Try Slax and KolibriOS sometime. I even installed and ran Blue Flops with Links browser and 16 bit pcmcia cards for dialup and ethernet on this 1990 notebook made by Kapok below. With a whopping P66 processor and 12MB of ram with I forgot how many Kilobyte hard drive.

http://i42.tinypic.com/6zv7n5.jpg

I already told you about Linux BBq. I guess you never ran it though.

http://distrowatch.com/search.php?ca...=Old+Computers

Above is a very nice list of Linux OSes meant specially for older Computers. Console Linux and Toutou Linux (Wolfx is the best as per comments, latest version has a lot of bugs) are specially attractive to me in this list.

One good way to use a very older computer is to use them OFFLINE. Can be very secure this way as long as they are routinely backedup. Use them as a learning PC to learn console Linux, basic software etc., read offline files etc.,

Modern browsing, video and graphics are the most resource demanding, use more recent PC only where needed. Also, more recent PC with powerful CPU.

Presently I am learning the use of console Linux, this seems quite useful to know, free manuals for this online. This will take 2 weeks to a month to learn well but is well worth it.

Got the following OSes today. They are small, so good to keep them,
not sure if I will try them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longene
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_Linux
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllable_Desktop

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygwin

Thanks for the notebook info., very interesting and impressive for this thread.

Tried Linux BBQ briefly in VM, it was an ok experience. Didn't feel like spending much time on it. Feel it does the job tho.

Edited to add:
Getting Slax now, tx for suggestion. Good to keep this also, have a lot of OSes now, not sure if I will try it in the near future.

I just *love* this kind of 'minimalist' hobby&learning stuff! Add ttylinux!

A thought (since I find VirtualBox so EASY yet 'realistic'):
IF one has old Windows (XP-on; I think even 512M might work but 1G ram fine)
and adequate internet to download [small] .iso's, try them in VBox!

Enjoy! And thanks for this 'live blog'! (yes, I saw posts#587,9,91 re VBox)
p.s. I recently discovered OSboxes.org, to skip the distros' 'install's!

Thanks for the very nice share. I got ttylinux but not sure if I will try it in near future. It is quite a distro to get for all reading this thread.

http://mikelev.in/ux/
Here is another nice goody above, with lots of learning on that web page.

The below also looks interesting:
http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html

Sometimes, inregards to older PCs, the info. just flows.

As an aside, this book was suggested to me but will take a long time for me to get
to it:
http://freecomputerbooks.com/The-C-P...-Language.html

I actually have a paper copy of that K&R C book

You have good experience. Thank you for your support and posts here.

I have a lot more to share in terms of old PCs. Will do it in pieces as time permits, it is overwhelming the flood of info.

One thing that is clear to me now is that considering older hardware, the BSDs, specially FREEBSD is very vital. However, I have always had very bad luck with BSDs so far, not sure why. Feels frustrating, was told that BSD live CDs usually don't work. So tried install in VM these also gave error message saying / not defined. Lastly, the older media I had burned don't boot as the media seems to be bad. Considering that so many use BSDs, I am certainly missing some very critical points in their install, wonder if I can overcome this with time. Will be nice if I did.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/joliclo...d-for-netbook/

Above is good for netbooks I heard.

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/14/reute...computers.html

Such a news as above doesn't bode well for older PCs it seems.

It only applies to sales of new pc's. Besides there is more to the us the crazyfornia.

I think it's an excellent idea. Standards of this kind never apply to second-hand goods, so we can all go on quite legally using stuff that we found on the pavement. But gradually over the years, the energy-efficient equipment will percolate down, first into the second-hand market and finally into the abandoned junk computers. And we shall all be the better off for it.

California does sometimes (illegally) apply laws retroactively but this one reads as only applying to new stuff.

The whole enforcing power savings though is mixed. Look at (Microsoft) windows for example, most of the time power savings just get turned off because it doesn't work.
Even in appliances, our dryer the light that comes on when the door is open for more than 5 minutes so you have to keep pressing a button to wake up the whole dryer several times while unloading it and waking the whole dryer uses more electricity than just having the light stay on.

But if you want to mess with old OS's and such you can typically use something like a raspberry pi and a small linux distro booting straight into dosbox, UAE, retroPi, MAME, etc and use less power than an old PC. Unless you are/was an iphone used you can re-use old phone chargers, microsd cards, etc for the Pi so those old electronics get put to use rather then just being thrown away.

Depends if your hardware is supported, just like when Linux started, but take a look at some of these.
http://livecdlist.com/os/bsd/

I've used jibbed, GhostBSD, FreeSBIE & FuguIta.

These days, my choice is OpenBSD. :)

Edit: Just to say that you can install OpenBSD to a usb stick & run it from there if you have usb booting.