Best OS for an IBM Butterfly (was: Any ideas on how to clear a BIOS password on a Thinkpad 701C?)

2008/7/25 madodel <madodel at ptdprolog.net>: Just FYI... I did get Warp 3 working on my Butterfly. I have a SCSI CD-ROM for mine with a PCMCIA SCSI host adaptor; the OS/2 setup disks couldn't see this. I do have a floppy drive, though. So what I did was pull the HD, connect it to a desktop machine, and copy the installation CD to a folder of the same pathname on the HD. The ideal is to have a boot drive, then another partition with the install files on - that way, it /thinks/ it's looking at a CD drive that is [boot drive+1]. I think the way mine was set up was that I had a smallish FAT16 C drive with Win95OSR2 on it, then a logical drive for OS/2, then a 2GB FAT16 data drive to share between them. You need to keep C: in FAT16; the suspend/resume code is part of the BIOS and it reads/writes FAT16 directly, without using an OS. If you use any other filesystem, the BIOS can't read it and you lose suspend/resume. I think it whinges at you each boot, too. This is some 10y ago now - I couldn't swear to it being Warp 3. I think it was. IIRC, it worked OK - it found the PCMCIA slots, it understood power management and sound. However, I never got the screen working. It's only a VGA-res screen but it should run in 32K colours, maybe even truecolour, and it should be able to drive an external monitor at 1024x768 or maybe even 1280x1024. However I could never get OS/2 to recognise the chipset, which is some kind of Cirrus Logic one I also tried Linux on mine. Debian was, as ever, a battle, but it did run. SuSE worked fine but was sluggish and barely fit on my ~700M drive. I also ran Win98SE, NT4 and Windows 2000. I cut down Win98 *hard* with 98Lite, removing anything that wasn't absolutely essential, such as Internet Explorer & all the other Internet tools, but it was still notably slower than Win95. A pain since I had to use Laplink to get it on there and it was a slow process. NT4 worked fine and drove both PCMCIA slots, but it can't do plug&play in any useful way and has no power management, so it's not ideal. Win2K worked amazingly well, considering, but was e-x-t-r-e-m-e-l-y slow. I got power management & PnP, but it was unusable. (FWIW, my Butterfly has 40MB RAM, an unofficial upgrade and the max its planar can recognise. I also replaced its HD with first a 700MB and then a 4GB one. The BIOS displayed this as something like a D92MB drive, lapsing into hex as it didn't expect more than 3 digits, but it worked fine, including suspend-to-disk.) In my experience - which was fairly considerable; this was my main notebook from about 1996 to 2000 or 2001 - Win95B is the best OS for the Butterfly. Performance is good, all the hardware works fine, battery life is decent as power management works, and it's easy to get working. There's a few updates to apply - WinSock 2, DUN 1.3, stuff like that - but it's easy enough to get working. You can keep C: small and efficient - <512MB - and have a nice big FAT32 D: for apps and data. IE5.5 works well but Opera was for most purposes better. Suitable apps are MS Office 95, with the 97 import filters, Acrobat 4 or 5, some lightweight email client - maybe Pegasus or Eudora; I used Ameol (www.ameol.com) - and so on. It even has a good stab at running Doom! The main limitations of W95 are actually fairly few. Don't press it hard and it's quite stable. It can only understand 4 IP addresses; I had a NIC and a modem card, plus the internal modem, and also ran the AOL client for international dial-up, and that maxed out my available IPs. (This is why I tried W98, which does not have this limit, but 98 was too much for a 40MB 486.) W95's PnP is flakey; it took me a *lot* of fiddling to find stable combinations of 2 PCMCIA cards and I had to apply various patches and updates concerning the PCMCIA controller chip to get it working. It was often a case of power down, insert 1 specific card in 1 specific slot, power up, then insert 2nd specific card in 2nd specific slot, that sort of thing. In the end, though, I had it working stably and reliably with either 56K dial-up+SCSI or NIC+SCSI, but it was too much hassle for daily use so I mainly just used a single card at a time. It's a *lot* easier to get Win95 running than OS/2, which was a battle, as it all too often is. I plan to resurrect the machine with a new battery, replace its crashed 4GB hard disk (a large heavy book fell on the machine when it was running; the HD died, the laptop was fine) with a CF card in an adaptor, and try to bring it back to life. I may have another bash at OS/2 - it would feel artistically /right/ to run an IBM OS on this classic IBM machine. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508