minimal space hogging OS

January 26, 2005 4:13 PM

Small Operating System: A ship that I work on has a VERY old computer (running Win 98) that is used as a public terminal. It's likely a P120, or some such thing. [MI]
posted by MotorNeuron to computers & internet (18 comments total)

The guys onboard the ship use the computer it to surf the internet a little or read email from Hotmail or Yahoo.

The computer runs very slowly. What is a small and quick operating system that could replace Win98? It should be easy to use (read: graphical) once set-up and be able to look at web sites. The computer will be used by non-techies, but I am willing to set-up some form of Linux if it doesn't mean that I have to constantly maintain the durn thing.
posted by MotorNeuron at 4:15 PM on January 26, 2005

Damn Small Linux
posted by annathea at 4:19 PM on January 26, 2005

98lite? also you could try one of the many linux livecds and get a good idea of how it will run (I think damn small linux even has a "business card" cd) before you actually install.
posted by dorian at 4:30 PM on January 26, 2005

Vectorlinux is running pretty happily on an old laptop (p133, 32M, 2G hd) at my house, although I had to use an older release to get it to work, and I am still plonking around with wifi. The livecd approach required more memory than I have to get X and everything running, but you might be able to find one that works on your computer. If the computer is so old that it does not boot from cd, you're gonna want dbm (dynamic boot manager).
posted by mzurer at 5:23 PM on January 26, 2005

DSL is good. It's a 50MB download and boots off CD so there's no install or any maintenance (although occasionally you might want to download a new cd and throw the old one overboard).

It comes with Dillo, not Firefox, though so and I don't know whether that works with hotmail. According to some bug reports it didn't work in 2002.

I don't know how these boat computers work but if it's dialup you'll want to ensure you've got a hardware modem.
posted by holloway at 5:34 PM on January 26, 2005

MotorNeuron, while linux would work fine, if you get windows 98 set up correctly, and maybe throw another $25 worth of RAM in the machine, you could have a good webrowsing terminal on your hands. To keep it "fresh" either set up a secondary partition and use ghost, or get your hands on a recovery card, like this.

A recovery card will let users infect, delete, format, and install stuff to their liking. When you turn off the power and turn the PC back on it will be 100% like when you set it up, all their crap completely forgotten.
posted by shepd at 6:01 PM on January 26, 2005

QNX demo would do the job quite nicely.
posted by five fresh fish at 6:20 PM on January 26, 2005

You might also look at Syllable - their ABrowse is KHTML-based (like Apple's Safari and KDE's Konqueror) and should be pretty good. (I have however never gotten their LiveCD to work, albeit on newer hardware.) If you want to try the recovery card option, there's also Deep Freeze which does similar things in software. It can be controlled from a central server and can do things like "thawed drives" which aren't restored at reboot, idle rebooting, and update windows. We use it on about 1000 or so machines without troubles.
posted by mrg at 6:53 PM on January 26, 2005

I run Vector Linux on an old P166. Dillo is a supersmall browser that works great but it doesn't have CSS support yet. You might want to just try to re-install Windows. Windows 95 worked fine on an ancient 486 I had until recently.
posted by euphorb at 7:01 PM on January 26, 2005

If you stick with Windows, you might try installing Opera. On a decent system, most people don't notice or care about the speed difference between IE/Firefox and Opera. On a system like that, it's insanely fast by comparison.
posted by stavrogin at 7:49 PM on January 26, 2005

Here's an old AskMe on the same subject. There are several Linux distros for this purpose.
posted by Zed_Lopez at 9:05 PM on January 26, 2005

i wouldnt necessarily call linux easy to use (not for beginners anyway). I used to have a ~p100 running windows 98 and it wasnt too slow, maybe the computer is filled with adware/viruses? I suggest reinstalling 98 and maybe getting a few sticks of cheap ram.
posted by EvilKenji at 9:16 PM on January 26, 2005

I'm running 98 lite on an old 486 laptop that has 32MB of ram. I've been amazed at how well it works. We had a pentium 133 with 16MB of ram running win 95, and it never performed this well. The laptop even plays some (older, I think) Atari arcade emulation games without freezing. I'm totally impressed.
posted by Clay201 at 9:20 PM on January 26, 2005

If you stick with Windows, you might try installing Opera. On a decent system, most people don't notice or care about the speed difference between IE/Firefox and Opera. On a system like that, it's insanely fast by comparison.

You might want to try Opera even if you do go with Linux. I used to run a similar machine (k6-2 300mhz, 32 megs of ram minus four for the onboard video) and Opera was pretty quick, while Mozilla ran like molasses. And I dunno what Damn Small Linux comes with for a GUI, but you oughtta check out a lightweight window manager like Icebox, WindowMaker or XFCE rather than trying to run KDE or Gnome 2.x. (Gnome 1.4 might run all right, though, if you can find it...)
posted by arto at 10:36 PM on January 26, 2005

Either 98lite, or normal 98 with the shell replaced by Litestep. (Or possibly both.)

You could probably find a DOS (text-mode?) program that does *almost* everything you want if you don't mind being a bit retro and you can get over your GUI=easy fetish. Something like Minuet internet suite, which was written for the HP DOS palmtops, would probably cover everything. Try this link.
posted by krisjohn at 12:13 AM on January 27, 2005

Try Craigslist. Machines that are 5 times as powerful get thrown out on a daily basis.
posted by bh at 1:08 AM on January 27, 2005

I second the QNX demo.
posted by sonofsamiam at 8:42 AM on January 27, 2005

Try Craigslist. Machines that are 5 times as powerful get thrown out on a daily basis.

good point. i've had tons of friends try to *give* me 500 mhz machines all the time* -- sure, they'll be missing a hd or a video card or something (most often the HD), but you should be able to piece something together. Hell, there's two 500 mhz+ machines lying dormant in my cubicle at this very moment (both, however, without hard drives).

* i always turn them down, because I am a spoiled westerner and already have too much crap.
posted by fishfucker at 12:05 PM on January 27, 2005