Teyrnon

I have a 200 Mhz Pentium MMX based machine that I bought (very) used in 2000. I got it to experiment with Linux without messing up the system I used for everyday stuff. After a few minor upgrades it worked great and I tried a dozens of different distros on it. It's been a very good, solid backup machine. Although every capacitor on the motherboard had blown by 2004 and all had to be replaced. It now has a bunch of oversized capacitors and is still running all these years later.

Since 2004 it became the machine I run FreeDOS on. There are several DOS programs I still use now and then. Largely stuff I wrote in the late 80s and early 90s. Of course, I have it as a dual boot with Linux. That's been proving a bit problematic as all of the major distributions these days are hideous on a machine that slow.

Today I decided to fix an issue I'd been having with the DOS partitions. Namely that I needed two of them instead of just one. That was relatively painless. Decided to install Damn Small Linux this time around for that side of things. That was not so painless. For whatever reason, they pulled a Slackware and assumed the boot drive was hda for the grub install and provided no way to change it. After a number of go arounds I almost opened up the case and swapped around the IDE cables. (My coordination has been bad lately thanks to this bug I had recently and I was worried about doing serious damage to things if I tried mucking about inside the case.) Instead I decided to try installing lilo instead of grub. Lilo, as it, turned out worked fine. After a bit I wrote a lilo config file pointing to both Linux and FDOS and installed it. Worked fine and I set to work updating FreeDOS.

While doing that it occurred to me just what patchworks these operating systems I use are. Version numbers of the key components are wildly divergent and sometimes it's a major pain to figure out what version of what you should be using. The large distributions make this easy by doing the work for you, but with something like FreeDOS if you're not doing a clean install you have to watch it or you'll end up with a mess. Though it goes very well with the hardware which is also a patchwork of disparate components that you can only hope and pray works together with a minimum of conflict.

While working on this I got to thinking of the various computers I used in the 80s. These were all largely fixed hardware sets without the wild variations you see on the modern pc landscape. I'm feeling very nostalgic for those days just now. It was just easier, things made sense.

Recently, at the request of a friend, I decided to try WoW. Got to looking and realized I don't have a machine that can actually run the client software. (Before you say it, sdaemon, no that box can't run WoW. The graphics adapter in it is sadly underpowered, it crashes if you try to actually use the drivers allegedly for it, and it may possibly be the culprit in a couple other strange quirks I've found in the system.)