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?"

Comments

Slackware

[clambake]

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?

Re:Slackware

[Gordonjcp]

I know that Slackware's main site goes back to about Slackware 3 - that might be worth looking at. Old versions of Debian, too. At Debian's site I think you can download *all* the previous versions.

Peanut Linux?

[knightwolf]

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).

RULE?

[JCMay]

Have you thought about RULE?

Well,

[ivan256]

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!

Lessee...

[Otter]

I'm not entirely sure I understand -- your concern is that you can't find a current distribution that will readily run on this hardware, right?

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?

Re:Lessee...

[MrResistor]

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.

Windows 95

[perljon]

Step1) Format and load Windows 95.
Step2) Throw some Sid Meiers Colonization on that bad boy
Step3) ... Step4) Let him play on it for 3 months. Step5) Got to step 1.

Re:Windows 95

[wik]

You actually can do this with 4MB of RAM. I even played solitare on it, too. It was just annoying to watch the mouse driver swap back in when you moved the mouse. :-)

Why Linux?

[BortQ]

Why bother putting Linux on it at all? It seems to me that any OS is good enough for a six year old to play around with.

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.

Re:Why Linux?

[Glonoinha]

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.

Another question might be ... 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)

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 ... any ideas?

Re:Why Linux?

[thumperward]

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.

Hahahaha... hahahaha. Just because children are capable of grasping the most stupidly complex things if they're interested doesn't mean it's a good idea. Nothing I learned poking around Commodore / Sinclair BASIC at age 7 has helped me in my later life. When some stupid problem with the primitive command-line driven piece of crap I like to call a "modern operating system" prevents me from getting any work done, I always have flashback to sitting in front of a (slightly more advanced) editor, cursor blinking at me while I trawl through maybe a thousand lines of code copied from a book to try and get some game to run.

The only thing that being mocked by a cursor as a child has taught me is that a piece of code, no matter how small or trivial, will always give you an error the first time you try and run it. To be honest, i could have done with waiting until university for that lesson.

- Chris

Re:Why Linux?

[Magus311X]

My first PC was one running Win3.1 with a 486/DX 33MHz, 4M EDO, and I think a 150MB disk. (My first computer was a Commodore 64 though).

If you can up it to 8M of RAM, you are golden. SimTower, SimCity 2000, SimFarm all ran fine, as Doom.

Don't throw a 6 year old at a Linux command line. Get him used to something like Win 3.1 and simply get him comfortable using a computer, period. Especially being able to type reasonably well and without having to hunt and peck.

AFTER that -- he understands directories, files, executables, and can type well, then move him to something else, whatever it may be.
-----

DOS?

[Glonoinha]

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 ...

NFS mount

[TheSHAD0W]

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

[turgid]

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.

Re:Slackware 4.0

[SN74S181]

Or install NetBSD. You can even use the current 1.6 release, as the basic NetBSD hasn't 'bloated out' as it's grown, like Linux distros, the 'packages' collection has just grown. The base install is under 100 megs and gives you X11 with the Tab Window Manager, the C compiler and libraries, all the core networking and Unix tools. Then you can selectively bring in other packages. I'd recommend, at most, adding in FVWM1 as a window manager for small machine like that.

It wasn't that long ago that the 'main' machines most of us were using were 486 machines. The richer of us had 16 megs with those expensive 4M 30 pin simms. The poorer had 8 MB in the smaller one meg simms. My Toshiba Laptop is a 486DX-2 50 MHz, though it has a 'bloated' maximum possible 28Meg of RAM in it. It runs NetBSD with FVWM and all the necessary goodies just fine.

You want to do things like tune your X by editing ~/.fvwm2rc. Create a virtual desktop that uses all your video memory (I like a 640x880, which uses up all 512K on my machine) so you can pan around your 640x480 'window' into your desktop easily. My Toshiba doesn't have a CD drive, but it's trivial to install NetBSD over NFS if you have a PCMCIA ethernet card and another box set up to serve out the distribution tgz files over NFS. The only 'installation media' you need is a pair of boot floppies from the images here, and the tarballs from here. The installation manual is here.

Everything you need to download to do a base NetBSD install totals to under 100 MB, so it's even a fairly casual download with a 56K modem.

Re:Slackware 4.0

[Saint Aardvark]

I can confirm that -- bought a 486 w/8MB of RAM and a 120 MB hd a while back and successfully installed slackware 7.0 (30MB free, as I recall, and a 20MB swap partition). Slackware, for these purposes (and so many others), rox. Really, I think you'd have a hard time going wrong.

Instead

[Strange Ranger]

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.

FreeBSD

[mcgroarty]

It's easy to set up a tiny FreeBSD install. You can build a usable and full-featured kernel for your hardware in around 700k so you're not eating up half the memory with locked pages before you've actually done anything. You may have to step back a few versions to get the smallest kernel.

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.

do a used update first

[zogger]

--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.

Minix?

[pbrammer]

A simple search on Google would result your answer, but in the spirit of helping, you could look at Minix.

Have done exactly this with Debian 2.2

[profBill]

I did exactly what you are describing using Debian 2.2. The machine is an old laptop with a Cyrix 486 (which is really a 386 equivalent), 4Mb of memory and a 100Mb disk. I couldn't get any connection process to work, so I did it all by floppy. I gave it to my 10 year old daughter to play with (she just wanted the BSD games). If she wants something new, I download it, put the package on the floppy then installed it . She doesn't really need it, but I did it just to see if it could be done. Oh, and X11? No way, couldn't get it to work with that little space (but I didn't reach back to very old X11 distro's either).

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.

Try ZipSlack

[gordie]

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."

Small Linux? Freedos?

[Drasil]

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.

BasicLinux

[Anonymous Coward]

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

FreeDOS, not Linux

[iankerickson]

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.

Use it as an X Terminal

[darnok]

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!

Several things you can run

[nurb432]

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..

OpenDOS 7

[Anonymous Coward]

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.