Legal issue...
 

I am (well I was - it's done now) building a pc for my friend and it is a slightly older one. I wanted win98 but couldn't find it for a decent rate anywhere, even on ebay. I saw a site that offered it for download and was wondering - is that legal? I don't want it if it isn't.

i doubt it's legal... you need the cd and/or the license thinggy for it to be legal AFAIK...

It might be a good idea to just go with Linux distro designed for slow machines. It'll give you better technology than a 7 year old operating system.

actually i've found the linux desktop distros "designed for slow machines" to be kinda sucky - and i'm a linux guy - imagine how much it would suck for this guy's non-linux friend... LOL...

(i'm assuming mhelliwell's friend is a completely windows person)...

:D What's bad about them? Are just just missing a lot of the standard Linux features, are they buggy, or is there something else wrong with them?

hehe, it's not bugs... mainly i guess it's a feature/version thing... like, on a "light desktop distro" it's odd having these software packages that are all old and stuff... it sucks having to use some weird word processor i've never heard of in my life before cuz openoffice or even abiword ain't light enough... or having to browse using one of those 500K mini-browsers with horrble fonts and no plugins cuz even firefox is too much to ask for... it's just not worth it IMHO to put a windows guy through that sorta horrible experience when they could be perfectly happy with windows 98, internet explorer, microsoft office, msn messenger, and DirectX and stuff like that...

i know this sounds weird coming from someone called "win32sux" but i'm trying to be objective here and i believe linux isn't the best choice for everything... hell, sometimes even open source windows applications aren't the best choice... like, on my friend's SLOW win98 computer he runs ms office and internet explorer happily, but openoffice and firefox run like crap on there...

now, keep in mind that my friend has seen my slackware desktop and so he KNOWS that linux rocks on the desktop and believe me that when he gets a more decent PC he's gonna wanna dual-boot at least... maybe he'll even migrate completely, being that he'll have a linux buddy to set everything up for him... but for now, with my buddy's hardware, running a "light linux desktop" isn't even an option unless he wants to feel like he's back in windows 3.1, hehe... :)

Yes, he is a totally Windoze guy. but if I could hook him up with fvwm95, he might be able to get used to the interface and I could install Wine, so he could use some of his Windoze apps. What do you think?

what are the specs on the PC??

It will look like I am trying to give my friend a crappy PC... but he is paying all bills on hardware and doesn't really want much, just some low graphics games 'n such, so I went for the cheap stuff and he (said he) doesn't mind.

-32 mb ram*
-ps2 mouse/serial keybrd
- sound blaster card
- graphics card
- 133 mhz cpu
- 2.5 gig hdd

EDIT: *I could easily get him some more memory for cheap.

i assume the 133mhz cpu is a pentium (i586), right?? i guess it wouldn't hurt to try fvwm95 or maybe even icewm to get an i586 linux distro and wine running on that thing... see how he feels after using it for a couple days... if he likes it you're good to go, but if he seems unsatisfied then you should seriously consider trying win98... whatever you choose, a memory upgrade would be a VERY good idea... i'm sure you already knew that, hehe...

which apps are you planning on running on wine??

As requested, I am moving this to Linux-General. As an aside, and to clarify, downloading Win98 is undoubtedly illegal and it's a good thing that you aren't doing it.

I donno really what he wants in Wine, but older games like Age of Empires, Rollercoaster Tycoon, etc. I think.

Oh and the MB came as part of a case that I bought so I didn't have much to do with it. So i donno.

I don't agree that all *nix distros stink on an old slow machine. Have you tried FreeBSD?

I'm on a PII 350 2 old 3GB Hard drives UDMA33 with 40 conductor cables 192MB PC 100, and this box is faster, stabler, more fun to use that win98 ever was on a PIII 733 with 512 RAM and a much faster hard drive. And I am running big heavy KDE on it too. Firefox does take 17 seconds to load 1st instance. Konqueror only takes 6 seconds. I have AbiWord, Evolution, Thunderbird, Xmms, Mplayer, RealPlayer,K3B ect on it.

I put Vector on this box and it was a little slower, I would not say it was any dogier than win 98 would be. I had Mandrake on it and yes, that was pathetic.

You can have FreeBSD up and running for about 1.5 GB of space.Or even less if you want to knock off some of the fluff. Yes I mean with X and a windows mgr. It would run fine and faster with less RAM also if I quit KDE and went to a smaller fooprint WM like FVWM or even Xfce probably.

A P1 is not going to be great with anything. Remember how they ran with Win95? That is if you could keep Win95 running long enough to evaluate it.

I'll take BSD over Win98 any day. For sheer speed, reliability, security, support, ease of software acquisition, modern features, huge base of support, documentation...ok I'll stop....made my point. LOL.

i think you can get away with age of empires, but i don't think the PC meets the minimum specs for something like Rollercoaster Tycoon...

ummm, okay, that's nice... but nobody here said "that all *nix distros stink on an old slow machine" so i'm not sure who you are disagreeing with... :)