I have a handicapped relative whose computer I have been taking care of for years. He uses it for simple games, it was a 386 I think running Windows 3.1 which could deal with the hard shutdowns he does (he is brain damaged and has been unable to learn how to properly shut down, sorry).

The computer has finally gone belly up and I don't have hardware old enough for the Windows 3.1 to deal with so I was thinking maybe a linux live cd would do? I have couple of 486s, I can throw 128MB of RAM into one of them and a 2GB harddive (they don't make them like that anymore, they still work!)

I don't know of a filesystem that can handle powering off at the switch but a live cd, Puppy maybe?

Opinions?

You might be able to get away with no hard drive at all.

If you could add a bit more ram them you could boot puppy from CD permanently and avoid any chance of corruption from hard shutdowns.

The answer is "sort of." Here is the problem: you can set up Puppy to run only from the CD (and what it loads into RAM) and not save any settings when shutting down (this would keep the hard drive from being corrupted since it would not normally be used. However, to run as a live CD requires answering some questions (what keyboard do you have, what time is it, etc.) when starting up. If this person cannot shut a computer down, I am guessing he or she might not be able to answer these questions. It is up to you to decide if the games are appropriate, though. Puppy does not include a lot of them.

You might want to consider looking into an old console game machine. I know almost nothing about gaming consoles, but I remember way back when (20 years ago) that shutting one off was not a problem.

Hi,

I am running Puppy from the hard drive of a computer that isn't much more than you are proposing. I sometimes test for 'durability' and this box has been very tough. If you set it up to boot from the live CD and save its configuration to the hard drive it will be even tougher than mine. You will probably want to set it up to use some of that drive space for installing games that appeal to your friend. Mine is being used mostly as a 'smart terminal' to run programs on my other machines. I have installed a few other programs to serve my needs and I'm still using less than 800 MBytes. The live CD ran ok with 128 M of memory but if you plan to run from the live CD all the time try for more memory. 128 M will be too slow for a lot of games.

My linux boxes are sometimes shutdown under emergency conditions regardless of whatever else might be happening (approaching thunderstorms being the number one emergency). In all these years only one of them ever suffered a problem and fsck was able to recover one hundred per cent. I have had a few Windows failures requiring a re-install from the same activities. My own opinion is the 'normal shutdown' fanaticism is greatly overplayed on Linux systems. Even for Windows I'd rather pull the plug than get blasted by lightning. Been there - done that. Reinstalling Windows won't work on fried hardware. Under more civilised conditions a normal shutdown should be done.

I would recommend just doing it. Its low cost. You can re-do it if it really does get too badly tangled. There doesn't seem to be very much to lose. This isn't like you are going to lose all of the customer data for a twenty billion dollar corporation <wink>.

Bill

Puppy would work very well for this appilcation. Puppy 2.15 CE already comes with about 8 games. Loading into Ram (128M) only would be no problem with multiple hard shutdowns.
Good luck