Help me revive this ancient Laptop

[asifnaz]

I have a very old Laptop . Its 486 with 4mb ram . No CD rom . 3.5 inch floppy drive . 320 mb HD .It is in working condition

It has NO OS installed . I am looking to install an OS on it . I want you to suggest me some Linux distro even with CLI .

I am taking a look at kolibri os http://kolibrios.org/en/ . Its GUI assembly OS .

I will use Dos as last ressort

Please dont ask me to throw this laptop it was expensive as hell when my father bought it :)

any suggestions

[collisionystm]

Freedos

[asifnaz]

Freedos

Good option since it is FOS . But I didn't find any apps for it when I was playing with it in VM

[eunix_treel]

There really is not a lot that you can do with that machine. If it were a desktop then maybe you could turn it into a NAS server but even then it would be slow.

The best bet would be to get your hands on an OS that was around the time of the machine. Maybe Windows 95. Ubuntu may be a little to heavy for it.

Freedos would be good for an older non GUI environment but you could install Puppy Linux on it. I for one squeeze every ounce of life out of my computers as I am just now retired some older Pentium 2 Deskpro towers that I had repurposed as NAS servers in my "home basement data center" and I have drawn the line at Pentium 4 / Pentium D - 2GB ram minimum.

It just is not worth the hassle unless you are going to run and OS and apps for that time frame.

Try puppy linux and let us know how it works for you.

Eunix

[TenPlus1]

Windows 3.11 is the best choice for a windows front-end on a machine of that spec, failing that FreeDOS...

[asifnaz]

There really is not a lot that you can do with that machine. If it were a desktop then maybe you could turn it into a NAS server but even then it would be slow.

The best bet would be to get your hands on an OS that was around the time of the machine. Maybe Windows 95. Ubuntu may be a little to heavy for it.

Freedos would be good for an older non GUI environment but you could install Puppy Linux on it. I for one squeeze every ounce of life out of my computers as I am just now retired some older Pentium 2 Deskpro towers that I had repurposed as NAS servers in my "home basement data center" and I have drawn the line at Pentium 4 / Pentium D - 2GB ram minimum.

It just is not worth the hassle unless you are going to run and OS and apps for that time frame.

Try puppy linux and let us know how it works for you.

Eunix

I don't think that Puppy could run under Ram as low as 4MB (let me know if it can run ) . I would use freedos if I find some apps
(games are there atleast ) . windows 95 requires lot of work to install on a Floppy drive only system like it takes 3 floppies for dos 6.2 6 form windows 3.1 and 25 for windows 95 update .

any Linux distro which can run that system..?

[mips]

Minix? Dunno what the hardware requirements are though.

[del_diablo]

I got the image that you wanted to get us to join our hands with you, form a circle around the laptop, chant stuff like a cult, and then it revives as a laptop lich.

[jmszr]

asifnaz,

You can probably find something here: http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributions/Mini_Distributions/ that will work.

Hope that helps, I will be interested in what you come up with.

[gordintoronto]

It may have been expensive, but that was almost 20 years ago. Because of the amount of memory, your choices range from Freedos to MS-DOS 5 to Windows 3.11. The hard drive barely has room for a couple of versions of the current Linux Kernel.

The 486 arrived in 1989, 22 years ago. (I attended the announcement.) It's time to retire this thing!

[asifnaz]

It may have been expensive, but that was almost 20 years ago. Because of the amount of memory, your choices range from Freedos to MS-DOS 5 to Windows 3.11. The hard drive barely has room for a couple of versions of the current Linux Kernel.

The 486 arrived in 1989, 22 years ago. (I attended the announcement.) It's time to retire this thing!

Please dont hurt the feelings of that poor boy :D

It is from 1994 . I am going to install freedos with windows 3.1

and will post a video on youtube