8 Dec
2007
8 Dec
'07
9:30 p.m.
On Saturday 08 December 2007 14:13, Liam Proven wrote:
On 06/12/2007, Roy J. Tellason <rtellason at
verizon.net> wrote:
Not too likely on that box...
I tend to run a GUI on one box, and leave the rest of them in textmode.
Right now that's a server and a firewall/router but this other huge box just
arrived here yesterday and that's gonna be another server, and I need to
build another workstation.
On Thursday 06 December 2007 12:53, Chuck Guzis
wrote:
> On 6 Dec 2007 at 1:52, Roy J. Tellason wrote:
> > I'd originally planned to put OS/2 in this box. Now I'm lots less
> > enthused about that OS than I was at one time, so I dunno what I'm
> > gonna do with it. Thoughts on this?
Depends what you want to do, or be able to do, with it, obviously!
Do you want a GUI OS? Do you want Internet access?
Networked with the rest of what I have here will do. :-)
Got plenty of 3c509 cards to deal with that. Even some with boot roms on
them...
Do you want productivity apps?
I'm not sure what you mean there. Office-type stuff? Nah.
It's a bit low-spec for a modern Linux distro. You
could try some
low-end distros, like DamnSmallLinux, Puppy, or VectorLinux. I've also
heard good comments of SaxenOS & Crux on low-end PCs, but I've not
tried them myself yet.
It would run NetBSD pretty nicely, but then, the same is probably true
of some toasters.
Heh.
I may use it for playing with smaller distros, though mostly they seem to
want to boot into some sort of a graphics mode and impress you with their
eye-candy.
One that might suit it quite well would be Minix 3.
Never played with
that yet myself.
Never played with any of them, and didn't know there was a v3 out there.
It might run BeOS, especially with a 5x86 chip in
there. BeOS Max is a
good, freely-available BeOS distro. Mainly intended for Pentium-class
systems, though.
Well, I have a bunch of those around too and assorted cases I could stuff 'em
into if I ever got the desire...
FreeDOS or DR-DOS plus OpenGEM would run very well;
indeed, it's quite
high-spec for that.
I think I looked at DR-DOS once, don't they run some oddball sort of
networking in there?
For a more modern, but commercial, DOS GUI,
there's Geos, AKA
GeoWorks, now known as Breadbox Ensemble. Again, it costs, but you can
assemble a fairly complete little system from various free demos and
things that have been put out there.
http://www.breadbox.com/
Hm, I didn't know that was still around.
(I think others have suggested something akin to
Concurrent DOS. IMS'
Real32 was the last supported descendant of that, I think, but it's
primarily a multiuser thing so not of great interest on a standalone
box - it just looks like MS-DOS.)
Or just plain old DOS, together with DesqView, or, if you want
something cool and exotic, DesqView/X.
I ran dos/dv on a different box, also with a 5x86/133 chip, for a really
long time, and that was in fact the last box that ran my BBS, which shut
down for the last time in October of 2005 or thereabouts. Never played with
dv/x, though. If I could access the BBS stuff I think I remember seeing
something in there about where one could snag a copy of that.
That might be both fun and quite productive couple
with some of the
last-generation, high-end DOS apps, like MS Word 5.5 (available free
from MS and so downloadable, as they gave it away rather than issue
Y2K patches for Word for DOS.)
Got a whole package here someplace that's WP6 for dos, which I think I'd
prefer, maybe. Though I do recall some of those real early versions of Word
(whatever one it was that ran on XT-class hardware) that would actually show
things like bold and italics on screen. But a machine for WP? I don't do
that much of it.
I'd like to try WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS, which had
a full GUI, but
I've been looking for a copy for years with no joy.
Hmm. :-)
For dos? I don't think so, or at least don't remember that being in there,
though it was menu-driven by comparison with the funky key stuff that you had
to deal with in 5.1. OTOH, my brother at one point had at least 3 copies of
WP6 for windoze (presumably 3.1 at the time?) and it may have been that one
you were thinking of? I'm sure I have that whole package someplace, anyhow,
if I run across it I could look.
It was unusably slow at the time, but on a more recent
PC like a fast 486,
it should fly along. There was also a full-GUI graphical spreadsheet version
of one of the major spreadsheets, but I don't remember details now. I
think it might have been Borland Quattro or QuattroPro 5 or so for DOS.
I actually used multiplan under dos, until that machine died. Not all that
much was in there, and at this point if I really need to do spreadsheet-type
stuff I'll use open office. Not that I see a need for GUI in that type of
app, either.
If you can get a supported TCP/IP stack running on
DOS, there *are* some DOS
web browsers, such as Arachne and Lineo's WebSpyder. I'm not sure about
email programs, though.
I've heard of the first one, not the second. And I had a fair collection of
stuff for all sorts of functions. Crynwr (sp?) drivers for one thing,
though that stuff didn't get along well with dv. And a couple of different
ftp clients. I had one heck of a collection of assorted utilities I picked
up over time, probably still do someplace, in some backup copy. I also ran
a UUCP gateway that would call out from time to time to a local system I had
a login on, and exchange email traffic, and then gate things to
fidonet-type messages.
Bung in a SCSI card and a couple of old SCSI disks,
make it into a
NetWare server? There was a freely-available 2-user version of Netware
4.1, and that can be patched up to date with free service packs,
making it fully W2K compliant and so on.
Ok, do-able but why would I want to run Netware?
If you want to try a modern, networking-enabled OS/2,
there's
Serenity's eComStation. Expensive, though. There's a free demo live
CD, but it's not installable.
Hm.
If you fancy something unusual, which IME doesn't
work well in VMs on
modern PCs, you could try the DEC-like TSX-32, which is sort of
aesthetically appropriate - it's a sort of PDP-like OS for the PC.
http://www.sandh.com/tsx32.htm
A bit on the spendy side, certainly more than I can afford to spend on an old
machine to fool around with.
Also on a DEC theme, there's FreeVMS, but I
don't think they have any
downloads yet.
http://www.freevms.org/
Some, but also some very interesting links from there too. Bookmarked! :-)
Somewhere lost in a cupboard I have an ancient 386
notebook PC, whose
80MB hard disk has DOS (DR-DOS 7 with QEMM) coupled to a choice of
about 4 GUIs, a range of productivity apps, and also dual-boots with
Pygmy Linux giving me TCP/IP through a parallel port Ethernet adaptor
and thus very basic Web access with Links. All this in 80MB and it's
about one-third full. I think it has WordPerfect 5.1, Word 5.5, a
spreadsheet of some kind, plus a selection of DesqView, OpenGEM,
ViewMAX and GeoWorks Ensemble. It was a real nostalgia-fest putting it
together. It has the Microsoft free DOS network stack, too, with
TCP/IP, but it can't actually talk to any modern Windows machine. Just
don't ask me to get it to print...
Hehe. Sounds like a fun box to play with, all right. That reminds me of
a "lunchbox" style machine I almost snagged a while back, probably pretty
similar in terms of what the hardware is capable of.
The first incarnation of my firewall/router used an 80M drive as well, and I
had plenty of room left over on that, too. And that wasn't using anything
special, just plain old Slackware, I was just real choosy about what
packages I let it install.
Probably I'll be working up another "workstation" here next, so I can stop
using this laptop. The keyboard quit some time back anyhow, and the
pointing device always was flaky, I'm just not sure how I'm going to feel
staring at a monitor screen instead of this display. And then get that
second file server going here. That box has two CPUs in it, enough room for
plenty of drives so I can play a bit with this RAID card I have here, and
get to know some more aspects of the software. I can see how easy it would
be to set up other, more specialized boxes for various purposes like fax
server, print server, and so forth but I really don't see a need for any of
that here on this small home LAN just yet...
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin