On 8-01-19 23:15, Ralf Quint wrote:
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that FreeDOS Wifi only supports WEP, which is now outdated and not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.
If you want run DOS applciations you could consider installing OS/2
which has DOS and Windows 3.1 build in. A company exists that developes
and sells an updated OS/2 version called ArcaOS in Arca Noae LLC.
But I am very much afraid that the browser that is included (Firefox) is
way to heavy for a Thinkpad 600E (www.arcanoae.com).
But its a commercial product so a Linux distribition might be a better pick.
Roderick
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