On Monday 04 April 2011 11:49:02 Pandu Poluan wrote: > On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 16:35, Joost Roeleveld <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Monday 04 April 2011 11:13:58 Pandu Poluan wrote: > >> When its floppy drive (5.25") gave up the ghost, I got another > >> hand-down; a PC-XT compatible no-name with a huge (at that time) 20 MB > >> hard disk. > > > > 2nd one we had was a 386sx-16mhz with 2 mb ram and 40mb harddrive. > > I did try to install linux on that once, but the network-install took > > forever. The NIC could do 10mbit half-duples (coax), but effective speed > > was less. Symptoms: > > download 1KB at full speed > > card crashed > > driver resets after 5 minutes > > ... repeat... > > Okay, I have to be honest: I LOL-ed at that... xD
I do as well, now... At the time, I was rather annoyed as I, at the time, made a really good effort finding a decent network card (so I thought) and had to drag that thing into uni by public transport during rush hour... > >> Again, it died after serving me & my brother for a couple of years, > >> and we got a "PC Brand 486 SLC" desktop. And there I dabbled in Pascal > >> and ASM, making replacement drivers for MS-DOS :-P ... I still > >> remember tuning QEMM386.sys trying to eke the last bytes of Low > >> Memory... > > > > What's the most low-memory you could get it and still use it? > > I managed to get low memory to around 634KB (If I remember correctly) > > using the memory-tools that came with Norton Utilities at the time. > > I don't really recall... but around the same number, I guess. > 630-something. > > Actually, I once managed to get 639KB, but lots of apps became > unstable, so I went slightly more conservative :-) I spent all that effort just to be able to play the occasional game. Most of my programming was, at the time, still done on the Atari. I did use them side-by- side for a while. > >> Afterwards, I started university, and its a blur of PC clones (and > >> Windows 9x)... and I shifted mental-gears to become a network engineer > > > > When did you switch to Linux? > > > > I switched when MS Windows 95 crashed once too many and decided to delete > > some files along with it. I didn't bother fixing that installation and > > eventually reclaimed the diskspace and removed it from /etc/lilo.conf. > > Too many apps* I use day-by-day have only Windows version, so I never > did switch to Linux :-( There are plenty of games also available for Linux. When I started with Linux, one of the popular ones was "xtris". For the people who don't know it, it's a networked version of tetris where, when one player clears a line, or multiple lines, an equivalent number of junk-lines would appear at the bottom of a random different player. In the end there were 2 versions in use. One was binary-only with an ID-code only allowing connections from other binary-only clients. The other one was more open. The reason for the binary-only was due to some complaints about "cheating" where people added additional keys to do all kinds of different things like: - bounce junk to next player - ignore junk-message - send junk to others - select next piece to be available These, however, were all modified by the actual player. For more "modern" games, there are plenty that run natively on Linux. Either ported/created by the original developers or ported by a third party. > First time I ever deployed Linux for day-to-day work was when I > started an IT Training company with my former professor. We installed > Fedora Core but replaced the UI with xfce. > > However, not until Ubuntu Hardy did I finally got serious about > migrating to Linux. Currently am still migrating the non-legacy > servers to Linux from Windows Good luck with that. I know about the difficulty with that if some apps use ms- windows specific "tricks" > * please consider "games" as "apps" :-P Games are applications, yes... Just a very specific type. -- Joost
