the serial port.
If you're really low on disk space though, 2.5" 1GB IDE drives can be had for around $20. Less if you're willing to snipe on ebay. If you want to spend $35, you can have a whopping 6GB!
Maybe I am missing the picture here but it sounds like a perfect opportunity for the little guy to spend some time at the command prompt. Even the slowest 486 (a 486sx-25 if I recall correctly, was the slowest 486) is twice as fast as the state of the art machine running when DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 were king. Seven floppys will contain the install disks of both and easily fit on a 20M hard drive, neither requires a CD-ROM either.
...
What's a six year old gonna do on DOS/Win3.x? Bah! Same thing he is going to do a 486 running RedHat 5.x - same thing we all did when we were running 486sx machines with 4M RAM, 20M hard drive and no CD : explore, learn, interact, and come up with a wicked cool powerpoint detailing exactly why he needs a faster machine with a current OS.
Want a cool upgrade? Assuming the drive is a regular 2.5" laptop drive, or even a regular 3.5" drive shoehorned into a laptop, get one of those adapters that lets you replace it with a Compact Flash card. You can get a 128M card for like $50 or a 64M card for less than $30 (+$10 - $20 for the adapter), install everything onto it and all of a sudden the weakest link (hard drives are fragile, yours is old and fragile) is a solid state device impervious to gravity and 6x as large as it was
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
If you can get a network adapter into that puppy, you can install most any version of Linux using a boot floppy and mounting the CD over the network.
Slackware 4.0 is what you want. It's split into subdirectories so you can put it onto floppies and install that way. I can give you an iso of it. I can also give you an old 3.x (which I have run on a 486 in the dim and distant past). Bear in mind these are ancient distros, so they don't have the latest fancy stuff on them. I think Slackware 7.x is still split into subdirs for floppy installs and is more modern, but much bigger.
Stick Men
I got to thinking about this after I posted my other post ... but actually I think having his six year old start with Linux instead of Windows is a good idea - esp if he is forced to spend lots of time at the command prompt. He is going to learn first impression thought patterns and given the importance of the Un*x os, a good start. I would recommend teaching him the DOS command shell also, although it probably isn't as pervasive anymore.
... What apps do you actually want to run on the machine? Figure out which applications the six year old is going to run (CivIII was a good suggestion, but I would also recommend Doom I for a machine with 4 megs of RAM)
... any ideas?
Another question might be
Forget Windows95 on a machine with 4Megs. Yes I know it can be done, but that doesn't mean it is a good idea. Win3.1 should run ok on 4M if he doesn't actually want to run any applications.
What runs on DOS 6.22/Win3.1 w/ 4M RAM?
IE 3
Netscape 3
Borland's Delphi (Pascal with a GUI IDE)
Borland's C++ Builder (? can't remember)
Borland's Dashboard (cool shell for Win3.x)
Doom I and most of Doom II
The first three levels of Duke Nukem III
Falcon 3.0
FreeAgent connected to Usenet, A.B.E.P.*
A slew of older games
Foxpro 2.x for DOS
GWBasic
688 Attack Sub
Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe
Honestly I don't have a clue of available apps for RH 5.x distro
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
While X and all may take a little time to start up, FreeBSD performs exceptionally well under low memory situations. It does very little redundant copying, and tunes the swap and scheduling policies as the load increases to try and help keep interactive applications responding smoothly at the expense of some services.
Many of these features are now in the Linux kernel, but I don't know that it'll be too easy to pack them into a tiny kernel to maximize the amount of pageable memory for applications.
--find out how far you can go with the ram, update that, max it out used. That old of RAM you can find the ram *cheap*. You want it maxed. Buy a used hardrive of a gig or 2 or something like that. Borrow an external cd rom drive, or have the guy at the white box shop do it, ask to use his. Plug that in, put up with the slowness. Install something new like peanut or latest mandrake, pick and choose options, etc, and just put up with the speed of it, after all it's your kid gonna be using it mostly. Use a "you make it" window manager instead of guhhnome or k-thisandthat.
And there ya go! Proly take ya all freekin day and nite day to install it, but then you'll have it. ram might cost ya 5 bucks, a one gigger whatever drive maybe 10$. PLUS, junior gets to see hardware upgrading! It's part of geekdom! It ain't all typing and starin at the screen, there's important SCREWDRIVER action young lads need to learn! BLESS my dad for getting me REAL tools when I was a kid instead of those plastic toy tools. I got his grade b stuff he didn't want, some he cut down to size or picked for size, but they were *real* tools made outta 'murican steel like God intended. And I got old radios and busted lawnmowers and woodscraps and odd chunks of metallic things and stuff to dork with. Cool beans! I was building stuff and tearing apart crap before I could read all that well. Now I ain't askeered of nuthin, even though I still bork half or more of my junker projects.
As for her learning about computers, that wasn't the goal. But she at least knows there is something there besides the family windows box.
I think QNX actually needs a quite fast computer.
QNX is an embedded OS, it does not require a fast computer. I use QNX (4.25, if anyone cares) everyday, with photon (QNX GUI), and it's pretty snappy on a Pentium 166 with 32MB RAM. My install takes up just under 140MB of drive space, and that includes our custom software.
No, neither QNX nor BeOS support pre-Pentium computers.
This may be true for BeOS, but QNX definately supports sub-pentium machines. The current version of Neutrino (6.2.0) supports 386, 486, ARM, MIPS32, and several other CPUs commonly used in embedded systems.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Freedos, VsTA, PicoBSD, FBSD, im sure tones more..
X will be dismal, ( even with remote apps ) but it will work. FBSD will be a tad better then linux due to the VM, but still irratating...
FBSD will install across the wire.. all you need is ethernet + floppy..
---- Booth was a patriot ----