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Operating Systems Software

Free Software Operating Systems for Old Laptops? 104

Posted by Cliff from the and-we-mean-OLD-here dept.
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?"
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Free Software Operating Systems for Old Laptops? More

Free Software Operating Systems for Old Laptops?

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  • Slackware (Score:2, Informative)

    by clambake ( 37702 )
    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?

    • DOS? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Glonoinha ( 587375 ) on Friday March 14, 2003 @02:49PM (#5513408) Journal
      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 ...
      • Be careful with using CF and an OS that uses swap space. From what I've read, it will burn out the flash from all the read/write/erase cycles in something like a few months.

        Mind you, this "information" is anecdotal, as I haven't gotten a system running on flash yet, but in researching it I ran across quite a few warnings to that effect.
    • Any of the micro distros will work fine. You can also look for old distros from around the time of your hardware was new.

    • Re:Slackware (Score:3, Informative)

      by Gordonjcp ( 186804 )
      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? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by knightwolf ( 457910 ) <jwm05c.mizzou@edu> on Friday March 14, 2003 @02:33PM (#5513269) Homepage
    Have you looked at peanut linux or maybe slackware? They're usually really small distros. Another option is to search freshmeat [freshmeat.net]. 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? (Score:2, Informative)

    by JCMay ( 158033 )
    Have you thought about RULE [rule-project.org]?

  • Well, (Score:5, Informative)

    by ivan256 ( 17499 ) on Friday March 14, 2003 @02:34PM (#5513277)
    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!
    • Debian requires a couple hundred to install without hassles. I just failed to install on a 130MB drive. This ain't the Linux of '93.

      Joe
      • Admittedly, I haven't installed debian from scratch since before potato, since I've just been upgrading. The older distributions are still availble though, and I've definatly run debian on a 80MB hard drive before. It didn't seem like that long ago until I just thought about it... Where has all the time since 1996 gone?
        • Debian is hard to install with less than 16 megs of ram. It's also horribly slow to mess with package installation on a slow computer with small amounts of ram - the packaging system wasn't designed for the 10,000 packages or whatever that are now in sid, and just parsing the database can take ages...

          You might get by, but I think another distro might suit you better... Not sure which one - I'm still looking, myself.
    • should be able to install using PPP over the serial port.

      I would recommend PLIP if you have a parallel port, much faster. PLIP Install HOW TO [ibiblio.org].

  • Lessee... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Otter ( 3800 ) on Friday March 14, 2003 @02:36PM (#5513298) Journal
    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?

    • I've never seen it, but QNX might be an alternative. Does BeOS support pre-Pentium systems?

      No, neither QNX nor BeOS support pre-Pentium computers. I think QNX actually needs a quite fast computer. BeOS runs very well on a Pentium Classic with 32 MB RAM though.

      I think FreeBSD would be fine if you run a smaller implementation of X11 on it. Anyone tried the Tiny-X [linuxdevices.com] server on FreeBSD?

      • Re:Lessee... (Score:3, Informative)

        by MrResistor ( 120588 )
        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
        • 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.

          Thanks for clearing that up then. Sorry for misinforming people. I knew older versions of QNX supported even 8086, but I read somewhere that newer versions (those available for free download) needed faster HW. Having checked http://www.qnx.ca I now see that I was wrong.

  • Windows 95 (Score:5, Funny)

    by perljon ( 530156 ) on Friday March 14, 2003 @02:41PM (#5513346) Homepage
    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.
    • ROTFLOL... he said he had 2 Megs of RAM, windows 95 wont run on that. I don't even think it would install on that. Windows 3.1 maybe.
      • 4megs he said...

        i would just hook that computer with something like freedos or some other, and tell him theres this nice place called the-underdogs.org to get games+reviews of older stuff. if he has the hd to spare some linux installation would be nice but finding games for it could be a major bummer compared to dos based system that has dozens and dozens of good classic games available.

        nethack should run on that just as well, even though introducing kids to thing like crack isn't advisable.
        • Well, Bill Gates said you could run Win95 on a 386 with 4MB of RAM. Really he did. Here's the exact quote and the URL:

          "You can run Windows 95 on a 386 computer with 4 megabytes of RAM, but we recommend 8 megs for better performance. If you're going to upgrade to more powerful applications, more memory is better. My laptop computer has 12 megs."
          - Bill Gates, August 1995

          Here's the link to the page [microsoft.com].

          Amazing, eh?

          /vjl/

          • Re:Windows 95 (Score:3, Funny)

            by wik ( 10258 )
            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. :-)
          • You know, that page reinforces my belief that Bill is a 'good guy', even if his business may have some rather shady practices and dodgy products.

            My laptop computer has 12 megs.

            Okay, it was eight years ago, but this still seems hard to believe. I was around then, but I really can't remember the technology limits of the time (I had a 4Mb laptop in 1995!) as memory was expensive.

            Was 12Mb the limit? After all, the richest guy in the world would have as much memory in his laptop as possible, right?
        • I would probably look at using picogui as it is designed for small embeded devices. Probably that and Linux. It would require some work I'd imagine, but teh end may be a usable computer.
    • 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.

      Shouldn't step 3 be "profit?"

  • Why Linux? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by BortQ ( 468164 ) on Friday March 14, 2003 @02:42PM (#5513351) Homepage Journal
    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? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Glonoinha ( 587375 ) on Friday March 14, 2003 @03:11PM (#5513600) Journal
      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?

      • 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 graspin

      • Doom and Duke Nukem for a 6 year old?

        What happened to the good old days of "NIBBLES.BAS"?

      • Re:Why Linux? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Magus311X ( 5823 ) on Saturday March 15, 2003 @07:45PM (#5521298)
        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.
        -----

  • NFS mount (Score:3, Informative)

    by TheSHAD0W ( 258774 ) on Friday March 14, 2003 @03:01PM (#5513508) Homepage
    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 (Score:4, Informative)

    by turgid ( 580780 ) on Friday March 14, 2003 @03:11PM (#5513598) Journal
    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 (Score:2, Interesting)

      by SN74S181 ( 581549 )
      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
    • 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.

      • Ditto (Score:1)

        by dk4 ( 522573 )
        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...

  • Instead (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Strange Ranger ( 454494 ) on Friday March 14, 2003 @03:20PM (#5513672)
    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 (Score:5, Informative)

    by mcgroarty ( 633843 ) <brian DOT mcgroarty AT gmail DOT com> on Friday March 14, 2003 @03:35PM (#5513801) Homepage
    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.

    • In all fairness, OpenBSD and NetBSD can likely accomplish this as well. I only named FreeBSD because I helped a friend set up a 6 meg system for his kids a few years back, and it performed admirably, despite the low clockspeed and tight memory.
  • 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 [nildram.co.uk], Small Linux [superant.com]), 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 mu

  • do a used update first (Score:3, Informative)

    by zogger ( 617870 ) on Friday March 14, 2003 @03:51PM (#5513923) Homepage Journal
    --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? (Score:3, Funny)

    by pbrammer ( 526214 ) on Friday March 14, 2003 @04:21PM (#5514214)
    A simple search on Google would result your answer, but in the spirit of helping, you could look at Minix [cs.vu.nl].
  • 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 wa
  • 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

  • Try ZipSlack (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gordie ( 139287 ) on Friday March 14, 2003 @04:30PM (#5514304) Homepage
    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."

  • Do him a favor.... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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 Termi

  • Small Linux? Freedos? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Drasil ( 580067 )

    I have a bunch of old laptops so I have had the same problem as you. There is Small Linux [superant.com] 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 [slackware.com] is the best of the bunch when it comes to hardware requirements.

    In the end I opted for Freedos [freedos.org] 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

  • 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.

    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 th
  • 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 softwar
    • Whoops- sorry aobut the screwed up link. If you would like to see screenshots of NewDeal Office, check out this. [toastytech.com] NDO even comes with its own free VB-like IDE... everything your kid needs in one package. Programming, games, and more, with a very minimal time setting up and little HD space needed.
  • Since everyone else has pitched theirs, my two choices would be OpenBSD [openbsd.org] and some flavor of DOS. OpenBSD installs quite easily from a boot floppy if you can get the networking going. (Good luck with that on an old laptop). OpenBSD will run somewhat in 4 megs. Just don't try to compile anything big.

    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 t

  • BasicLinux (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 14, 2003 @07:56PM (#5516095)
    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

  • 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??")

  • FreeDOS, not Linux (Score:4, Insightful)

    by iankerickson ( 116267 ) on Saturday March 15, 2003 @12:56AM (#5517539) Homepage
    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.
    • Consider FreeDOS.

      Then consider loading this [arachne.cz] on it (it can also be configured as menuing system). An earlier version was included in the FreeDOS distro, but I don't think that version played MP3's

      If you can then link him into the house network (The Arachne browser comes with a freeware TCPIP stack for DOS), he can surf the web, and check email with it.

  • Use it as an X Terminal (Score:4, Interesting)

    by darnok ( 650458 ) on Saturday March 15, 2003 @01:50AM (#5517777)
    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 displ

  • Several things you can run (Score:3, Informative)

    by nurb432 ( 527695 ) on Saturday March 15, 2003 @11:05AM (#5519211) Homepage Journal
    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 (Score:2, Interesting)

    by 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 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 [filetap.com]. But if you have a moral objetion to running abandonware, you can also use Seal Desktop 2.

    Seal is available on Sourceforge.net,
  • You could always try running a minimal linux distribution with tinyX or smallX with ratpoison or icewm.

  • Why not dig out an old 8 bit? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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
  • Try either
    MuLinux [sunsite.dk]
    or
    PicoBSD [freebsd.org]
    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

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