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Operating Systems Software Linux

Diskette-Based Distributions for the Masses? 65

Posted by Cliff from the for-those-who-haven't-forgotten-the-floppy dept.
Tzaquiel asks: "I've recently gotten involved with a local computer recycling operation. We see quite a variety of machines pass through our hands, from the foolish corporate Pentium III discards to individual donations of Ataris and 286s. Some do end up scrapped for recycling, but most of the machines are tested, refurbished, and given (OS-less, for now) to various charities who find homes for them. I've shown off Linux in-shop on various machines, and the reaction has been positive. But we move a lot of boxes, some very old. Installing Debian on every one of these is not possible (due to time constraints, and end-user confusion) and neither is imaging the hard drive with a properly tweaked distro (hardware variance). Does there exist a distro on 3-7 floppies that would be suitable for use by the unwashed masses? Proponents of Linux speak often of its being able to draw usability blood from a 386 stone - does there exist a distro that can do this without a massive time commitment for every machine involved? Every distribution I've examined thus far has assumed you either have fairly decent hardware or the time to fool around with things if you don't. What I need is a quick-and-dirty, minimal-expendability, floppy-based graphical word-processing-and-web-browsing affair that is right at home on machines that probably should just be left to die. For all the talk of 'Linux and old hardware will be a blessing upon the third world', I would think something like this wouldn't be so hard to find. Surely, if Microsoft did it with DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 a decade ago, it can be done better in Linux now?"
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Diskette-Based Distributions for the Masses? More

Diskette-Based Distributions for the Masses?

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  • i'm not following you on the image thing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by honold ( 152273 ) on Monday March 03, 2003 @04:51PM (#5426580)
    and to get it out of the way, floppies completely suck. they're unreliable. if these systems have disks or cdroms you should avoid them like the plague.

    what i don't understand is how you think that a floppy-based 'distro' could somehow be generically immune to whatever problems you'd have with a typical (in your case, debian) image.

    it's a monolithic kernel. it has the drivers for most common components already. if you're planning on using one kernel with a boot floppy, your reasoning that you can't image because of hardware variance makes no sense.

    you'll be using one kernel in both instances, and the image/hard disk-based one has so many advantages alternatives aren't even worth considering.
    • neither is imaging the hard drive with a properly tweaked distro (hardware variance).

      I think the point is that using imaging, while a technically superior alternative, is NOT an option due to the variance of hardware and the fact they don't have time to rip open these machines (i'm deducing this myself). A floppy-based distro would give a fast minimal install that could then be used to install more features/software if necessary.
      • In my experience, it's much easier to pop open the machine, install a NIC temporarily, and install off a server with the distro on it.

        Even with Slackware, you'll need at least fifteen floppies to have a system with much useful on it. For example, the X window system. Using a network is heaps faster, more realiable, more convenient. You can do more than one at once. Your floppies would have worn out after 3 or so installs, and anyway, every floppy drive is different. It a floppy drive reads a disk that wasn't written by itself, that's nothing short of AMAZING. But it's so unlikely I'd not recommend wasting your time with them.

        The plastic punched card is dead!

      • neither is imaging the hard drive with a properly tweaked distro (hardware variance).

        A network card with a boot ROM would be a good replacement for yanking the drives. As for customizing the systems -- tweak, shmeak, that's what auto-configure is for! 8-}

        Kudzu works well under Red Hat, and some of the mini distributions use that. If the hardware isn't detected or can't be configured remove or better yet ignore it. ISA software/Win modems are the most likely things to entirely fail. Everything else should work if not with all features enabled.

        Here's a good rule for handling clutter -- and these charity systems are clutter;

        1. What can't be given away should be thrown away.

        In this case, the request was for a distribution to toss on the system to make them usable. Well, floppy-based distributions don't cut it.

        If the system doesn't auto-configure to the point that is usable, dump it in the "you're on your own" pile and move on. Why waste $100 worth of effort on a $20 computer when you are having problems with it already? It's possible that the system was donated because the previous owner had problems with it...and figuring that out is a real time sucking P.I.T.A.

        If you really see the need to scrape the last bit of use out of a system, put it to the side *now* and look at it again *later*. Maybe it would be a good parts machine?

        Also, I've found that about 1/3 of systems over time develop memory errors. Get memtest86 and boot that first before wasting time on a charity machine. It takes no effort on your part and can be done while you install the image on other systems.

      • I think the point is that using imaging, while a technically superior alternative, is NOT an option due to the variance of hardware

        That's a bad point. With drive imaging, at least you can put all the boot code, kernels, and drivers you might ever need onto the drive, as well as enough intelligence for the thing to figure out what it needs to do by itself.

        Fiddling around with floppies, you are going to spend hours per machine just picking and choosing among the drivers by hand.

    • Not to mention that if you compiled a kernel with everything included, it's not going to fit on a floppy. You are dead on about floppies. I don't know if it's a drive quality thing, or a substandard media thing, but every modern computer I've used has LOTS or troubles with floppies - something on the order of 70% of the floppies won't format without error.

      A poster farther down says Knoppix. Oh yeah. If your machine doesn't have a CD, pop in a good network card, use a boot floppy ONCE, get knoppix installed, then remove said network card.

      Some of the older CD drives / motherboards won't boot directly, so floppy boot may still be needed for the install. Best to not mess with it at all if in doubt and use the network card.

      Some network cards have boot roms that will boot on virtually any older machine, so that may be an option too.

      • If you're going to go to the trouble of ripping open the machine, why not just image the hard drive?
        • Um, I guess I am sort of suggesting imaging with something like Knoppix.

          I'm assuming that these machines kinda suck as stated by the poster, and that they can't boot off CD or may not even have a CD. So how are you going to image? Pull the drive and put it in another machine? Hookup a CD drive?

          Installing a good bootable network card is just about the easiest possible way to do this.

          • That makes sense. I guess I wasn't thinking about it like that-- if you've got a fast network, using a netboot would be just as efficient as a disk-to-disk copy would (yes, I'd pull the drives, but I'd put them in the master machine with a removable tray I think).
            • Yeah, I used to pull drives too, but I HATE pulling drives out of sucky machines. Sometimes you need to rip the whole thing apart to get to the screws... And those BASTARD cables that are too short, that you can't hardly hook up again because there isn't enough room between the power supply and the drive rack to get your hand in, and Damn, cut my hand AGAIN on a sharp piece of metal!

              After about the 300th machine you get REALLY tired of that and look for a better way. :-)

          • Find a parallel cd-rom drive (yeah, yeah, slow) and boot from floppy with the parallel cd-rom driver. It's slow, but you don't have to monkey in the guts of crusty old machines.
            • >Find a parallel cd-rom drive (yeah, yeah, slow) and boot from floppy
              >with the parallel cd-rom driver. It's slow, but you don't have to
              >monkey in the guts of crusty old machines.

              Or if you can find an old parallel port network card, you can boot from a floppy and do a painfully slow network install.
    • I don't think he's trying to say that floppies would solve the imaging problem.

      I think he's trying to say (in gov-speak):
      1 Problems
      1.1 Imaging: hardware varies too much
      1.2 CDs: these machines often such so hard they don't even have CDs
      2 Solutions
      2.1 All machines have floppies, so get a floppy-based distribution

      Judebert

  • Knoppix (Score:4, Informative)

    by manyoso ( 260664 ) on Monday March 03, 2003 @04:54PM (#5426598) Homepage
    If they can boot from CD then what you need is Knoppix:

    http://www.knoppix.net/docs/index.php/KnoppixKDE

    This is one of the coolest ISO's ever to come out of Linux land ;)

    • If they can boot from CD then what you need is Knoppix

      I'm figuring from what I have seen that most of these machines either do not have a CDROM drive or can't boot from it. Hence his request for a floppy based distro.
    • Agreed, but not for what he wants. On my 1Gig machine with 256M of RAM, Knoppix is useable, but does drag at times. Mostly this is due to lack of swap, but having worked with Linux for a long time, I don't see that making enough of a difference to have it useable on a 486, or even a PII.

      A better option would be to look at Linux from Scratch [linuxfromscratch.org]. He could build his own distribution that'll work on every one of those machines. A small, floppy-based distro might be a lot of work, but it can be done. Building LFS with no locale support and using ucLibc I was able to get a distro that was under 70M. Keep in mind, however, that it was fully-functional (albeit sans X), so with some work, it could be pared down a bit more.

    • Morphix Better (Score:2, Informative)

      by hswerdfe ( 569925 )

      http://www.morphix.org

      3 Flavours of Morphix
      1. Base
      2. Light GUI (IceWM)
      3. Heavy GUI (Gnome)

      For him I'd suggest He Mod
      Base and use that
      or Use Light.

      Slowest Machine I ever tested light on was a 233 it worked fine ..... It might be able to go lower

  • How to get this done (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Surely, if Microsoft did it with DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 a decade ago, it can be done better in Linux now?"

    It would seem the poster is familiar with the second rule of getting an engineer to do something. Allow me to use the first rule. *Ahem* It hasn't been done better in Linux because it can't be done!

    • Heh! that's funny...

      On the serious side, DOS was something like 3 floppies, and Windows was something like 11 if I'm remembering right (it's been years...) Not to mention that you had ZERO apps. Then install a browser, word processor, etc. Lots more than 3 - 7 floppies.

      Way back when, I had a boot floppy that ran the FTP Software (company name, not file transfer protocol) IP stack that I used to install DOS / Windows from an AIX box that had the floppy images. Worked pretty well. This was back in the early 90's.

  • KNOPPIX (Score:3, Informative)

    by Darnit ( 75420 ) on Monday March 03, 2003 @05:15PM (#5426761)
    For those of you touting Knoppix, it is not feasible in this situation most of the time. I bet very few of these machines have the required memory.

    Knoppix is awesome but not feasible with under 96MB of RAM. Although a cut down version with it's quick install would be nice.

    • Yeah, well the poster wanted tons of features on almost zero disk space that runs on virtually any machine. Not very realistic. A cut down version of Knoppix does seem to fit the bill better than anything else. It's open, hack it.

      The reality of running a graphical environment (word processor, web browsing) is that you are going to need a reasonable amount of memory. 64M is about the minimum that runs with any acceptable level of performance. Much less than that and you start swapping like mad - on an ancient machine's hard disk. Knoppix doesn't automatically setup a swap which is why they claim a 96M minimum. Read the knoppix web page for more info.

      Regardless, the poster is going to have to do some work or change his expectations.
      • The reality of running a graphical environment (word processor, web browsing) is that you are going to need a reasonable amount of memory. 64M is about the minimum that runs with any acceptable level of performance.

        Sigh, the bloat these days is abominable.

        I started using GUI's with C64 GEOS, in 64K of RAM, I could use GEOWrite and GEOPaint just fine.

        Then I went to an Amiga where I could use a full multi-tasking desktop system in 512K of RAM with no hard drive. In my later Amiga 3000 with 12 meg ram and a little harddrive space I had a completely functional system that I routinely used to browse the web, email, use usenet, desktop publish, render graphics and a myriad of other things.

        My first Linux box was an old 486 DX4/100 with 12meg RAM and a 2 gig hard drive, I ran a full X system on that, with KDE no less.

        Anyway, my point is, that you shouldn't need all these heavy requirements if all you want to do is use Office type software, send/read email and browse the web - let's face it, that's what people do most of the time.

        Now to help with the question at hand, maybe Small Linux [freshmeat.net] would be a good place to start.

        • I used to have an Apple ][gs, which ran a perfectly usable GUI on a 2.6 Mhz processor and 256K of RAM.

          Also, when Win95 was in beta, I had it running just fine on a 386SX16 with 16M of RAM and a VGA card. It came with Write, a perfectly usable word processor without any noticable bloat.

          If I didn't miss the point, the poster seemed to be looking for some sort of low-end distro that he could SEND HOME with the new owners and let them go through the install themselves. That sort of lets out the net-boot install method.

          Would it work to put an ISO on the HD and give them a boot floppy? They could work through the install themselves that way, and always have the ISO (on its own partition) as a sort of restore disk.
          • Ahh. He want's to "provide" disks to unwashed masses? And he has HOW many machines? So he is going to sit there and duplicate HUNDREDS of floppies? With the time it takes to manually duplicate a 10 disk set (assuming the copies go 100% error free which is impossible these days considering that even brand fucking new disks fail 50% of the time) you could pop open the box, netboot and image the hard drive with a small distro. Seriously. I'm not making this up. I assume that he is going to at least do a LITTLE testing to make sure the machines even work, which means that he's got to power them up at least once, maybe run a diagnostic on them, format the hard disk, etc. Might as well get the image on the hard drive while you are at it.
        • In theory, you have a point. Sigh. The old Amiga. Yeah, had one of those too. One of the first in fact that I got back in October '85 when they were just released.

          The problem we have today is that modern versions of software are much larger than they used to be. Of course applications today do a fair amount more than their counterparts of yesterday too - they are easier to use, look better, integrate with other things, are more modular, etc.

          Take GTK (or QT) for example. Old X apps would manually draw buttons with a simple frame with text inside, or use very simple black and white icons. Modern apps use PNG, Jpg, XPM, or one of 15 different file formats for icons. The widget code is orders of magnitude larger than it used to me. Now lets add integration for Gnome, KDE, or Both. Ugg.

          For an example of what I'm talking about, compare something like X-fig to Visio. (Personally, I like X-fig, but my wife would find it Very hard to use compared to Visio.) Any idiot can pick up visio quickly and within an hour be drawing some useful stuff. It looks great and has a lot of capability. It's also massive taking up around 100M on the hard disk. Xfig I think installed with around 4M. XFig is UGLY though. It uses those old text and black and white icons I was talking about. Many things are non-intuitive. The learning curve is about 5 - 10 times that of visio. Note that even xfig has grown dramatically being many times bigger today than it was 15 years ago.

          As Linux matures and becomes more user-friendly, it's gonna get big.

          So yeah, the poster can probably take something like Small Linux, then spend about 6 months adding things like hardware autodetection back in.
      • Depends what you want to run: 16 megs is more than enough for Linux + X + Icewm + some editor (vi, joe, nano, heck even GNU Emacs) + LaTeX. Although I admit that most non-techie users will not be running LaTeX.

        I'd be surprised if the GTK version of Abiword didn't run acceptably well in 16 megs. Combine that with the Dillo web browser and a mail program such as Sylpheed, and you have a decent system.

        Come _on_ people, it was only a few years ago that 64 megs of memory was ridiculously expensive. Do you really believe that nobody ran Linux, or X, or any applications back then?
  • I just have two older computers to do this to, but one of them has a 1Gb hard disk and 24Mb RAM (I can't get the other to boot, yet, but it has no more than a 5Gb hard disk). Neither can boot from CD.

    I'm trying to get these set up with educational software (they've been donated to two different local schools that I have connections with), but haven't found a distribution that I like with educational software that doesn't want at least a 4Gb hard disk.

    Only one of the two computers has a network card, so network-based installs are completely out of the question.

    -austin
    • Try tiny linux (http://tiny.seul.org/en/). It should be able to run something like abiword, and some other basic free office tools.
    • (I think) I have built boot disks with PLIP, then used the parallel port to net boot.

      PLIP has gotten me out of quite a few pinches when I didn't have a real network card.
    • .ca is canada, right? Can't you get NIC's for about $10 or so? I have trouble believing you can't pony up for a single NIC. As for distros, until very recently, I was running Debian with scads of software from a 1 Gb drive. 3.0, not the 2.2 series. Yes, I had way more ram, but only had a crappy 1 Gb drive. I had KDE, Gnome, Mozilla, and openoffice. Getting rid of the extra seventy-11 text editors, terminals, etc. saves tons of space.

      But I have no idea how to get around the RAM requirement. I put an older (RH 6.2???) distro on my wife's old machine with ~16Mb ram, and that was painful.

      • I have trouble believing you can't pony up for a single NIC

        Why is everyone focusing on the alternatives to the original question, rather than the answer to it?

        I know the situation this guy is in - I've done this myself. Trust me: CDs, Network cards, ripping open the cases to get at the disks... none of these are viable options.

        In the end it all comes down to time. How much time is it worth to mess around with an obsolete PC? You've got fifty machines to sort out in a day, and they're all different. If you're really lucky, most of them might work, but don't count on it.
        You simply don't have time to open all these machines up and play with the hardware: if they work, they need an OS installed; if they don't, they get put aside so they can be raided for parts.

        All you want is an OS that will boot as many of these machines as possible with the least amount of fuss. Forget whether it looks pretty.

        From personal experience, I'd say you'll need more than one, though - you'll want something really simple for the 286's, something a bit better for the 486's, and maybe even an almost modern distro for the P II/III's.

        For the ones that really don't like Linux, I would even suggest dropping it, and trying something like FreeDos. That will give you MSDos compatibility (which can be helpful when dealing with the 'unwashed masses' as you put it), and should be fairly straightforward to get up and running.
        • You are asking 'why are you thinking outside the box?' Because in the estimation of many people in this thread, the poster has illogically drawn constraints to the problem. If it takes longer than about two minutes to pop in a NIC, maybe you shouldn't be futzing with looking for the right Linux distro.

          BTW, I also made this [slashdot.org] comment, which I still say is the most logical answer to the problem yet. Like others have said, I have trouble with brand new floppies. I can't imagine how poorly one with 5-10 years of dirt, dust, and cigarette smoke will perform.
  • Not on the front page. Headline grabbers are the way to go.

  • backpack (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cryptozoologist ( 88536 ) on Monday March 03, 2003 @05:46PM (#5427073) Homepage
    you may want to consider getting a parallel port cdrom drive (i believe there is or was one made by backpack) which would allow you to boot off a floppy and install (slowly) from the parallel port. another place to look for information is the rule project at
    http://www.rule-project.org/en/ [rule-project.org])

    where they are trying to allow folks to Run Uptodate Linux Everywhere

  • A Question... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by until(0) ( 533975 ) <da5id@@@winter-mute...com> on Monday March 03, 2003 @05:49PM (#5427112) Homepage
    To me, it sounds like you want a fast, simple, streamlined way to install a Linux distro on older machines, and donate them to the 'unwashed masses' (read: people who don't know up from down with a Linux distro?)...

    I pose a question: If you are donating these machines to people who (we'll assume, as per your statements) cannot readily install a free OS on their own, why do you expect that they'll have any more luck using the OS in a productive manner??

    o_O

    • Re:A Question... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Skipworthy ( 151946 )
      I disagree with the premise of your question. You seem to imply that just becasue they can't find and download linux, they won't be able to use it. I work on a camous where I support and install both windows and linux,and at worst, Linux (we happent o be using red hat) is *no harder* than windows to learn, if it is installed correctly to start with : most students don't even notice the difference.

      Now its likely that with a 'smaller' or 'older ' distro, there might be more difficulties, especially if you can't get a gui going for whatever reason, or don't have programs that will run in that space of memory: but it is *not* a learning curve issue.

      And frankly, 1) giving away PCs and 2) enthusiastically advocating Linux means you are committing yourself to at least *some* user education and support. (would you give a car to someone who didn't know how to drive?)

  • Not to incite any sort of Linux-vs-BSD war or anything, but have you looked at NetBSD? The 1.6 distro runs on 386s and up, (probably 286s too, if it has a math coprocessor) installs from two floppies with drivers for just about everything, and runs just as well on PCs, Amigas, old 68k Macs, etc.

    Without the development tools, headers, etc., you can easily fit it into a 200MB image size, and go down from there by manaully removing items from the default installation sets. Plus, there are binary packages for most of the common apps you would want to use, which you can install with a simple command like: setenv PKG_PATH "ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/1.6/i386 /All"; pkg_add abiword.

    I have been a big Linux user (and booster) for many years, but if you want a lean UNIX-like system that runs great on old boxen, without going back five years on the versions of all your software (which is a big security win all by itself), I highly recommend NetBSD.
  • I have to second (third, fourth, ...) the comments from others. Floppy-based distributions are a bad idea -- unless you're technically minded and want to repair or fix something.

    Here's a better one;

    Install a minimal distribution on a small machine, grab the image, and install the image on the hard drive of any new systems as needed.

    When the system boots the first time, it will configure itself.

    What to use as a base is up to you. Consider Peanut Linux, Knoppix (which can be installed to the hard disk), or a very promising distribution named RULE [rule-project.org].

    What makes RULE interesting [rule-project.org] is that it is not really a distribution by itself, but a set of packages and an installer that are added to Red Hat 8.0 that allow you to run Red Hat's distribution on more modest hardware. For example, a 486 with 32MB of RAM will use the same kernel with RULE as a stock Red Hat 8.0 system will.

    Take a look at the screenshots showing RULE running on 486s with 16MB of RAM [rule-project.org]. If you want to add other packages, such as OpenOffice [openoffice.org], you can just like a full Red Hat 8.0 installation.

  • Proponents of Linux speak often of its being able to draw usability blood from a 386 stone - does there exist a distro that can do this without a massive time commitment for every machine involved?...What I need is a quick-and-dirty, minimal-expendability, floppy-based graphical word-processing-and-web-browsing affair that is right at home on machines that probably should just be left to die.

    You aren't going to be doing much graphical web browing on a 386 on today's web. It's sad, but there you are. Web pages have simply gotten too complex.

    I'd say about the slowest machine I'd want to do graphical web browsing on would be a Pentium, and that'd be with dillo, or some other less-than-full-featured browser -- and when I could, I'd be using links or lynx.

    I'd skip the floppies, and install to the the hard drive of a Pentium II or higher a relatively modern web browser and word processor. Giving people ancient programs to try to get around with is just going to cause them pain unless they're quite technically ept.

  • Not really... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Otter ( 3800 ) on Monday March 03, 2003 @07:49PM (#5428387) Journal
    What I need is a quick-and-dirty, minimal-expendability, floppy-based graphical word-processing-and-web-browsing affair that is right at home on machines that probably should just be left to die. For all the talk of 'Linux and old hardware will be a blessing upon the third world', I would think something like this wouldn't be so hard to find.

    You do realize that "all the talk" comes from people with no clue what they're talking about, right?

    A bunch of years ago, Linux ran quickly and stably on low-end hardware that would choke on Windows 95. It didn't do much, though, unless you wanted to run vim in an xterm under fvwm. (Which many of us did.) Today, Linux distributions have far more capability -- but they're no faster or more stable (frequently less so) than current versions of Windows.

    In other words, try word processing and web browsing with Linux on an 386 before you start recommending it to others.

  • hmmm... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by XO ( 250276 ) <blade.eric@g m a i l .com> on Monday March 03, 2003 @08:35PM (#5428818) Homepage Journal
    While we're on this thread, I have a P100 laptop with 40MB ram and a 700MB hard drive. The floppy disk drive is completely shot on it, and I can't boot anything from it.

    Is there any sort of relatively modern distribution out there that can be installed say UMSDOS (any distros even support that anymore?) from the file system they are residing on?

    Ie, I want to download a bunch of files to a directory on my DOS drive, run a program, and have it install from there.

    Is this possible?
    • Zipslack? http://slackware.com/zipslack/

    • A laptop that old should have a standard 2.5 inch harddisk. Download a linux kernel and a ramdisk image, load it via loadlin.exe, run fdisk and mke2fs/mkswap to have proper partitions. Get an adapter that converts the 2.0mm 44 pin connector from that drive to a 2.5mm 40 pin connector plus a power connector (Like this one [reichelt.de] found at Reichelt Elektronik [reichelt.de] in Germany for 4 EUR = 4 USD). Plug it into your laptop harddisk and your desktop PC, replacing the build-in harddisk, and install your favorite Linux distro from CDROM. Don't configure X or other stuff, then put the drive back into your Laptop. Finished.

      The trick is to do the fdisk and format in the laptop so that the geometry information written to the master boot record of the harddisk matches the laptop bios' idea of what kind of harddisk you have.

      You may want to keep a very small DOS partition (5 megs or so) with loadlin.exe and a kernel, marked as active partition, so that you can start up Linux (and then lilo) from a known-good state instead of hoping that lilo was installed properly in the desktop. You could also use a partition of about 100 MBytes and reuse it as swap later.

      No warranty, your mileage may vary, don't kill your granny, jadda jadda jadda ...

  • I fully understand what you're saying.

    The QNX floppy demo heads in the right direction for what you want but not nearly enough. While it is graphical, boots easy, does word processing and browsing it's not linux, it's old etc, blah blah blah. I recommend everyone reading this post have a look because by doing so you'll understand what the poster wants; a click and go floppy.

    muLinux is what I've been using. But to be graphical (X11) and the other things you need takes disk swapping (1 for each task) and a little time setting it up.

    Once configured muLinux is your best bet.

    All in all the situation could be better. People who have old computers with no cdroms are usually good enough to use a floppy distro like muLinux.

    Hopefully one day they're be something better, it's a shame to make such a thing is a little harder than worth the effort.
  • Boot Openbsd from the floppy drive and use a serial port CD-Rom for the install. OpenBsd will virtually work on every machine and even a non X-Windows install should give you enough functuality.

    Together with obsolete hardware you will give away the most secure machines ever to your clients.

    Thanks, Theo.

  • Gentoo? (Score:2)

    by GiMP ( 10923 )
    What about gentoo? You can compile for different cpus to achieve the greatest optimizations. Users with an internet connection would be able to install programs easily via a 'emerge'.

    I suggest compiling the base system on a dual-athlon or something similiar and then copying the data to the machine via cdrom or the network. You could network via Null-modem for those without ethernet.

  • Old computers are not general-purpose (Score:3, Insightful)

    by amcguinn ( 549297 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @09:37AM (#5432181) Journal
    I would say there are three "levels" of old computers.
    1. Any PentiumII or above is essentially a "modern" PC: It will run a standard desktop setup like Knoppix.
    2. Pentium "Classic" 133MHz and up can be used as a general-purpose desktop, but you need to carefully select lightweight apps. XFCE + Phoenix + Sylpheed + Abiword is the kind of setup that can work.
    3. Less than a P133 is not a general-purpose machine. It can still be very useful, but you need to know in advance what it's going to be used for -- a single GUI app, a terminal for text-mode network access, a server -- It can do any of those things, but only the one it's been configured for.

    In general, older computers are harder to use than newer ones, and you can't run one without a skilled administrator available, just like you can't run a car without visiting a mechanic occasionally (or learning how to get your hands oily).

    It sounds to me like you're looking for a silver bullet that will make a 10-year-old computer useful to someone who doesn't have admin skills. They never were, and the silver bullet doesn't exist. I might be jumping to conclusions; I would like to know where these machines actually do end up.

  • If you have any money to work with at all, consider using Compact Flash with an ATA adapter. You may be able to get the adapters and CF cards donated to you by a vendor if you can prove to their satisfaction you're trying to do something charitable. If you scale your plans to fit in an "obsolete" size of CF cards, you may have better luck. A vendor would probably be happy to donate to you a hundred 4 MB CF cards.

    The advantage is that the BIOS sees the CF card as an ATA hard disk. At 1 to 16 MB, almost any BIOS will boot from one. And you can load the CF card with FreeDOS and DOS-based tools for linux (UFS), so that you can bootstrap the PC initially and THEN load additional software from CD or a harddisk or ethernet or whatever.

    They might also be useful to allow an old PC to use a modern hard disk. The BIOS may be too old to like today's large disks, but CF cards should be no problem. From there, Linux ignores the BIOS like a bad relative, and can mount almost any device it would normally support. So you boot off the CF into linux, and from there have access to CD-ROMs, UltraATA size disks, or whatever you want to use. No different than booting from a DOS floppy with MSCDEX on it for PCs that don't speak El Torrito.

    Also, the CF card is solid state, and a given card will either work or pretty much fail outright. Floppies and CD-ROMs are mechanical, and will give you intermittent problems if there's something wrong with them.

    As far as a distro for Old PCs for non-nerds? Look for something intended for kids, like SEUL. But most linux is too incomplete to foist on people unwilling to roll up their sleeves, unless you plan to give them full KDE.

    Keep it simple. Make it look like DOS with:
    - pretty colors
    - multiple simultaneous windows
    - 2D color graphics and printing
    - basic sound
    - documentation that looks like English
    - some friendly shell scripts with English names that handle the hard stuff for the user.
    - a paper booklet that explains how to use it.

    You might look at Slackware as a basis to build you own, or dare I say it, NetBSD, which is very friendly for a free OS (good man pages, easy system administrations, a K.I.S.S approach to everything).

    Keep in mind, if it wasn't much work to do, everybody would probably be doing it, and you'd find ancient relics running Linux faithfully for old ladies in every small town and ghetto of America. That doesn't mean the work's not worth doing.

    Best of luck.

  • The problem ,with the qnx disk mentioned above, is that you can't find the "incredible 1.44 challenge demo disk" (or something like that) on the qnx site anymore... Using the wayback machine, you can see it [archive.org]

    And as mentioned on Tiny apps.org [tinyapps.org], the downloads are available here [planetmirror.com]

    Everyone should try these at least once. I was really impressed by what you could acheive with a simple 1.44 floppy disk. You get a gui with a net acess and a simple browser! (And this was done in 1998!)

    Anyway, this a good starting point for making those computers works.

    One advice i can give it that theses olds computers can be put to simple use like routers or graphicals terminals, but don't expects a lot out of a 386. Your best bet would be to start by visiting google and google directories [google.com]. You can also try the Linux terminal server project page [ltsp.org]. They have debian-based packages, so it's not to hard to install on any computer.
  • For such a variety of non I386 type hardware, I dont think linux would be the best choice.

    NetBSD supports most anything under the sun that would be useable for a unix type environment.

    Hope you are not trashing the Ataris, if so, send them to me instead... i collect..

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