Okay, I got this dusty tired old clone out of the garage, and I suspect if I put a reasonable amount of RAM into it, it would complete booting nicely.richard.a wrote:I haven't tried running it on a 80286 because I no longer have one! But I have a Pentium 100 with two 32Meg RAM chips - in the garage - but it's too hard to reach it lol
Unfortunately, I don't have any spare RAM at the moment. I might try again if I can pick up a couple of larger sticks.
XVesa
It seems that XVesa does not properly support the serial port mouse consistently, although the desktop loads 800x600x16bit. I haven't yet discovered how to dismiss the last video set-up screen using the keyboard. By wiggling the mouse during the desktop loading, I managed to get it working just once - at about the fourth attempt out of about a dozen start-ups. All the rest required a restart of the machine to fruitlessly try again.
I tried two such mice left over from yester-year. They work happily in Windows 3.11 and 98. Funny, I don't remember upgrading from 95 to 98, but I guess I must have.
I found F12 will open the menu (and I wonder what the other keys do), so at least you don't have to Ctrl-Alt-Bksp to shut it down.
Once the menu is there, you can then use the arrow keys and the enter to navigate it. The applications I tried work, even with such a small amount of memory.
Xorg
Xorg, on the other hand, requires far too much in the way of resources, but does support the mouse in a serial port. It just stalls trying to create a screen (it stays black after accepting the settings, even in 640x480x16.
After I got the mouse to work, the one and only time, I was able to do a screen capture and stuff like that. It really is an unbelievable operating system, top marks to you all
I took advantage of that one succesful boot to establish a whole 128 of puppy_save.3fs on the only drive with any spare capacity. Remember, this is a machine with 1Gb HDDs as original and it has two of them, and three existing operating systems lol.
I assigned an installed Syquest 135Mb Ez-Drive cartridge from the early 1990s, and selected "use whole partition" as the logical choice presented.
Here are the specs of the machine (as seen in Windows) first... and the puppy desktop after. Look how little resources are there - under 30Mb - prior to the setting up of a persistent directory.