On 1/8/2019 12:13 PM, Thomas Vetere wrote:

Hello FreeDOS community,

I have an old IBM Thinkpad 600e that I am trying to refurbish for fun. With a Pentium 2 processor and 256 MB of RAM, I am considering using FreeDOS. I would like for this computer to be able to connect to the Internet via Wifi, but after browsing the FreeDOS wiki pages, I saw that FreeDOS Wifi only supports WEP, which is now outdated and not safe. My question is that will there be any plans to support something like WPA2 on FreeDOS?

Not likely. You need to remember that DOS was around well before there was any Internet. So there is only minimal support specially for wireless networking. I am not aware that there is any "FreeDOS WiFi", so you might have to check with with whatever author has created the WiFi driver, beside that there is fairly limited to no support for up to date web technologies.

My other question relates to a Graphical Interface. I did some research and found OpenGEM as the most popular graphical interface to put over FreeDOS. However, the Thinkpad 600e supports 24-bit color and OpenGEM is only 16-bit color. I was wondering if there were any more sophisticated graphical interfaces for FreeDOS that are 24-bit color.

Short answer: No. OpenGEM would be as good as it gets. There used to be a few attempts to create "a new and shiny ultimate GUI" for DOS in the past, but I don't think that any of them got really anywhere.

Honestly, if you want to use that laptop for web browsing, you're better off trying to install a Linux distro that still works with such old hardware, and if you find one, you might have the very same issues of finding up to date browser and WiFi drivers for that one. The oldest one that I ever got to run with wireless (and only 16bit color IIRC) was an old Pentium 4M based HP with 256MB of RAM. A couple of classes above what you are trying to utilize. Until that one died by heatstroke a year ago, I was using Q4OS (https://q4os.org/) on it, which was kind of usable. antiX s**ked, didn't around anymore to try Linux Lite (https://www.linuxliteos.com/index.html), though I heard from some reliable folks that it would work quite nicely on older hardware as well.

Ralf



---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus
_______________________________________________
Freedos-user mailing list
Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user

Reply via email to