Back in the mid 90s when I got my first CD ROM drive, one of the cover CDs contained a shareware version of TSX-32. A multitasking, partially DOS compatible operating system for 386 and better:
I would have to try it out again to be able to say anything meaningful about it though.
That sounds interesting, thanks.
ZipSlack is certainly a worthy mention in the thread.
I put Small Linux on the previous page, you may have glanced over it due to all the Linuxes in one post!
I have older versions of it if you're interested.
This is Slackware 11.0 running on a FAT partition via UMSDOS.
UMSDOS isn't very desirable due to the inherent restrictions involved. IIRC, Peanut used an image file.
Edit: No it did not. So, the mystery question is, what was the distro I'm thinking of. Low resource consumption, X based GUI, ran off a loopback mounted file image.
UMSDOS isn't very desirable due to the inherent restrictions involved. IIRC, Peanut used an image file.
Edit: No it did not. So, the mystery question is, what was the distro I'm thinking of. Low resource consumption, X based GUI, ran off a loopback mounted file image.
Any love for SliTaz? haven't ran it in ages though so i don't know if it regressed old platforms or not. It was tiny though and the spider mascot's cute
SliTaz needs quite a lot of ram, even for the mini and loram versions, but it looks cool for Pentium machines.
How usable is DSL with the minimum required specs?
Time for an update, today will be about BeOS.
It started its life on a machine powered by AT&T processors, then moved on to the PowerPC 603/604 and to the Intel Pentium patform.
Be distributed almost all of the versions of BeOS either as free to install or as LiveCD to test, and not just the BeOS 5 Personal Edition usable installable as a loopback filesystem on DOS/Win9x or Linux.
Some were packages directly downloadable from its website, unfortunately impossible to find, and some were distributed on magazines cover discs.
After the demise of Be, Inc. two german companies continued the development of the OS under the name Zeta, the first one, yellowtab produced a LiveCD of its version 1.1.
Here you have the Preview Release 1.2 for PowerMac
^^ I've used it on a P233MMX with 64MB, but that's already a couple generations newer. Took a few minutes to boot off the CD but after it finished loading it wasn't too bad. Didn't try the browser. I'd think it'd be pretty painful on any less memory than that though.
twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!
I found it unusable with my am5x86160 10 years ago. The VESA driver didn't work very good on the ye old Trio64 either.
xjas wrote:
^^ I've used it on a P233MMX with 64MB, but that's already a couple generations newer. Took a few minutes to boot off the CD but after it finished loading it wasn't too bad. Didn't try the browser. I'd think it'd be pretty painful on any less memory than that though.
Right, it really needs a Pentium and more RAM than what a 486 usually had back in the days.
Davros wrote:
I wonder if anyone has tried BeOS 5.0 Personal Edition under win 10 ?
I'm sure installing it is not the problem, but running it on recent thus unsupported hardware on the other hand, I expect it to crash long before you see your mouse cursor...
Time for a small 360K size update, so far the lowest specs machines supported in the thread were 386 with 2MB of RAM, but if you got an older machine, such as an original PC, a XT or a 286, this post is for you.
Lastly, if you want to see the commercial OS QNX 2 running on your retro computer, you can try the QNX 1989 Demo Disk, you can't do much with it though, but it's still worth a try:
Someone mentioned NextStep, but OpenStep officially runs on x86 hardware (though only retro hardware, not modern hardware): http://toastytech.com/guis/openstep.html
It's picky about hardware in the 486/early pentium range, particularly with IDE drives, and takes research.
I have a plan to load BeOS on a P4 laptop I have, then run Basilisk under it to emulate an early Mac, Because I Can. I already ran Haiku (in-progress BeOS update) on the laptop for a while.
lolo799 wrote:Lastly, if you want to see the commercial OS QNX 2 running on your retro computer, you can try the QNX 1989 Demo Disk, you can't […] Show full quote
Lastly, if you want to see the commercial OS QNX 2 running on your retro computer, you can try the QNX 1989 Demo Disk, you can't do much with it though, but it's still worth a try:
qnx1989.jpg
qnxdemo1.png
qnxdemo3.png
qnx1989.zip
I've some news on QNX: you can not just boot Demo disk, but install system to disk as QNX 2.x is now on Archive.org
lolo799 wrote:Coherent looks interesting, I'll give it a try soon.
NextStep also officially ran on x86 in one of its later 3.x versions, and y […] Show full quote