[H-GEN] HEADS UP: Debian for Kids

[Frank Brand]

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>>As I recall the windoze3.0-avoidance strategy of the day was DRDOS or
>>PCDOS plus GEOS which most definitely ran on 486s and even 386s with 8mb
>>and small HDDs.


Yup exactly


>corel has a free version of dos i believe. and then there's the freedos
>project i came across last year.

Trivia:-

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Corel bought DRDOS from Borland who got it when they acquired WordPerfect
who acquired it from Digital Research the original developers (at least I
think that was the process). DRDOS was quite a reasonable MSDOS alternative.
For those without grey hair, Digial Research or DR was the Microsoft of its
day (the 70's) and was the dominant PC player with CPM/MPM prior to the
emergence of MS with its DOS for IBM. IIRC when IBM sought expressions of
interest for the development of DOS, Digital Research was the other company
that IBM was negotiating with in the late 70's early 80's. Oh how the mighty
fall. Had IBM not fallen for the sweet talking Harvard man DR would be the
big news and MS out of business.

Corel still has a case going against MS in relation to DRDOS (IIRC) and
somewhere in the back of my mind I think Ray Norda (who is/was involved with
Caldera) might also have had some involvement there earlier.
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 however i haven't managed to find a free
>version of a windows tool... well apart from what comes with linux. oh and
>if u want to run X-Windows with low ram, a flatmate of mine used to run
>xfce on our gateway (which only had 16meg ram at the time) and he swears by
it.




I really like xfce too. It is a linux look-alike of the CDE interface from
the Unix people. Nobody has responded actually giving an indication that
they do substantial things with  a 486 and 8 Mb RAM running X Windows on a 3
00 Mb drive.

OK it is technically possible to run a base system with X but I don't think
I would like to run StarOffice 5.2 under such circumstances with a
non-accelerated ISA video card. The only people I have had first hand
knowledge with have really been running a gateway or mail server or some
such system that is not heavily taxed from an x/application point of view.
It will be interesting to see when they try this but I have some
reservations. There will not be a lot of hard drive space left and I suspect
that there could be a lot of swap space thrashing (and don't forget we are
talking a pretty well worn HDD that is probably 8 years old). But,....hey
the proof will be in the pudding and I would be interested in hearing from
people running X on a 486 with 8 Mb RAM and a 300 Mb HDD (or similar
equipment) to see just what sort of things they are doing.


Frank Brand


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