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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 looked at peanut linux or maybe slackware? They're usually really small distros. Another option is to search freshmeat. Just a quick search for linux floppy brought up several results for distros that run on one or two floppies. The only trick is the more current versions of X often require a fair amount of space. You might also have to use a really old kernel (i.e. 2.2 series).
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!
How about using an old Linux distro, something from the Red Hat 5.x era? There are a ton of security holes, but given the environment in which this is going to be used (a single 6 year old user, no important data, no networking) who cares if wu-ftpd is vulnerable?
Run WindowMaker or AfterStep or even that fvwm95 monstrosity Red Hat used to ship and it will be fine.
I've never seen it, but QNX might be an alternative. Does BeOS support pre-Pentium systems?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Step1) Format and load Windows 95. ...
Step4) Let him play on it for 3 months.
Step5) Got to step 1.
Step2) Throw some Sid Meiers Colonization on that bad boy
Step3)
This isn't the sig you are looking for... Carry on...
There's got to be something installed on the laptop already, so why not just let him use it as is? It will still help him learn about computers.
Your six year old is not a kernel hacker, and need not be treated as such.
A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
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
Do not stick him at a command prompt. Let him discover that like the secret underground passage that it is.
From lots of personal experience, I suggest instead of asking 'What OS', ask "How can I introduce computers to my 6 year old in a fun way?" And go from there. In other words your solution should be application specific, not OS specific. Games are good. Making his name flash on the screen is good. If you really want him to learn fast lock him out of folders named "Christmas List", "Secrets", etc.
Reading, computing, microscopes, and ant farms. These things all need to FUN for kids otherwise it's work and kids learn to hate it quickly.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
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.
A few megs of HD and 4MB RAM? A 486 is enough to do X, but you'll want to have at least 8 megs of RAM, and you would really benefit from having 16 or even 32 MB. Furthermore, though you may be able to fit an X installation on a HD of just a few megs (see 2diskxwin, Small Linux), I don't think you'll be able to do much of use with it unless you have a hard drive which is at least 30 MB or so.
I personally don't have any experience trying to use X in an installation smaller than 120 MB. If you can get this much, you might try doing what I did: install the latest ZipSlack, then move it to ext2 and add X.
--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.
A simple search on Google would result your answer, but in the spirit of helping, you could look at Minix.
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.
Although I think they are out of business now, NEW DEAL INC made something called NEW DEAL OFFICE which was a GEOS-like office suite for old DOS machines. It was really good. You can find it on eBay for ~$20 and it is definitely worth checking out. Lots of old GEOS guys worked on it. -Chris
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
Slackware http://www.slackware.com has a very small distro called zipslack. Should serve your purpose (I've used it myself on a very old 386 based laptop).
From the web site: "ZipSlack is a special edition of Slackware Linux that can be installed onto any FAT (or FAT32) filesystem with about 100 MB of free space. It uses the UMSDOS filesystem and contains most of the programs you will need. This means that you do not need to repartition your hard disk if you already have DOS or Windows installed. ZipSlack installs into a directory on your DOS filesystem. It can also be installed to and booted from a Zip disk.
This distribution is ideal for people who don't have a lot of hard disk space, do not have a fast Internet connection to download the entire distribution, or who want a Linux distribution they can carry around on a Zip disk."
Spend $30 and buy him a baseball mitt and ball. Go out and play catch with him. Kids spend way too much time in front of the TV, Video Games, Computer, etc.
He will thank you in 20 years when he's not a big, fat, Socially inept geek.
From the sounds of it your laptop is as old as your son. I can relate to your dilemma. I find that my 6 year old would be playing with something else because it takes too long to load. I love Linux but to tell you the truth I havn't found alot of programs that are suitable for his age. they are just learning how to read, and spell and stuff like that. I would run something like PXES http://pxes.sourceforge.net/ A nice thin client that doesn't require alot of horse power. and can run both Xwindows, and Terminal services. That way you still get to use your old hardware. without the huge loss of speed etc. either that or buy him a real computer. you gotta remember by the time he's 8 or 10 he'll have probably be way ahead of what you were when you first started using a computer. BTW, My four year old asks less questions on how to use my computer then my wife does.
I have a bunch of old laptops so I have had the same problem as you. There is Small Linux but that didn't really suit me at the time. You can forget installing any other Linux distro on anything with less than 4Mb of RAM, although I would say Slackware is the best of the bunch when it comes to hardware requirements.
In the end I opted for Freedos for a 386 with 2Mb that my 5 year old son plays with. It's not UNIX, but it's much more UNIX-like than any other DOS I have used. There are also many educational programs and games that are available for free download.
Hope this helps.
Hmmm....well, there's FreeDOS, right? Could try that. TinyBSD's a good candidate, supposedly. Need a window manager...mebbe X comes with TinyBSD...I dunno, I think FreeGEM might be able to run on top of it (?). Man, this is kind of rough. One recommendation: get something that is fun for your kid. Some simple-as-all-heck games like Tetris, a paint program, you know; something kids like to play with. The paint program on my old Tandy1000 was all that kept me going some days. It was fun even without a mouse.
***
I'm using Via Eden boards for various embedded systems (motion controller, an Ogg Vorbis player for the house, and so forth), and with great trepidation sat down to build my own installs from source code.
/boot, /bin, /dev, /dev/cciss, /etc, /lib, /opt, /proc, /sbin, /tmp, /var, /usr, /bin, /lib, and /etc/init.d, although I was using BusyBox for my utilities, more complex init situations will want more in /etc).
It really isn't that hard.
First off, get an SFF to standard IDE adapter so you can put the hard disk in your main computer and copy stuff to it rather than having to copy stuff around on floppies 'til you get a network drive up. Costs you $20, you'll end up using it a few more times, I guarantee.
Mount that drive, create the basic file system (for me with a stripped down 2.4.19 kernel it was
In your "/etc/lilo.conf" (on this new drive) do a "disk=/dev/hde" (or wherever the new drive ends up on your disk chain) and a "bios=0x80") to tell it that you're wanting to boot off the first BIOS drive, everything else as you normally would.
Then just use "ldd" to check what dependencies are for various files and copy 'em over.
On this kind of machine, I'd just install DOS. I think you could get a lot more use out of it relative to the work you'd have to put in to getting Linux working on it much at all. I for one would skip Windows entirely. Win 3.1 is horrible on any hardware. ...but then again, maybe I am just being nostalgic because I cut my teeth as a youngster under DOS. I miss it somedays, feel like trading in this iBook for a 400 MHz or so PC for running DOS. :P There are still a fair amount of useful and fun software floating around for DOS. You could do MS-DOS 6.2 or FreeDOS. From what I've heard (but not positive) FreeDOS's comatability is pretty good.
;)
:) On the same download page, you can get an Infocom games interpreter as well! Best thing in the world for a 6-yo- helluva lot better than starting him on Doom!
Also, you could put OS/2 2.1 on it. If you're interested, I have the original box with manuals, along with 21 disks! Oh wait- that'll require a good 30 MB of HD space. But I did used to run it on a 486 sx/25 with 4 MB of RAM. It was a lot faster and more stable than Win 3.1 on the same machine.
GEOS is quite nice. Again, ran it on a 386 SX and 486 SX with 4 MB of RAM. Ran pretty well. You can get a lot of software for it, relatively at least. Check out BreadBox. You can get web browsers, irc and AIM clients, games, etc. Download GeoWorks Ensemble for FREE! Quite nice- choose between a Win95 or Motif look!
If you're willing to spend some money, you could get Breadbox's New Deal Office- same core as Ensemble Lite, but with a lot of bundled apps. Pretty well done, runs on almost anything.
You could also run... MINIX!
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Any of the micro distros will work fine. You can also look for old distros from around the time of your hardware was new.
--will that still then work back into the 486? I'm interested in this thread because I got given an older toshiba laptop, a pentium 1, 100 speed, with "just a floppy" and a borked hard drive. Want another linux machine of some kind, or bsd or whatever. Not real interested in reinstalling 95 on it, and will put up with the speed loss I guess. And those burn one floppy then download for two months on my rural dialup and coal burner modem just ain't gonna happen. Was wondering how to do it easier than getting an external cd drive or some serial port connection, that sounds easier by far, now I wonder if it being a laptop that it won't work. Hmmm.. I never even looked yet, are laptop hard drive drive connections the same as desktops? I need to use my own advice and open that thing up, it's been sitting on a junque pile long enough I guess... projects, projects, projects..... whoo boy, spring gardening season too....
My first choice would really be MS-DOS or PC-DOS or DR-DOS or FreeDOS. There is a huge amount of software. It is much easier to find DOS drivers for old laptops than it is BSD or Linux. If you really want to get fancy, search for Desqview/X and give it a try.
Have a look at BasicLinux 1.8
http://www.volny.cz/basiclinux
There is a version for 4mb RAM.
It uses a 2.0 kernel and libc5.
5mb BasicLinux HD foundation
12mb X (with icewm)
1mb xfreecell
15mb C compiler
33mb TOTAL
--thanks man! Logical and makes sense and I'll remember the tips!
Teach him the delete command.
He'll learn real fast that way.
It's probably the reason I'm doing anything with computers today.
("YOU DID **WHAT** WITH OUR NEW $3000 COMPUTER??")
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
He doesn't need Linux at his age. Kids can barely concentrate on one thing at time, unless they themselves want to. IOW, he's not going to multitask (not yet).
Consider FreeDOS. It may or may not work on your old laptop. But if it does, all you need is to
- Add a menuing system
- Set up a nice autoexec.bat to handle all the sound, mouse, and screen setting, and to drop the PC into the menu
- Collect some abandonware or free DOS games or educational software
I used to have an old Thinkpad. With DOS, it ran great. With Linux, it also ran great... until you loaded the X window system.
I second the ideas here to either upgrade the hard disk with a newer laptop IDE drive, or to use CompactFlash.
Democracy. Whiskey. Sexy. Pick any two.
I know your original message said something about using an OS "other than a terminal", but you might consider bringing it up as an XTerm. From the wording of your question, I'm guessing that you've got a more modern Linux box somewhere that you yourself use, so why not install your kid's apps on that and let him run riot accessing it via an XTerm?
Advantages:
- given that you'll probably be installing Linux and X on the old laptop anyway, it should be easier to install just enough to have it run as an Xterm, rather than having to install several games, drawing programs, etc. into limited space
- you'll probably get more life out of it, given that there's very little that's going to have to change on it once it's up and going properly
- you can send him cute messages from your other PC (don't underestimate how exciting kids find this!)
- very little software on his PC means very little to go wrong
- if/when he breaks or outgrows it, you can quickly get another clunker PC and bring it up as another XTerm
Disadvantages:
- you'll need a network card, which you may or may not have in this laptop. It should be pretty cheap to track down an old Xircom or something similar
FWIW, my two boys (6 and 4) have been playing games and surfing Web sites on one of my Linux PCs for years - basically, they started "helping" me work before they could walk. There's lots of games and drawing programs out there if you look around. They're yet to show OTT geek tendencies, or any inability to use a MS OS, as far as I can detect - you should be safe!
Okay, maybe RH 6.2 isn't exactly the funnest bestest OS ever but RH (for about two more weeks) is supporting it and it wasn't the GF that 7.0 was. So, if you can track down a supported (read OLD) NIC, do a network install THEN install all the patches RH has provided. You'll wind up with a fairly modern system, you can compile some light web browsers (such as links & dillo.) you can run lyx, latex & tex (if you've got patience & disk space.) and maybe even quake (bleh, quake on a non-TFT display.) I've got two 486 notebooks (20 Mb of RAM and 300-500 Mb of disk) and they did quite well. . . until I tried wireless networking (boy does a PCI bus make a difference there)
Still, Debian, slackware etc Linux is your best bet.
Good luck.
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 ----
Have him run OpenDOS or FreeDOS. There are a
TON of applications and games for DOS freely
available. In fact, I am posting this response
on the following: OpenDOS 7.1 and Arachne web
browser 1.7. I am connected using my DSL
connection (through an Etherlink III nic). The
packet drivers etc.. are provided with the
browser. This version of DOS has some
multitasking capabilities built in, along with a
cool game (Netwars). I also have an office
suite/operating environment called New Deal
(based on GEOS) that is fully GUI. I recently
downloaded and installed an SSH2 client for this
machine and can log in to my Linux box with no
problem. I have Microsoft's network client
installed, which allows me to browse shares on
my local workgroup. This box can play all
manner of audio and video (mp3, divx, mpeg,
etc...) using my 1MB video card and SB16.
Programming stuff: Turbo C, Turbo Pascal, QB4.5, Pacific C
Turbo C++, NASM, Euphoria, WABA (small DOS
Java), DJGPP (gcc for DOS).
Applications: CAD (2D), NeoPaint, WordStar 5, Pedit (great
DOS editor) Flow Chart (Visio for DOS), and more.
The games. Oh, the games. Doom, DoomII, Quake,
Descent, SimCity, One Must Fall, Red Baron, Duke
Nukem, Wolf3D, Stunts, and on and on.
Im running a P133 with 64meg of RAM, which is
HUGE overkill for this system. Ive had this
all running happily on a 386 with 4 meg of RAM.
The 486 system should be fine. Oh, the things
mentioned above should fit in about 100 Meg of
space. I have a ton of other stuff on this
machine, and it takes up about 300meg.
Finally, all things mentioned above are FREE and
available for download. www.simtel.net is a
great resource, otherwise just type "DOS
Software" into google and the other major
download sites will come up.
I have a laptop similar to this one, except the specifications are almost double. It is a 486dx2/66 with 8 MB RAM, and a 125MB HDD. DR-DOS 7.03 runs rather well on this for the core OS, as does Windows 3.11 for Workgroups for a GUI. If you do not feel like supporting MS (which you would not nessesarily be doing, because Windows 3.11 is freely available on many abandonware sites. But if you have a moral objetion to running abandonware, you can also use Seal Desktop 2.
Seal is available on Sourceforge.net, and is very decent. DR-DOS is free for personal use, but unless you purchase a lisence to use it, there is no support. You do not need to purchase it though. If you go here, you can get it completly free.
Get your free Dropbox account with 2 GB Free storage!
Back in 96-98 or so, when I was VP at golf.com, we had 1/2 dozen Slackware 4.x machines running on 486s that happily pulled down various newsfeeds, with relatively few issues. One was even on a Laptop with a PCMCIA ethernet card. 'course we also had a Netware 3.11 server on a 486, and it ran even better...
You could always try running a minimal linux distribution with tinyX or smallX with ratpoison or icewm.
I wrote my 1st game at the age of 7 on a ZX Spectrum (Timex 2000 to you amaricans out there) ... I think teh best thing you could do is either get an old 8 bit machine or set up a linux box so it boots straight into a simple BASIC interpreter and give him a few pieces of code to type in himself (anyone remeber the days of magazines with source for you type in yourself? good learning stuff), print out a few tutorials (in a big enough point size) and print out a complete reference - From around 8 to 10 years old i think my most-thumbed book was the BBC BASIC Users Guide!!!
but if he shows no interest in the comp, at least get him some mindstorms lego!
P.S. there was definitly nothing scary about a command prompt to me when i was 7!!
Try either
MuLinux
or
PicoBSD
to get started with a minimilist distro. Pico BSD runs on a single floppy, and I think MuLinux requires at least two. Onoe advantage of MuLinux is that it can actually run X after a few more floppys. I had both of these running at one point on a Laptop w/ 8 megs of ram.
Enjoy.
I dont understand why so many people keep nagging Cliff his choice of making something useful with his old laptop. I find it to be a very sane question. Many people have old hardware useless to current OS. But are they really useless? No. I think the best way to go is to install a vnc-client on the machine. You can find one for DOS. Vnc is a PC-anywhere-style system that you can use to connect to other computers. Vnc-servers exist for both Xwindows and Windows GUI. I that way you can use the old laptop as a graphial terminal and connect to either a Linux or a Windows-computer.