On Mon, Mar 23, 2020 at 11:52 PM <mich...@robinson-west.com> wrote: > > Just a thought, some of us have old computers that we want to run freedos on. > Running Linux on a Pentium 4 and trying to run Dosbox on top of that is going > to be pretty have for that machine.
I run an Android port of DOSbox on an older and less powerful tablet. It works fine, and supports a few old character mode DOS apps.(like the VDE WordStar clone editor) and games (like DOS ports on Unix Larn and VMS Empire). It's a tickle to get a working DOS command line on an Android tablet, though you really need an external KB, and you really need to run either FreeDOS's COMMAND.COM implementation or 4DOS. The version of command bundled with DOSbox implements just enough to let you type th4e name of the game you want to play and launch it. > Linux won't run on a 286 or XT by the way. *Unix* didn't run on a 286. There were a couple of attempts (including one from AT&T) that died horribly due to lack of HW memory management. It only became practical when the 386 was in common use. I still own an AT&T 3B1, a single user Unix workstation designed by Convergent Technologies and sold by AT&T. It has a *10mhz* Motorola 68010 CPU - the first 680X0 CPU with HW memory management- and can boot and run AT&T Unix System V R2 in "1MB* RAM. Give it more and it flies. A client of the systems house I used to work for had one running a custom distribution management application, and supporting four terminals and a printer. Worked fine. > Modern Linux distributions, don't expect them to work with less than a 1 Ghz > processor with at least 1 gig of ram. That depends on your expectations. I have an ancient Fujitsu p2110 notebook that was a pass along from a friend who upgraded but didn't want to throw it out. It had a <1ghz Transmeta Crusoe CPU, which was an early attempt at power saving, and Transmeta is now mostly remembered as Linus Torvalds' first employer when he emigrated to the states. It had a whopping *256MB* of RAM, and the Crusoe CPU grabbed 16MB off the top for code morphing. The person who passed it on said it was "Slow, slow, SLOW". No surprise - it came with WindowsXP SP2, and took *** minutes to simply *boot*, and a lot more to do anything once up. WinXP wants 512MB *minimum* to think about working. On the p2110, it did a good job of emulating mainframe "death by thrashing". Repartition, reformat, set it up to quad-boot Win2K (which runs in 256MB RAM,) Puppy Linux, Ubuntu Linux and FreeDOS. Puppy Linux is designed for older, less powerful hardware. (A poster on the Puppy forums described creating a dedicated media server based on Puppy that ran on an ancient Toshiba laptop with *16MB* RAM. He had to create the system image on a more powerful machine, write it to a hard drive, and swap the HD into the Toshiba to boot and run it, but it worked once he did.) Ubuntu isn't, but by installing from the Minimal CD which booted to a command line, and picking and choosing what got installed through apt-get, it was possible to get a working installation. (Using ext4 as the file system on both Linux instances helped.) The problem on all of them was less CPU speed and RAM, and more constricted I/O due to IDE4 HD and poor network performance. The *OSes* ran okay. Large apps did not. But it *was* possible to get a working Linux installation, for suitable values of "working". (I did it as an experiment to see what performance I could get from ancient HW *without* throwing money at it. Actual work was done elsewhere. I haven't tried to boot it in a long time.) > -- Michael C. Robinson ______ Dennis _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
