9 Jul
2003
9 Jul
'03
12:49 p.m.
It was thus said that the Great =?iso-8859-1?q?Jules=20Richardson?= once stated:
Ahh, been there though. I did run Linux on this very same laptop for a while -
I believe it was AbiWord I used as a basic GUI-based wordprocessor for my
scribbles.
At the time, one problem was the lack of CDROM drive on the machine for getting
any large software onto it. The only parallel-port drive I had access to was a
Microsolutions Backpack, and no matter what I tried it refused to work with
Linux. No problems there under DOS / Win311.
Heh. I ran into this a few years ago when I received a laptop (486, 4M
RAM, 120M harddrive):
http://boston.conman.org/1999/12/13.4
http://boston.conman.org/1999/12/14.1-15.1
http://boston.conman.org/2000/01/06
It took several days, but I was able to get Linux (a drastically
lobotomized installation of RedHat 5.2) onto the laptop. I think the entire
process went something like:
boot laptop with Tom's Rootboot disk. It barely ran in 4M of RAM
and about the only tools I had on *that* system were bash, dd and fdisk. I
also had a full Linux installation on another system. Generally, I made
disk images on the primary Linux system, tarred and compressed them onto a
floppy, then untarred, uncompressed and dd'ed on the laptop. Rince.
Lather. Repeat. For the better part of a day.
Windows
3.11
1. Replace Windows with an operating system. E.g. Linux or NetBSD.
(Especially the later runs very well on older hardware with non-GHz CPUs
and only a few MB RAM.)
You may skip this step if you are not willing to wrap your head around
Unix. Second problem was one of performance - the linux
distributions that were
around a couple of years ago tended to be aimed at slightly faster hardware. I
do still have old distributions lying around back to around 1994 or so (I
remember the days of SLS on 50 or so floppies - it was always guaranteed *one*
of the disks would be dead, usually near the end of the pile :) but then I'd
have all sorts of compatibility problems with any modern software. Alternately
I could trim down a more modern version of Linux - but that's a lot of effort
for something that just gets used for casual note-taking now and then.
Heh, that is if you can still find an older Linux distribution that's
installable. The reason I went the route I did was that RedHat 5.2 required
16M RAM just for the install, and the *oldest* Slackware version required 8M
RAM.
Third problem is also performance-related, and down to
the time it takes Linux
- or any modern MS operating system - to start up and shut down. If I just want
to spend a couple of minutes typing some notes, I don't want to be taking the
same length of time waiting for the machine to boot and then shut down again at
the end. With DOS / Win311 the startup and shutdown is extremely quick.
Well, clean up the boot-time scripts and you can cut the boot time down
tremendously.
Maybe there's a version of NetBSD that gets round
the second problem, but I bet
it still takes a lot longer than DOS/Windows does to boot and shut down.
True, you can just shut the machine down under DOS while you have to shut
down a Unix system---although again, if you clean up the boot-time scripts
you can cut that time to a minimum.
-spc (Been there, done that, probably won't do it again 8-)