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Hardware

OSes and Applications for Aging Machines? 120

Posted by Cliff from the reclaiming-older-hardware-for-other-things dept.
TellarHK asks: "My aunt and uncle, both completely unfamiliar with computers, are looking to replace a broken word processor with something new. They'd like to either spend as few dollars as possible on a computer, or replace the word processor. Silly me, I mentioned I had a spare PC kicking around. It's a Digital Equipment 'Starion 930' Pentium 100 with 40M, and onboard video of an unknown type. As this machine is going to be used for word processing, I need an OS that will work with my newly dusted-off Lexmark Z11 printer. So what are my options? Will QNX handle the limited video and printer? Is there a WYSIWYG solution for FreeDOS? Is there a chance in hell any Linux distribution can give me graphics? I've got a whopping three gig drive in there. What can I do with it?"
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OSes and Applications for Aging Machines? More

OSes and Applications for Aging Machines?

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  • Windows 3.1 to the rescue! (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    See if you can find some old Windows 3.1 disks online (lots of places have old Windows versions available for download). MS Word 6.0 or WordPerfect on Windows 3.1 worked fine on my old 486SX-25, and I imagine it'd work just as well on a Pentium system.
    • I'd second this as well, Win 3.1 will work fine. You probably can find a copy of it in your local second-hand computer shop for cheap as well (I know the one around here has plenty of them)

      This is especially useful, seeing as the Un*x printer compatibility database lists the Lexmark Z11 as being only paritally supported. [linuxprinting.org] Or to be more specific, the Linux driver does 600dpi colour only. Besides, I highly doubt you'd even want to think about getting X running on that old of a machine.
      • highly doubt you'd even want to think about getting X running on that old of a machine

        Back in the day, I had X running on a 386DX 40MHz system with 16MB RAM. Not that I would want to run anything close to that configuration today! But it is possible.

      • No problem running Linux and X on such a machine. I once installed it on my father's 100 Mhz Pentium.

        These days I am experimenting with low-latency and preemptive kernels, and they do a real good job on such machines.

        I think that the printer driver probably should make the decision.

    • Windows 3.1? Hell, it's way overspecced for that (what'd Windows 3.x do with 40MB of RAM?) My advice? Drop NT4 Workstation w/ sp6a, Office 97 and IE 6.0 onto it then lock it down the wazoo (you may also want to install something like NetOp or, if you're strapped for cash, VNC onto it to enable you to do support from the next town/county/country..)

      Quick, easy and stable, and all your kit should just work out of the box. The remote manageability and increased stability of NT over 3.x (gack!) and 9x (urgh!) make this a nobrainer.

    • Sheesh, I ran OS/2 2.1 for years on a 486 DX/2 66 with 12 megs of ram and a 360 meg hard drive. Not only that, I frequently ran Wordperfect 6.1 fir Windows 3.1 emulated as well, with no problems.

      Come to think of it, I still have that machine here and boot it up for kicks. My next machine was a Pentium 100 that I didn't retire until four years ago. What the hell is this? Its not like we are talking about a 386 DX 40 with 4 megs of ram.

  • Whoa (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by PaddyM ( 45763 )
    That's a pretty old machine. Maybe there's some applications on punch cards or something, but that's beyond my years ;)
    • That's not an old machine at all, and in fact that machine can be quite useful in other roles. I run NetBSD on an old 133MHz 486DX with 32MB of RAM. This machine handles DNS and DHCP, and has had no crashes. I'd have to say that old hardware is at least just as reliable as new, and maybe even more so.

  • Overkill - Ha! (Score:4, Informative)

    by moosesocks ( 264553 ) on Thursday September 05, 2002 @10:57PM (#4204334) Homepage
    I have an old laptop which I use for a similar purpose: an IBM thinkpad 755, which is a 486/75 with 20mb of RAM, and what is possibly the world's most troublesome video adapter.

    Despite these shortcomings, I am still able to run Windows 98 with Word 2000. '98 boots up in about a minute, and word takes about 10 seconds to load. For an 8 year old laptop, that's pretty darn good. The only drawback is that the type is somewat laggy, although the system described in this article should be nearly twice as fast.

  • WordPerfect (Score:3, Insightful)

    by reverius ( 471142 ) on Thursday September 05, 2002 @10:58PM (#4204339) Homepage Journal
    No pun intended, but WordPerfect on some form of DOS sounds "Perfect" for the job. I believe that was a common word processor at the time that computer was made ;)

    You might also want to look for some really ancient versions of Word, if they'll have an easier time with that. I don't know, I haven't used either.

    It's possible to run linux on that type of hardware - I'm currently running Linux on my Pentium 90 with 16 MB of RAM. Go with an older version of Debian, like 2.1 or maybe 2.2.

    However, I can't think of any word processors on Linux that are easy and stable enough for someone without Linux experience to use. LyX is close, but you have to learn LyX first (it's so different from most word processors). Forget about running AbiWord, KWord, or especially OpenOffice on that kind of hardware. :)
    • It is a pentium not an early 386 :) No need for some antidiluvian software.

      Speaking from experience, 95 SR2 + Office 95/7 will run fine, and fit in a smaller space then that if need be.
      • Now that I think about it, yes, you are absolutely correct. Win95 (but probably not 98) and Office 95/97 would run perfectly on that hardware. That's probably the best choice for non-computer users.

        • Is this really an entire thread pushing non-Open Source apps & OSes on Slashdot? Or did I end up on Bizaro Slash?

          • Comment removed based on user account deletion

            • I still can't believe that people have problems running Mozilla and OOo on systems that are more powerful than mine.

              I run OOo 1.0 on the following systems :

              • 200 MHz PPro, 128 Mb RAM
              • 233 MHz PII, 96 Mb RAM

              I use these to write documents which I must export to .doc format and to create slideshows for courses on Linux. Yes, startup time is a little long, but I am now used to it, but working with it is no problem.

              Mozilla is a little bit slow in the tooth, and I would certainly not recommend it for slower systems than mine, but it performs fine for me.

    • My mom still owns and uses in her classroom a 286 with Lotus 123, WordPerfect, and Print Shop. Obsolete? Well, it goes from cold stop to ready to use in 60 seconds. My previous employer's Win2K IBM T20 laptop takes six minutes to do the same.

  • debian (Score:3, Informative)

    by rodentia ( 102779 ) on Thursday September 05, 2002 @10:58PM (#4204340)
    Linux will run like a dream on that thing, man. I am running debian w/ graphical environment on AMD K-5 100, 32M, 500M HD.

    Loverly.

  • Do your research (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Hard_Code ( 49548 ) on Thursday September 05, 2002 @11:01PM (#4204355)
    Really, it would do you good to spend just a few minutes researching the alternatives on google. While few operating systems will run as fast as you want it is entirely possible to run Linux or your choice of BSD with a GUI in that configuration. X should run just fine. There is also a tiny X implementation that will run just fine under low memory circumstances. I wouldn't even consider 40 MB of RAM "low memory" as far as Linux, and *BSD is concerned. "Low memory" is more like 4 or 8 MB. Of course with a little handiwork you can strip down the Linux or *BSD kernel to as small as you like. QNX and FreeDOS are other alternatives, but of course you won't get as much application support on those OSes (ok QNX is fairly sophisticated, but still AFAIK, it doesn't have anywhere near the apps that Linux does). Watch out though, OpenOffice is fairly hoggish.

    The post even comes off as a bit insulting, as many of us were using Linux+GUI way before 100 mhz + 40 MB was considered outdated. It is by no means something far fetched.

    Practical advice:

    * Stripped down Linux
    * FVWM or BlackBox or Aewm spawn of your choice

    • Re:Do your research (Score:3, Interesting)

      by joshuac ( 53492 )
      ---snip
      Practical advice:

      * Stripped down Linux
      * FVWM or BlackBox or Aewm spawn of your choice
      ---snip

      add (from the evil dark side)

      * Win95
      * Win98
      * NT 3.5x
      * NT 4

      All will run fine on this hardware.

      At my parents house I have a 486dx4/75 with 16MB of RAM running windows nt server, working as a dial on demand router between a wireless "symphony" (product made by Proxim) LAN to a dialup ISP (as well as hosting a small local postoffice). It's been in place and running for over 3 years now. Slak would/could not install on that proprietary POS Compaq Presario (known problem, some older compaq's of that era had a known incompatibility I found out about later), so out of desperation, I installed NT. Squeezing it onto the 180-something MB system partition was a challenge, and using the remaining space on the 210MB drive for the postoffice did not leave them with much room for large messages, but it works. Your P-100 with 40MB of RAM and 3GB (geez, what will you do with all of that?) of disk space is spacious in comparison.

      Why bother with QNX and work to support the odd video card/printer, when you could just install windows 98 and be done with it? Or for that matter, plenty of Linux distros will work fine (Mandrake for one will not; just the graphical _installer_ on 8.0 complains about resources at the slightest nudge; but there is always the text-mode installer).

      Otoh, if what you really looking for for your aunt and uncle is an oddball OS that will shutup any of their annoying friends silly enough to come over to help them with their computer, install OS/2 Warp 3. It will _fly_ on that machine, in fact you have a little too much RAM for that version of OS/2 to use optimally, (some RAM will be forced into disk cache duty only) and I have yet to see any equivalent (in functionality) to the presentation manager/object desktop combo anywhere else (Evolution may be much prettier, but not nearly as elegant IMO). Plus, OS/2 always has had great support for Lexmark printers.

      And you maintain the goal of using something which is definitely no longer mainstream.

    • Re:Do your research (Score:3, Informative)

      by rafa ( 491 )

      There are a lot of light apps one can run. I had a similar setup up until not so long ago. These are the apps that I found ran nicely on that hardware.

      • xwc - great little file manager, really fast
      • blackbox - as mentioned
      • dfm - for desktop icons, your relatives might like this app.
      • gkrellm - system monitor. It acatully feels faster if you can see the CPU go at it. Really. :)
      • xscreensaver
      • asmix - to set volume, dockapp
      • ascd - cd player, dockapp
      • some aterms
      • Abiword

    • I haven't seen this mentioned yet, but if you go the *nix route there's a decent window manager that is lightweight, and nicely configured right "out of the box". I haven't used it in some time -- but the project website suggests that development is still active...but check out the XFCE window manager.

      Check it out here [xfce.org].

      Its lightweight, and in the past, its run quite well on all of my old naff hardware. It borrows alot from Sun's CDE.

      Hope this helps

      --Turkey
      • XFce is still quite active, and will support GTK2 in the relatively near future. There are screenshots of various configs (CDE-like isn't the only option) at http://www.xfce.org, and my screenshot is here: http://www.monkeynoodle.org/Photos/screenshot.png/ view

        That's running some various Mozilla skins/themes (GTK, XFce, and Gkrellm), and xplanet for the auto-updating backdrop with weather maps showing a geosynchronous view from space of my house :-)

        It's especially nice for new users because you can put the apps they care about on the icon bar or its pop-up menus. It's also very snappy from a performance perspective -- in fact, my wife uses it on a 10Mbit xterm, and you'd never know you weren't at the host.

        On the larger subject of whether to use Windows or Linux on an old PC... I've tried Linux on various relatives in the past, and my advice is: if they don't ask for it, don't give it to them. My mother-in-law is a perfect example -- when I replaced her OE5/Word98/IE/Freecell machine with an Evolution/OpenOffice/Mozilla/AisleRiot machine, you'd probably think she was happy, right? Well, the transition from Word to OpenOffice was the show-stopper, because despite being shown a few times she couldn't make the leap from a W icon to a Seagull icon. That plus stupid webmasters who lock their sites to non-IE users with a browser-detection routine. I've had similar experiences with other relatives, but my wife is a happy Linux user because she's grokked the freedom issue.

        So if the user is interested in Linux for the freedom or performance or stability aspect, as some of my neighbors are, help them install OpenOffice and Mozilla on their Windows machines and then see what they think in a month. But if the user just asks for a machine and won't listen to the freedom argument, give them Windows or a Mac. Otherwise, they won't be motivated to attack the slightest of learning curves.

  • Linux all the way (Score:2, Interesting)

    by mfos.org ( 471768 )
    I've booted linux 2.4 on a 486 with 4 meg of ram and an 80 meg harddisk, didn't get X, but w/ 10 times the amount of ram and 40 times the disk space, you should be golden.

    If the video card gives you trouble, just use the generic VGA driver

    • The lowest thing I booted Linux on was a Toshiba laptop 386sx, 16 Mhz with only 3 Mb of RAM. I had to create a special boot diskette to be able to partition it first and add 5 Mb swap, before I could install Slackware on it.

      The lowest thing I ran X on was another 386sx with 16 Mb RAM and a Hercules card (yeah , b/w), 80 Meg HDD. I used it as an Xserver for my large system.

      The only thing with these systems is that even on the command line they are slow. I suspect it is the kernels, because in 1993 I already had installed Linux on such systems, and they did not seem slow at that time.

  • "My cat and her daughter, both completely unfamiliar with litter boxes, are looking to replace a broken backyard with something new. They'd like to either spend as few dollars as possible on a litter box, or replace the backyard. Silly me, I mentioned I had a spare box around. It's a Digital Equipment 'Tape Drive Carrier' 20inches with 17inches, and onboard folding of an unknown type. As this thing is going to be used for litter boxing, I need an cat litter that will work with my newly dusted-off CatLogic Z11 litter box cleaner. So what are my options? Will Tidy Cats handle the limited folding and cleaner? Is there a WYSIWYG solution for poopsiecat? Is there a chance in hell any distribution can give me entrophy? I've got a whopping three inch height in there. What can I do with it?"

  • hate to do this to you. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Neck_of_the_Woods ( 305788 ) on Thursday September 05, 2002 @11:12PM (#4204401) Journal
    If you do this, welcome to support hell. You will get calls why this does not work. That is not here...etc.

    If you want calls about how to get the *nix to work like windows by all means sign them up. I really would like to stress just droping win95 on it. Scream all you want but it is a small foot print, it is stable if your really only using for for word processing, and you not the "only well of knowledge" for that os.

    Just my views, I have only put a computer in about quite a few famialy/friends homes and linux in the long run always ends up kicking my ass. That is because they get hooked on the computer and they want to talk about it with frinds, share all the stupid shit that is not going to work on linux without some computer skills to get it to work.

    Linux and endless support for "my friends computer does this" how come I don't have the stuff he has...

    Install windows and the crash now and then with the virus that goes with it. Install linux and be the only person that can help them, and deal with the why does this not work like everyone else "I" know besides you that runs windows.

    Hard choice, make it wisely for your friends. There are cases for both, just depends which set of problems you are going to want to deal with.

    Good luck, and get use to being someones free tech support for the life of that computer. The linux biggots are going to eat me alive on this, but that just shows they are like a lot of people I know. They don't use the best tool for the job, they use the tool that they can wave like a badge of knowledge even if it was not the best choice.

    • I was thinking something similar but I would tell them to go to Walmart.com and get the bottom end Lindows machine. You get a new machine, it's faster, and plenty of people are using it so they should be able to get support.

      By contrast, Windows 95 is in end of life so it (and anything older like the non y2k compliant Win 3.1 somebody else suggested) isn't going to get fixed for any bugs found later, it's not particularly safe to put on the net if they decide to expand their computing horizons later and it's running on a slow, old machine which could start having hardware failures at any time.

      At today's prices ($299) a new machine just makes sense.

      • $299? Try $199

        800Mhz/10GB/128MB [walmart.com]

        • Funny, that wasn't there before. Oh well. I wouldn't recommend giving this machine because of the lack of floppy (splurge the $20 and add it). Thanks for supporting my argument.
    • I've thought about this a lot. And, I'll admit, you almost have a valid complaint. The thing is, there is one thing you can do with Linux that is difficult/impossible to do with Windows95/98: lock them out of it. If you're giving them a machine, hell, even if you're building them a machine, tell them it will do 1) web browsing, 2) word processing, and 3) CD playing. Disable everything else.

      Sadly, and even not-so-sadly, Linux is perfect for use as the single-function device that all CS professors dread. The good news is that if Linux catches on in this market, Windows won't have the chance to embed their OS with all it's DRM and licensing glory into every hardware device made.

      BTW, I have a friend who "supports" his girlfriend's XP box, and believe me, it's "kicking (his) ass".



      • Ho lord, I really really fell for him on that one. XP is not fun to hand hold with, more so if this is the first taste of computers for them.

        I really do agree with your point on the single function I was just trying to point on more than anything else, which I think I failed to do is that:

        #1. if you put linux on that machine, your the only person for help they can call. It is hard enough to get help with a computer, let alone if you pick an OS that is not the one everyone else has. You would be amazed how many people have at least a little knowledge with windows and are willing to help a greeny.

        #2. Everyone else has these cutsy little craptard things that your "person" is going to want to use as they get into computers. It is just human nature to want to fit it.

        #3. Which I agree with you on, is if you lock them out they have a very secure and robust machine for what they are doing. Stressing that is all they want to do.

        XP....sends chills down my spine now just thinking about my parents, grandparents, friends, and other extended members of my family who know what I do for a living and have me on speed dial.

    • Yeah (Score:3, Insightful)

      by flikx ( 191915 )

      In that same vein, just tell them to get a type-writer. You can find old 30kg models all over the place, and they get an intuitive interface, plenty of flexibility, and no hassles. If they want to be sophisticated, simply steer them in the direction of one of those overpriced 'word processor' typewriters from Brother. I heard they're only $900, and no computer skills are required.

    • Interesting to hear another's view on this. I've mentioned a few times that I set up Slackware on a refurbed bare Dell for my neophyte mother. Mostly she uses it for web-based email and browsing.

      Aside from the "how do I use the mouse" questions that are platform-independent, I certainly get a few questions about why she can't open this or that attachment. (Usually some Word or Excel document.)

      My feeling as the family's designated sysadmin was that I would rather have to sometimes say "Your computer can't do that. Tell the sender to reformat it as text and send it to you." rather than sometimes say "Sorry your computer is hosed. Looks like you shouldn't have opened that email from that person. I'll have to reinstall everything now." For one thing, it's way less work. Also, I've been able to remotely admin the machine, which is a huge timesaver.

      So far things are working out pretty well. As I said, the initial questions were mostly about how to use a computer, with some that were derived from Linux's shortcomings as a desktop. But things have been pretty quiet lately.

      I think a bigger worry I'd have is supporting old hardware. You never know when some IC or other component is going to flake out, or the BIOS battery runs out.

      Good luck!

  • OS/2 Warp 4 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by LordNimon ( 85072 ) on Thursday September 05, 2002 @11:18PM (#4204417)
    You can find a copy for cheap on eBay. It will run great on that machine, give you full networking, and it can run tons of Windows apps, as well as Mozilla, XFree86, and Star Office.

    In my experiencing, Warp 4 runs better in low memory systems (less than 64MB) than Linux + X does. I have a 40MB laptop that runs OS/2 great but Linux won't install on it.

    • In my experiencing, Warp 4 runs better in low memory systems (less than 64MB) than Linux + X does. I have a 40MB laptop that runs OS/2 great but Linux won't install on it.


      Out of interest, what linux distros have you tried? 40Mb is more than enough for most, except the heavier eye-candy ones (RH, SuSE and MDK spring to mind). A little slackware or debian should run just great with 40Mb.
      • Red Hat 7.3. Anything older than that, and my PCMCIA network card wouldn't have been supported.
      • You could even run heavier eye-candy distros if you kill uneeded services and run a lighter window manager. I personally like Blackbox [sourceforge.net] but there are many other options that would work just as well. This gives you some resources free in case you want to run stuff like Mozilla or something else that might want a little more ram, cpu time, etc.
    • OS/2 Warp has the best x86 optimisations of any OS. IIRC I read somewhere that the way system calls are implemented uses some x86 feature not used by cross-platform OSes.
      Has anyone heard or read something similar?
  • Apparently, Slashdot's advertisement scheduler has a sense of humor.

    Joe

  • You have fast machines (Score:2, Insightful)

    by mnmn ( 145599 )

    You sound like youre underestimating the power of your computers. I have for over a year collected 486 and pentium machines people throw away and used them on the network here. With the VERY cheap token ring cards and hubs available, I have a full lan almost for free.

    Use TWM with X, well maybe youll have to fork out some for the RAM. I could get by with 32mb RAM with the latest distro (debian or slackware) but had this pain waiting for the system to work until I upgraded to a VGA card with 2mb+ mem and 64mb ram. With this combination thing will run smoothly. I also set major software to be installed over a common NFS share, which altho gets slower than the HDD, the system can get by even with 256mb hdd, Still need more speed and have highly compatible vga cards?? use netbsd and older versions of xfree86!!

    • ...and older versions of xfree86!!

      I have actually found that the newer version of XFree86 (I'm using 4.2.99.1 from CVS) is faster than the older versions.

      As for another tidbit...I would recommend using Slackware. I run it on my old 486 laptop w/ 16MB of RAM using the vga driver for X.

      Back off...this sig is mine!!
      • another vote for slackware from this peanut gallery - my g/f's packard bell p90 (well, p75 clocked to p90) runs slackware 8 very well (machine has 72MB of RAM). slackware seems to kept away from bloat all these years. in contrast, i was totally amazed by the bloat evident when using redhat 7.3 (vs 6.2)(default install won't fit on 1GB?! wtf?). i'd suggest running X and icewm and Abiword or something. it should make for a very servicable machine.

  • Options (Score:2, Informative)

    by dJCL ( 183345 )
    Some people here have good ideas, some are just giving the party line.

    I use and setup equiptment like this all the time, I collect older hardware, and also you find this level of equiptment when dumpster diving, found 5 or 6 386 throu 586 mobo's the other night.

    There are really two options, the Microsoft solution or the unix solution.

    MS Win 3.1(1) will work fine on that hardware, it is generally above spec for the software. I run it on some slower 386 level stuff fine. For a P100 like you have, I'd suggest win95 or win98 with IE stripped out(win98Lite - look it up). I've been able to shoehorn 95 onto a 386 and 98 onto a lowend 486 and they ran ok(little programs that run in the config.sys that lie to programs and say your on a pentium!)

    As for WYSIWYG word processing - use a copy of Wordperfect, it was the standard at that time, the MS products were not that great. Wordperfect does not even require win3.1, it can run WYSIWYG in dos. Use DOS 6.2 not 6.22 that was one after they lost a fight and had to remove some stuff.

    The unix solutions are also not too bad. BSD or linux will run fine, just get rid of the useless extras, and use a simple window manager, nothing complex. That said, I use enlightenment on a P150 system with a ati mach32 2meg and it runs reasonably well.

    QNX is one I have been playing with for a little bit now, like the interface it has, really slick. But it can sometimes be a pain to configure if it did not detect things right. Once you find and understand the manual, things are OK. I don't know of any word processor for it, but I do know there is a wordpad equivalent.

    My suggestion after all that: Try the unicies first, they are cheaper and you will know if you like it. If you find usability is low, just dig up a couple of old MS and Novel(wordperfect) disks at a garage sale or something and install. That is what those programs were made for.

  • BeOS (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Try BeOS PE with Gobe (a free Office suite).
    • I tried to install Be personal edition on a P100 with 64 mega of ram. Tracker always craps out at startup. Maybe you know ehat I've done wrong.

      Also, where can one get goBe for free?
  • Really, this machine's more powerful than you need for word processing. My advice would be to track down wordperfect 5.1 and freedos, and install them.

    It's not wysiwyg, but that's not really much of a problem for most people.

    It's actually much EASIER in my experience for most people to use this sort of system. For the simple things most people do in word processors, you need to learn and memorize (or just write down) about 10 commands that are easily entered, you don't have to worry about stability, or the periodic reinstalls that windows seems to necessitate, and you don't end up trying to set up linux or something similar in a truly idiot-proof way.

    And hell, if you go that route, you could sell that overpowered machine and get an XT or something. :)
  • How about starting the search by looking at what software was available when the PC was considered current? You know the software will work OK on it because that's all there was at the time, and it won't really be taxing the machine.

    If you're looking to go the Linux/BSD/similar route, you can probably do fine starting with a base install that's more recent (as the core stuff hasn't gotten so heavy a P100 can't handle it fine), just with a stripped-down window manager (no KDE/Gnome), and applications you may want to recompile with optimizations and stripping out things you don't need.

  • Run what the OS that the computer came with... (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    As an owner of a old DEC i know the machine came with Win95. why don't you just restore then machine to the day you bought the box and be done with it. why pull out your hair with off the wall OS's and the like. what i am trying to say is, don't make your life my difficult than it needs to be. GOOD LUCK
  • I currently have a P.O.S. for my younger sister (who barely knows how to turn a PC on at 17...) to use that is only a p-133 with 32mb and a Trio gfx. It runs BeOS (I think 4.something) prety damn well. I want to upgrade it to Be5 but be's website just says that they are going out of business (http://www.beincorporated.com/.) Anyone know where I can getBE5?

    As for Word Processing, I recommend a program called gobePRODUCTIVE! (http://www.gobe.com) I use it on my (ack..)Windows(gag..) box in leiu of Office, and on the BE box. It's damn good and very powerful for how comparatively cheap it is. It's only $49.something on BeOS which I am sure you can get to work well, and it's well worth it. It can even do an almost perfect (I have noticed trouble with OffXP) conversions from .doc and does completely perfect conversions from .xls. That's all I have tried but it is very promising.

  • On "helping" your family... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by joto ( 134244 ) on Friday September 06, 2002 @01:36AM (#4204872)
    Do you want to continue helping them forever? There are some alternatives you can choose between to make life easier for yourself, and having been in that situation, here are some things you can do.
    1. Tell them you've tried your machine, and it doesn't work for you, but they are free to take it if they want. (There is nothing better you can do to avoid helping others, than to play an idiot. Unfortunately, it might be difficult to formulate this in a way that makes them try it out themselves before giving up...)
    2. Do exactly the opposite of helping them. Install QNX and a bunch of worthless applications on that box, but nothing that will help them type that stupid letter. Sooner or later, it's going to get through to them that you are in fact misleading them, and they will probably consider you an idiot, since they will probably not understand why their nephew is deliberately misleading them out of pure selfishness.
    3. Give them machine, Win98 install CD, Word install CD, and free phone support for one hour (yourself). Optionally, give them a book if you think it helps, but they are not going to read it. Hopefully, having done the install once themselves will make it easier for them if they get into trouble, but you may have to lie later to avoid helping them.
    4. Tell them that you will help them for a fee of $350/hour. You can of course help them with anything non-computer-related, but since this is your day-job anyway, doing it for free for friends and families later, is really annoying. I'm sure they'll at least halfway understand it.
    5. Tell them you tried the machine, and it didn't work anymore. Tell them that they will have to buy a new one, and that unfortunately you can't help them (sorry, but you are _so_ busy right now, with all the things at work). This might not make you feel well, but is generally the best option. They can understand that you can't help them, since you haven't got a machine anymore. They can understand that other people are busy. And busyness is always a better excuse then not wanting to.

  • Duh! WINDOWS 3.1 (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Umm... isn't this obvious? get hold of a copy of win3.1 for only a few dollars, then use write. It was what the machine was designed for all those years ago - it will still do the same now.
  • First of all, it costs 50 bucks to replace the ink cartridge in your Lexmark Z11. The Lexmark Z11s cost 50 dollars and come with ink. The Lexmark is totaled. I sort of keep a running tab of alternative word processors, and quite frankly, the best ones (appleworks, Nissus, TexEdit, to name three) are only available on the macintosh. Abiword, OpenOffice, and Star Office are all too bloated / buggy to be satisfying. KWord is nice, but will require KDE... which you really don't have the cpu for. The most interesting possibility which has been mentioned several times is BeOS with Gobe Productive. Gobe Productive is available for demo on windows, if you want to test it out, and is by the Clarisworks / Appleworks people (the office suite I most respect). And if all of this is too much, spend the 200 bucks to buy an eden from wallmart.com, and install mandrake. It will probably save you headaches in the long run.

  • NewDeal Office / GEOS (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Try NewDeal Office [breadbox.com] aka GEOS, Ensemble. Complete GUI and office type applications. Great for word processing, easy to use. USD$99

    Hardware Requirements

    * Minimum 386 IBM compatible computer or better
    * 640k minimum RAM (2-4Mb or more recommended)
    * 15Mb free hard disk space
    * EGA, VGA, Super VGA
    * Mouse (optional/recommended)

  • NetBSD (http://www.netbsd.org/) runs like a dream on older hardware - I've had it running on an 8Mb 486DX2/66, and once the kernel was recompiled (on a nippier machine I might add), it worked quite smoothly.

    SIAG Office (http://www.siag.nu/) relies on the Athena libraries - but the much more attractive NeXTstep themed ones rather than the ugly originals. NeXTaw is maintained by the SIAG Office author, so it's not going to suffer the same bitrot as other Athena based toolkits. This means none of the overhead associated with Abiword or Staroffice and their considerable dependencies - all in all, it's a neat software package.

    Chris
  • Lots of people have pointed out that Linux, *BSD, QNX, FreeDOS et al. will work fine on such a machine, and for most I can tell from experience that they do.

    However, a painful point to consider is that when using Windows 95, IE4 and Word 97 also run fine on such machines, whereas Mozilla and OpenOffice (although great software, I use both every day) absolutely suck rocks as far as resource efficiency is concerned.

    These applications are not usable on anything lower than a 300Mhz Celeron with 64Mb RAM (128 for OpenOffice not to feel too sluggish; StarOffice 5 is a little better here).

    In the browser area, Opera may be a good alternative, but I don't see one for word processing.

    It would have been great if Corel would still sell the SCO version of the (character mode) WordPerfect 5.1; it would probably run fine on Linux with iBCS, and together with Lynx you could even make a 4Mb 486/25 with a text-only video adapter useful this way.
    • There are some productivity apps on linux that are fairly light on the resources. The word processor that I would recommend is Abiword. It doesn't support things like tables, but considering the requirements I don't think they'll be missed.

      Somebody else already mentioned Siag office.

  • If you can find a copy of OS/2 Warp version 4 on eBay or somewhere.

    You can still get StarOffice for OS/2 (version 5.1) from a a helpful enthusiast, and your video and printer drivers will be easy to find at http://service.software.ibm.com/os2ddpak/html

    If you want to spend money for supported OS/2 (you probably don't) then there's www.ecomstation.com.

    Your P100 with 40 megs of RAM will happily run Lotus SmartSuite too.

  • I have installed Slackware 8.1 a Cyrix K5 133 MHz, 40 MB PC100 ram (8 + 32), 1080MB HD, Win 95 OSR2 preinstalled. The integrated video is an S3 Trio64, and XFree86 recognizes it just fine. The machines is five years old this past August (ancient in PC years). For a printer, it has a Deskjet 632, which seems to work fine.

    I used Gnu Parted to shrink the existing Fat32 partition, added an ext3 root and 80MB swap space (for a total of 120MB virtual memeory).

    From slack, get the following packages:

    a/ - all packages
    n/ - tcpip1, tcpip2 and ppp, not inetd or any other servers
    x/ - xfree86, xfree86-fonts-scale, xfree86-fonts-misc (thats it)
    xap/ - fvwm2, mozilla (yes, mozilla on a 133!)
    ap/ - sudo (!), hpijs and ghostscript for printing,
    l/ - as needed when programs complain about missing libs
    d/ - nada (glibc devel package is > 100MB)

    I set up pppd to start in demand dialing mode (15 mins idle time) at boot time. I set up sudo to let all users "killall -HUP pppd", reboot, and shutdown. Then I added the same three commands to the window mgr config.

    The machine is primarily a web and email box, and it works well for that. Abiword (and the rest of Gnome and KDE) is on the Slackware iso, but I haven't tried it out yet.

  • Available from Breadbox Computing [breadbox.com]. (They call it New Deal Office 2000 [breadbox.com].)

    It's an operating systemish thing that runs on top of DOS. What you get is a complete Windows-like operating environment with virtual memory, long filenames, threads, outline fonts, WYSIWYG word processor, drawing package, database, spreadsheet, loads of applications, basic web browser, email, PPP, etc. It runs in bugger all memory. Minimum useful spec is a 386 with 4MB and 20MB or so of hard disk space, but it'll run on a 286 and up with 640kB or RAM (but it won't be pleasant). All the applications can deal with documents too big to fit in memory.

    It is, unfortunately, payware. But it's 100 USD, it's a complete integrated solution containing everything from high-level apps to printer drivers, it's easy to use --- the user interfaces are all customisable; for experts you can rearrange the toolbars, for newbies you can turn most of the buttons and menus off to make something dead simple --- it's an excellent choice for low-end systems. It'll run like a storm on your machine.

    (I did my fourth-year project writeup at university on it. 300 pages in a single document. No problem whatsoever. The built-in word processor is a hell of a lot more flexible and powerful than a lot of commercial products I've seen. For ease of use it beats Word into a cocked hat, and it's got most of the useful features --- frame-based text flowing, built-in vector drawing tools, built-in bitmap drawing tools, rotatable & transformable & editable text, wrapping text around graphics, spelling checker and thesaurus, hierarchical paragraph styles...)

    You will have to support them, including installing it on the empty machine. However, they'll need much less support than Windows or, heaven forbid, Unix will. It won't run Windows apps, which is a plus. It will run third-party GEOS apps, but you probably don't want them to.

    It's ideally suited for a turnkey system, which I think is what you want here.

  • LinuxJournal article (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6169
  • YeahWrite [yeahwrite.com] is very small ( 1Mb), very fast, runs under everything from Win 3.1 on up. It probably does everything your relatives want, though it isn't completely full featured. It is also very intuitive to use; it automatically saves your files for you, opens the last document you used. It organizes documents around file folders and drawers.

    Drawbacks include only one font per document, although is does support various font sizes for headings and titles. The program does not support hyphenation, endnotes, footnotes, a table of contents or an index. A document can have only one margin setting. But, I'd bet your relatives probably don't need these. There is a full spelling check, thesaurus,etc.

    I've used YeahWrite for kids as they don't have to remember to save the document (a big problem). It also takes almost no instruction.

    You can download the free version and try it, you can enable the full version for 15 days, and it's only $29 to buy anyway.

    Yeahwrite was written by former WordPerfect programmers under Pete Peterson, one of the founders of WP.
  • I've gota P100 laptop, that is currently running Doze '98 on it. I've played with Linux, and OS/2 on it, but nothing gets the battery time out of it that the original Windows '95 install or the '98 install does. ('95 with the original laptop drivers was best for battery, but wouldn't load IE 6, so I upgraded to '98 on it)

    40MB ram, 800MB hard drive, P100. Runs pretty well.

    Linux and OS/2 also performed very well on it,but the battery time in both were awful.
  • I'm doing something similar with my mother-in-laws old computer, which is a Packard Bell with almost the same specs. I upgraded the RAM to 64M, since the graphical installs on most modern distros really want to have that much. Yeah you can get around that, but it can be a little painful. I recommend you do the same, as FPM/EDO prices are pretty low right now. Things should work without doing that, but it will likely make your life a little easier. Actually, my biggest roadblock was the broken CD-ROM drive, which would lock up any boot disk that tried to load drivers for it.

    Also, 3GB is an infinite amount of space for what you are planning to do. My full SuSE 8.0 install on my desktop at home is barely over 3GB, and it's about as bloated as a Linux install can be, as I figured I'd start with everything and slowly par it down to what I want.

    QNX would be almost lost on a drive that big. It's designed for embedded systems, and in that world a system like yours is quite luxurious. The QNX4 demo fits on a 1.44M floppy. I actually have several systems running QNX4 within spitting distance at the moment, and none of them have hardware significantly different from yours, and they are quite responsive (they'd better be, that's what real-time is all about after all). They're single-board "industrial" computers, all with Pentium 90s or 100s, embedded VGA, and anywhere from 32M to 128M RAM, depending on their specific purpose. With a full QNX install, plus all of my companies proprietary software, plus the usual cruft (saved log files and core dumps, system upgrade sources, etc) only one of them is managing to use up more than 500M of disk space. I haven't tried Neutrino yet, but I'd be surprised if it were much more demanding.

    It's a little hard to find info about 3rd party apps for QNX, so I don't know what kind of word processing apps might be available, but hey, it'll run Quake3 and Unreal Tournament, and what more do you really want? ;-P

    The real bad news is that the Lexmark Z11 is not listed on their supported hardware page. There are a ton of Epsons and Cannons listed, though, so you may be able to swap with someone who has one of those. That could be an issue for Linux as well. Lexmark has put out Linux drivers for most of their newer printers, and I think the Z11 is new enough to be one of them, but they don't include the drivers on the install disk and they make them difficult to find on their website (unless you start at the Linux driver page, but only the printer setup wizard in YaST seems to know where that is).

    Anyway, good luck. You shouldn't have too much difficulty, but I do recommend a RAM upgrade if you've got a few extra bucks.

  • Unless you want to spend 20 hours per week fixing this computer every time they hose it up, get them a typewriter. Never give a computer to or build a computer for reletives, unless you want them to call with technical questions while you try to eat, sleep, or make love to your wife. They will make you wish you had never heard of computers. Don't even get me started on all the virus hoaxes and sick kid letters they will email you by the dozen once they discover the net. Be afraid! Be very afraid!
  • If you can find an old copy of framework around for sale, it would do the job.

    The first ( only?? ) useful, truly **integrated** office suite. The word processor module is WYSIWYG as you 'need'.

    Ran at a decent speed even on a 486.

    Its still being developed, but its a bit pricy for the latest version...
    • StarOffice 5.x was integrated. To the point of being scary. StarOffice & OpenOffice 6.x aren't as tightly integrated, I hear.

      In 5.x, if you wanted to draw a picture in StarWriter, it used the StarDraw program within writer to do it. If you wanted a table in your email, it used the spreadsheet program to do it.

      M$ Office isn't that tightly integrated; you want a table in Word, it uses a tables module that has nothing the power of Excel. Drawing capabilities are rudimentary. OK, so you can use Word as the editor for Outlook, but Outlook has other problems (IMAP support sucks the big fire hose, for ex.).

      IMHO, the best DOS wp ever written was WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS. The current Win versions are better than Word, I think.
      • framework was an old 'suite' put out by ashton tate (well, fw3 was sold by them, at any rate). same people who were selling dbase back in the day.

        total DOS application. pretty fast, though. and, as was previously mentioned, completely integrated. not a bad text editor. i'd think the only downside would be the lack of printer support.

  • ... onboard video of an unknown type.

    If the references to S3refresh.exe here [compaq.com] are anything to go by, your machine probably has an S3 8xx video chip (my guess is that it's an 805). XFree 4.2 doesn't support those [xfree86.org] (yet), so you'd need 3.x if you want to run Linux/*BSD with X on it.

  • My grandmother had a similar situation.

    So I put MS-DOS 6.2 on it, loaded up WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS. WP6 is WYSIWYG and has its own graphics, mouse, and printer drivers.

    Set it up so when she turned it on, it would automatically go into WP.

    Sweet thing about WP is it's incredibly customizable. I allowed my Grandma access to two shortcut keys: F2 printed, F3 quit. (Well, really what it did was to run a macro that would save and quit so I could recover the file if needed.) There were no menus, the alt key did nothing. Anything with the remote possibility of confusing her was removed. Of course, I did leave access to Shift+F1 (Setup) but I didn't tell her that.

    You might have trouble getting a Lexmark Z11 to print from WP6, but you can try some of the drivers [corel.com] on Corel's [corel.com] support [corel.com] site.

    You know, WordPerfect gives you the power to do everything, including limit that power to do almost nothing. I use WP10 now, I hate M$ Word.

    As for OS, I've successfully run WP6/DOS in graphical mode under dosemu in Linux on a 486DX2/66. It was slow, but it worked! I think it should run under just about any free dos version.
  • Seriously, this combination should fly on the system you're describing, and there IS a y2k patch available for win3.1 - run a search on google for it. If you install Calmira (calmira.org), it looks and feels very much like win95, is reasonably stable, and can run lots of old win3.1 browsers and word processors - tucows can help you with this. I suggest running DR-DOS win win 3.1, but I guess that MS thingie will do in a pinch. You'll never have this be a gaming box, but for what you need, it should be fine - the OS will take up well under 40 megs of hard drive space, and 4 megs of ram is plenty for win3.1, let alone 40.
  • Since you were talking about QNX, you seem to at least not be hostile to the idea of running a UNIX-like operating system. I can assure you that running Linux (or a BSD-flavor) on such a box is entirely possible. 3 GB is an enormous amount of HD space, and 40 MB core doesn't sound bad either. I am running Slackware 8.1 on a 486DX2/66 with 28 MB RAM and 1 GB hard drive, and it works just great. Of course you can't expect to run GNOME or OpenOffice on such a box, but WindowMaker (or icewm if you'd like to make it look like Windows) and AbiWord do the trick for me. And AbiWord has reasonably good compatibility with the leading word processor, something that cannot be said of WordPerfect on DOS, which is something I've seen suggested. Of course, DOS works, too, insofar as DOS ever worked at all...
  • First, I'd like to thank everyone for replying. This seemed to get a lot of answers for an article that my submission history says was rejected. I had no idea that it was being posted until a friend pointed it out today, long after anyone saw it. So, I figure my post now is pretty pointless but it'll at least make me feel better.

    A couple of the caveats to this entire process that I didn't get to put in the intro are rather limiting. The first one is the fact I have absolutely no money, and neither do my family (an aunt and uncle in this case). They -will- be buying a new computer in a few months, but any investment over fifty bucks is probably out of the question. This is largely a temporary situation, unless I somehow get something on there that gives them no hassle at all. The next one is that they're totally and utterly religious. If they even get a hint that anything isn't legal software-wise, they'll tell me I'll burn in hell, because God knows I did something wrong.

    Since I'm broke, and they're broke, I'm stuck with what I have. I'll try and address some of the ideas I saw posted to the thread, just to make things clear. Just in case.

    1: I got the machine used, for free. No software, no nothing. So I'm limited to Win98:SE and anything I can download.

    2: FreeDOS would be great. But I can't get WordPerfect. Bleah.

    3: I have no problems with giving them a locked-down Linux. I'd probably set it up to be so limited they couldn't get any more than a solitaire game and a word processor. They're using it to replace an old, broken word processor, and not really expecting to get a computer out of it. Eventually they will get a new system, probably an eMachines.

    4: The printer will very likely be replaced if I can find an OS that'll support the new one. QNX is so far the frontrunner, but if I can find BeOS that'd overtake.

    Again, I just want to thank folks for replying. Sorry I didn't notice before.

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