John Oram wrote: > OS/2??? Geez, IBM may still be shipping their 16-bit graphical > interface product. However, I can assure you that their driver support > sucks swamp water in a big way.
I have only seen OS/2 in the gray market. I dont think IBM supports it anymore. But there are a lot of OS/2 Fan-atics who seem to keep coming up with stuff. > However, Howard's questions were originally about which version of > Micro$oft's Windows was most functional for the broadest cross-section > of computing hardware. Yeah, we read different things in. But from what I can tell, OS/2 w/ mozilla offers the most functionality on older platforms. IBelieve, it can run FAT-32 on a 486. What I have in mind is the absolute minimum support for mozilla, either win 3.1 or OS/2, and OS/2 is way ahead. The other thing I like about OS/2, is that it gives me a real nice DOS mode, transfering quickly and transparently back and forth between the GUI. And with a dual boot system, you can have a fairly small fat-32 DOS partition, that can still read the NTFS, if that's what you have on the rest of the drive. You should be able to rescue an NTFS drive with even a 486 and OS/2. I dont know diddly about it's networking ability. But for a personal desktop, it looks like pretty decent browsing on minimal hardware. > Ref: http://www.xandros.com seems to have good reviews > http://madpenguin.org/Article1049.html > http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7449&mode=thread&order=0 > http://www.xandros.com/news/reviews/linux_magazine.html from my > favorite Linux writer > > Xandros is going to be a core product in the Linux-based desktop > attack onto the Micro$oft juggernot. Asia has answered with a > consortium which is going to put up a lot of financial resistance to > Micro$oft's strangle hold on the desktop > http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/05/asiapacific_govts_sign_linux_promo/ > > > Since Micro$oft is number one in their marketplace, they only have one > direction to go as the competition increases their products usefulness. > > my $.02 worth > > John Oram I've run COREL 1.2 for a few years, and it was pretty buggy with only 32meg DRAM; but by the time prices fell enough for me to get 64, 96, then 128meg, it got real smooth. With 32meg the Debian 2.2 kernel churned the shit out of the swap drive. But it wasnt long before netscape 4.7 was long in the tooth, and trying to upgrade it was a huge pain. Xandros says it needs 128m; given my experience with COREL 1.2, which said it needed 32meg, I kinda expect trouble with only 128. But I dunno how much more of a memmory hog the 2.4 kernel is compared with the debian linux 2.2.16 kernel. I'd use more, but I'm also trying the 128 as DDR, which runs the REDHAT 9 (2.4 kernel) pretty well @700mhz. Except otherwise, Redhat is a royal pain, permissions, passwords, logons, and other crap you need for networks, but not as a *personal* pc. COREL 1.2 was pretty neat, you could take a COREL installed drive and pop it into a windoz PC, and it would automatically reconfigure the video, mouse, and modem, and also automatically 'mount' *all* the drives curently in the system. The only thing it didnt read that I saw was the REDHAT xf3 file sysem. But otherwise, you could use MC to transfer files from any other file system. I expect XANDROS will do the same. We'll see...
