UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have an old 486 computer, and it has windows 3.1
at one time it had the internet, and i wish for it to have it again, so i can check my e-mail, but im not sure what to do, i can either keep my old windows 3.1 or try and instal a scaled down version of 98, or should i switch to unix, and forget windows all together?


im having a hard time finding a browser that will work with 3.1

and does msn messenger work with unix?

any help would be appriecated
thanks
dave

My suggestion is to get rid of the 486. The board, CPU and memory are worth much less than $10, some less than $5. Here is an eBay listing for sold 486 motherboards w/cpus:

http://search-completed.ebay.com/sea...ty=MetaEndSort

Here are Pentium 200s sold on eBay at the $15-$40 range:

http://search-completed.ebay.com/sea...ty=MetaEndSort

Unless you live in poverty or an unfortunate nation in economic collapse, the 486 board is not worth the postage stamps to ship via snail mail. The eBay 'sold listings' speak for themselves, I'm sorry to say.

My suggestion is to get a good used (very cheap) pentium board and cpu....

BTW: Check out the price 386 boards are selling on ebay:

http://search-completed.ebay.com/sea...ty=MetaEndSort

Hi Dave,

You can still get many more good years of use out
of your 486 if you switch over to a Unix based Operating
System Like OpenBSD, SuSE or RedHat.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of M$ windows software,
even if it can run, will be extremely sloooow on a 486.
M$ Messenger requires the following: 486DX/66 or higher
with 8 Meg of ram; Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me,
Windows 2000, or Windows NT 4.0 or later.

Now you will still run into slow operation if you try to
use the unix version of a graphical desktop called
"X windows" but one difference between unix and windows
is that you don't have to use a graphical window you
can use a text based console similar to a Dos console.

A major benefit of using a unix type operating system
is that there are many hundreds of text based tools
that you can use for email and browsing the Internet.
Such as Pine or Elm for email:

http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/pine/
http://www.instinct.org/elm/
http://www.webfoot.com/advice/email.top.html

and Lynx for browsing:

http://lynx.browser.org/

Don't throw out the baby with the bath water! Many
486's are acting as routers, email servers, web servers etc.
Because unix is such an efficient operating system it can
do much without having to have the latetest and greatest
PC.

So, Scrape off that old windows system, get yourself a
book on unix and start using unix, you'll be glad you did!
There are many places to get a version of unix for your pc
at a fraction of the price you will pay for M$ products try
going to:

http://www.openbsd.com/
http://cart.cheapbytes.com/cgi-bin/cart

books on unix:

http://safari2.oreilly.com/table.asp?cat=8


Enjoy!

If you don't want that old x486, I'll be happy to pay all shipping, and a few bucks for your time... I've got a few 486's in working order running as diskless workstations in my "lab" at home. I would always be happy to toss another one in there.

Where were you server packrats when I got rid of 2 486s and 3 Pentiums (P60, and 2 100s) a few months ago to make room for hotter CPUs !!!!

Yes, I agree that you can do a lot with the smaller CPUs. I don't need them and don't have the space for a bunch of klunkers Glad to see someone in our forums can use them.


Next time I retire a server, I'm going to post here first !!!!

In fact, I've got two Toshiba Satellites (P100s) Laptoys that I will retire this year. Both have linux (slackware) installed and run great (batteries are dead and have to be plugged in all the time....but that's no problem....)