My nephews have an old K6–350 with 64 MB RAM, 2.1 GB HDD, and S3 Trio64
graphics at their grandparent's house. They used it to play about 6 windows
games they have installed, until one day when boot files were suddenly gone.
Unfortunately (or not?), I already thrown out all Windows 95/98 instalation
disks. I also don't posses working floppy drive for few years, so all the
floppies are already gone (except for few, but as I found out, those are
unreadable anyway). So I went on a quest finding a linux distribution that:
- would run on i586
- would run some desktop environment, while leaving some of the 64MB of RAM
unallocated
- would run recent wine
- would run X with GL/DRI, so those games could be run
Well, I've got some bad news – there is no such distribution. Here's why:
Damn Small Linux
DSL installed OK to the harddisk, but it only allowed it's ownmyDSL extensions
to be installed. Those doesn't include dosbox or wine >0.9.4×. Switching to
apt didn't work on that version, because package statuses were broken, and it
would mean downloading and forcing installation of each deb. (Well, I'm writing
it after few more days of expermimentation, and it doesn't look like big deal
now :), so maybe I'll return to that).
Vector Linux Lite
The LiveCD didn't boot, and installation was too big for 1.8GB partition.
Where's the ‚Light‘ part?
Deli Linux
Looks nice in VM, however, there are no packages for it – neither wine or
dosbox.
Debian
I installed XFCE environment, but it looks too heavy for the machine space-
and memory-wise. Maybe if I started without X and then added JWM and ROX
session, and configure it properly… well it would take some time to have it
done.
TeenPup 2008
This is a puplet – spinoff of Puppy Linux 2.1. It contains many
applications, games, nice icons. But getting packages for puppy linux is a quest
itself – searching forums for .pet files, finding passwords for password
protected repositories, and fighting incompatible versions of libraries. This
distribution helped me getting acquainted with ROX file manager, which is
actually quite nice once you understand the philosophy of it. However, wine
package didn't work because of incompatible libc. I also managed to lead it to
the state where it wouldn't reboot intead it always just restarted X session. So
it was time to move further.
PuppyLinux 4.1.2
So after spending few days with TeenPup I understood desktop and bootup
process of PuppyLinux, so I picked generic one. Installing wine went smoothly.
But DirectX games wouldn't run on Xvesa or Xorg with vesa driver. The solution
looked simple – just download full Xorg 7.3 and finally have answer to
question, whether the system is actually capable of running those games from
Wine. However, there is bug in Xorg 7.3 – xorg-server 1.3.0 doesn't export
some of basic symbol properly, so enabling S3 driver results in linking error
„Symbol RamDac not found“. So I tried to find a puplet that includes X.org
7.4
LXDE puplet
I found that one, burned the ISO, and found out it's i686 only.
Arch Linux
and arch linux is i686 only as well.
TinyME
This is the last distribution I tried. Looks quite momry heavy (still LXDE is
way heavier than ROX/JWM) and still has xserver 1.3.0
Conclusion
There's no out-of-the-box solution. So I will either return to DSL or Debian,
or get some bootable CD with win95 bootdisk and just run sys c: (to find out,
some other system files are missing :)) – but getting such CD is not easy,
who needs win95 anymore?