I like what this guy has to say. With apologies to Degas, though I do not belong to the same generation as Isildur, he is someone who feels as I do.
It's cool that BeOS has made the next release free for private non-commercial use. Unfortunately, they don't support anything but Socket 5 and 7 systems and higher, which leaves my 486 out in the cold - so you won't see a Making the transition to BeOS page anytime in the next several months, maybe. This is 'maybe' because I may be inheriting my roommate's old mobo and cpu, and even then I may be hesitant to give up my customized BSDBox to TRY an alternative OS. Maybe when I get a bigger HD... In other OS related news, I've installed Win95 OSR2 on my home computer - an overclocked P233MMX (to 266 or 75x3.5), and only OSR2 - no UNIX-compatible OS'!!! Yuk, but I'm not using it - my Mom is. It does have a Waveforce and EAX though, and that's cool. If only I had a Matrox to go with it and the FIRST Trinitron tube I bought for Christmas... Also I've brought back my Audible DLS on floppy disks, and I'll post it on the net once I find some server space.
Blackbox 0.60 alpha is cool. It's my default wm now, with a good part of my time also in the newly released 1.x icewm. I have upgraded my video card to 2 mb's, and performance with a 1024x768 virtual screen at 16-bit color is more than acceptable. I have also ordered a 15 inch Trinitron from pcpartsinc.com which will 'complete' my UberboxTM - 1024x768 at 85 Hz and no virtual screen will be much better than my current setup. Other recent additions and replacements include a Winbond EIDE controller card, a Pro Audio Spectrum sound card, a more generic pair of speakers, and an original 3-button Mouse Systems serial mouse. This will be all until I can afford 64 mb's of RAM and a Quantum Fireball - for speed and not necessarily more space - I have a fairly complete set of apps (and games :). I may be replacing my nic with a more generic NE2000 compatible, however.
I have purchased Corel Linux, but I will not be installing it on my 486 - maypost a review on this later - depending who I can con into installing it :). And I have yet again switched from Netscape 3.x to Netscape 4.x - performance is actually comparable on my marginal system.
It's been a good while now since I successfully set up FreeBSD and wrote the text below. And FreeBSD is still my primary OS - amazing. I haven't used any of my friends' Windoze boxes for anything, except to telnet into my box. I also have XDM set up, which allows me to access my desktop anywhere on campus. FYI, I spend most of my time in the residence hall across from the one I live and where my computer, parrot, is kept. I like hanging out with my friends, and I like using my computer. Having set up an Xdenu based X Terminal at the other hall and an X font server on parrot has allowed me to do both. The performance isn't great because it's a measly 386SuX 20, and the X Server on it isn't accelerated YET - I'll have a Mach32 set up soon. But it's useable despite that and is much more useable than if it was running all the programs by itself instead of over X. Thank Linux for saving a 386 - which, for greater emphasis, I found in a dumpster.
I'd been experimenting with various window managers. Yes, that's plural - I believe I have discovered one I can live with. Blackbox was a definite attraction with it's philosophy, emphasizing minimalism and speed, as well as standards compliance. I may spend more time in a Blackbox environment in the future, but at this particular time in its development it's not for me. I mean, I'd prefer to use the latest development version with its new features, but it's not stable enough (duh). VA Research, BTW, is using it as the default window manager on its servers - neat. As for my system, it's the only window manager that is installed as a package. I have the latest version of fvwm2 compiled with minimal options. I love its configurability, and the fact that its been around for a long time, meaning its probably the most stable of window managers. Fvwm will probably remain my 2nd most often used window manager. The Motif emulation is nice too. Lightweight Window Manager is somewhat of a derivative of the Plan9 wm clone. It takes up 20 kb of my hard drive space. It DOES have the most used features of any window manager, and that's it - nice. There is practically no configurability, meaning no wasting precious hours everyday customizing your GUI :). I have only two gripes about this window manager. Otherwise, I think it's the perfect wm for my 386 X Terminal. These complaints are centered on the emphasis on minimalism but obviously not speed or compliance. Interestingly enough, wmx, another minimal wm, took up as much memory as my other window managers while not offering the same level of functionality. LWM does not have this problem and does take up much less memory, but it does not allow for disabling opaque move, which makes moving windows on my 386 impractical. There are also no claims to compliance, but at the very least I think a window manager should understand various window manager hints as at least one 'light' window manager I know of does. That's about it though, and LWM will stay on my hard drive for now.
Icewm is awesome. Yes, it is pretty sick how close it is to Windows 95 in appearance and usage in the default configuration. But that's ideology. I have found myself liking it, perhaps because that was the kind of environment I was used to working in. And though it's not limited to Win95 kind of functionality, that seems to work best for me for most things - and anything else I like from non-Win95 like GUI's I can also use. And I really like this theme that I'm using with it. I like the theme so much that I got aterm for transparency and switched to 800x600 at 16-bit as default. And no, I'm not bothered with having a smaller desktop. Win95-like task switching, the taskbar, and other Icewm facilities allowing for more Win95-behavior as well as the virtual desktops, window list, and window shading work perfectly for me. I know other window managers can easily duplicate these things, but I think Icewm does it better, or at least, does it better in its default configuration than other window managers. Oh, BTW, it's a window manager that was written from scratch just like Blackbox - which to me is another benefit, at least in idealogy. Having seen Twm and its derivatives, and fvwm, which was suppose to be smaller, and its derivatives... and how all those derivatives had a tendency to get more and more features (read bloated)... Window managers like Ice and Blackbox are like fresh breaths of air.
Current video card is a Diamond Stealth 64 20xx DRAM based on the S3 864. It only has 1 mb memory at the moment which will be upgraded. Despite this current limitation, I've gotten very acceptable performance scoring over 135,000 xstones with the SVGA server at 8-bit color. I have no complaints about performance at 16-bit color. In fact, I don't think I'll EVER go back - 256 colors I think is good enough for normal surfing, but, if you're going to have a phat looking desktop, then it's nowhere near enough. And all UNIX power users seem to have a phat looking desktops. I also have the suspicion that some programs are actually running faster, because they don't have to do less if any dithering. Once I upgrade the card and get my SVGA monitor, then I'll probably run at 1024x768 at 16-bit, or stay at 800x600 but will probably increase the size of the virtual screen to 1152x900 in that case.
Overall performance has been impressive. I suspect that my system can easily deal with a few graphical logins. What I also suspect is that FreeBSD may be the most useable, if not only useable, operating system for me on my system. I think I'll be trying out OpenBSD next semester, however. Or maybe not - this FreeBSD ExperienceTM is pretty addicting.
If you haven't heard, the new version of NetHack is out. It actually brought tears to my eyes. Anyway, the Linux binary works well in FreeBSD. Personally, I'm playing through a 80x25 transparent aterm. Wow, is it nice to be able to play NetHack anywhere, anytime, as long as I have access to telnet - love having a network OS... if only I had friends who used UNIX and played roguelike games [like a religion]...
FreeBSD has renewed my love of UNIX, and my love of computers. It was the last day of 1997 that I was able to make Linux useable on a daily basis. But I didn't use it on a daily basis. Ultimately I didn't do it for the same reason I made the transition to NT. It was a simple matter of which operating system I had the best networking with, and, since I was signed up with AOL on a modem connection at the time, NT remained my operating system of choice, that is, until now.
My System
486 DX2/80 upgradeable to DX4/120 256 kb cache upgradeable to 1 mb 32 mb's 60ns fpm memory upgradeable to 128 mb's 520 mb seagate ide hard drive on promise vlb controller 1.44 mb floppy drive generic at keyboard, generic serial mouse cirrus logic 5429 1 mb 80ns vlb video card color vga monitor (will be upgraded to 15" SVGA 1024x768 non-interlaced) opti931 isa sound card (expertcolor) altec lansing gcs100 speakers 3com 509b isa combo nic
The 486 with 8 mb's memory and the hard drive cost me $20 plus shipping. It's a standard AT desktop case with 2 3.5 and 3 5.25's. I didn't pay anything for the extra memory, the monitor, the mouse, or the keyboard. I've had the network card for a while now. I payed $10 including shipping for the cirrus logic and an s3 928. The opti931, with a wavetable daughter board I'm not using at the moment, I payed about $15 total including shipping. The speakers I bought also for around $15. My mobo is a sis 471, a well documented and tweakable motherboard.
DOS and Arachne or Webspyder were horrible. But for some reason I thought that it would be the fastest configuration. I was never more wrong. Not only was the performance terrible, but there's no multi-tasking. I even thought that multi-tasking was impossible to do on this machine! I had all the tools I needed, but I cannot deny for a moment that I missed multi-tasking.
Windows still pretty much sucked with it's cooperative multi-tasking. Performance was horrible, in retrospect, even when I tweaked my configuration files and had 32-bit disk and file access. Video performance was bad even with a Mach64. I had Opera, but performance, again in retrospect, was horrible.
The lack of real multi-tasking and other limitations of DOS, and an inability to play mp3's all made the transition to Linux possible? What? Linux?
I put Red Hat 6.0 on my system. Many know that Red Hat doesn't really have different installation options. You can't just install the base system, your standard gnu utilities, X, a compiler and the most common libraries. If you're like most people you'd probably install the whole system to make sure you're not missing anything important. Unfortunately, I had the limitations of hard disk space, and this was not an option. So I had to somewhat systematically nuke packages that I may or may not have needed in the future, and, after I had done that, I still didn't have enough disk space. Yes, it was still an improvement, but there was still a lot of junk on my system that I knew I'd never ever use, and I had very minimal functionality as I had to remove many packages that I would have liked to have.
Note that this is Red Hat specific. I am yet to try Suse. I have used Debian, but dselect still sucks, and the documentation was wanting when I read it last. Slackware might have been appealing if the package system had dependencies.
Installation was smooth, very, very smooth. Bootups and shutdowns, meaning the few I've done for hardware upgrades or kernel recompiles, and file system checks are much faster. Let's go back to installation. I'll omit the things I took for granted for brevity.
I installed with the X-User option, added some ports like rxvt, lynx, pdksh, unzip, less, among others, the linux binary compatibility package, and eventually the kernel sources. This still left me with a lot of disk space for mp3's. FYI, I have a 64 mb swap, 40 mb root, and 20 mb for var and tmp. The package management has dependencies and the ports tree is cool.
Kernel configuration is well documented, and I had no problems understanding the documentation. My current kernel has only support for the hardware on my computer including my sound card.
Configuring startup was easy, and there is NOTHING running on my system that I don't know about. slash stand slash sysinstall and the 'boot -c' at startup are good to be familiar with.
Configuring XFree86 is not an OS specific issue. You still need to know your mouse, monitor, and chipset info. Documentation for XFree86 is more or less complete. If you're new to X, the most important things you need to know about are .xinitrc, Xdefaults, and window managers. I definitely like having virtual desktops, considering the limitations of a VGA monitor. BTW, I'm running at 640x480, 8-bit, with a 1024x768 virtual screen leaving plenty of memory for XAA.
There is less FreeBSD specific documentation than say Linux documentation, but I am beginning to see this as an advantage. There are only a few sources, and those sources are rather definitive. Deja news and the web can provide additional info.
My FreeBSD configuration from the user side is almost identical to my previous Linux configuration due to X and the Linux binary compatibility in addition to my use of open source software. However, I think I have a more complete system with FreeBSD considering the size of my hard drive and my previous Red Hat installation.
With DOS and Windows I was achieving a maximum of about 230 kbps on the lan. I'm getting about 600-700 kbps now. Internet performance is as good as any other computer I've used on campus. Supposedly, a 486 with FreeBSD can saturate a T1 if serving plain html pages.
Compiling one's own kernel is A Good ThingTM. Instructions and documentation are clear, and the performance improvement is marked.
I did not want gnome or kde for performance reasons. Windowmaker, enlightenment, and afterstep did not appeal to me, or more accurately, it did not appeal to my monitor and my video card. fvwm and derivatives were objectionable. twm is spartan. Blackbox, with its emphasis on minimalism and performance, was perfect. It has enough features and is the easiest window manager to manually configure that I've used so far. BTW, there are only two shortcut keys you can configure, one to switch tasks, and the other to switch desktops. Perfect. BTW2 I'm using a customized BeBox or BeOS theme. Oh, and the default window behavior, and the toolbar among other things just work for me.
Blackbox and the XFree86 3.3.5 SVGA server have been very stable for me. And performance has been excellent. At first I used a Trident 9440 VLB with the linear frame buffer enabled and overclocked to 66(?). The performance was more than adequate. With the Cirrus Logic, which I'm using because it has the fastest text acceleration of all my cards, overclocked to 60, I'm getting 107,000 xstones. MMIO and the linear frame buffer are NOT enabled. Wow. The score without overclocking was 75,000 which is still very reasonable.
I've also used a 2 MB ET4000 W32P VLB which scored nearly 160,000 xstones without the linear frame buffer with a 1024x768 virtual screen and a generic configuration. My 1 MB Number Nine GXE VLB based on the S3 928 scored over 125,000 with a 1024x768 virtual screen under the XF86_S3 server. This is the card I'm keeping as backup. My 1 MB 70ns CL5428 scored 87,000 without the linear frame buffer, overclocked to 55, and with a 1024x768 virtual screen. My Trident 8900CL I tested just for fun scored just under 4,500 with a 1152x900 virtual screen. I had to disable the zero-wait state to get it to work. It did better in the line, text and arc tests, achieving half the scores of the R5 suns1+ which had a total xstones score of 25,000.
I have netscape 3.04. It's much faster at startup and bringing up new windows than 4.7 which I had on this machine for a while. I had knews for a while. I've switched to Licq, so far the best ICQ client I've found for UNIX, from the console based Micq.
Linux binary compatibility is nice, even if it takes up a good part of my hard drive space. FYI, the binary compatibility is with Red Hat 5.2, which is a good Red Hat to be compatible with at this time. I have WordPerfect for Linux installed in my home directory. It runs much better than was expected. Yes, I'll check up on AbiWord again next year, but right now, it doesn't work for me. I also have Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.0 for Linux. It's much slower than xpdf to start up, but it's the latest from Adobe.
I have a console-based sound mixer that works. I telnet into my mail server to check my mail. I use the command-line ftp.
Games include angband. Emulators include iNES. ROMs include Dragon Warrior 2.
Xv is installed in the case I might need to look at some picture. TiMidity++ compiled cleanly. mpg123 is installed. It is important to note that I was unable to get ANY mp3 players to work reasonably under DOS on my system. I can easily play mp3's in the background under FreeBSD even with Netscape running, but I get the impression that performance was better under Linux. Under console, I can play 22khz stereo mp3's FYI.
I've always wanted to use a BSD-like operating system, if only because I wasn't born at the right time. I like being able to control every aspect of my system's behavior. I like having a kernel that only has support for the devices I am using.
I love UNIX. I love the functionality. I love the performance. I love the security. I love being able to access my system remotely. I love editing my menu with vi. I love telnet and ftp. I love ksh' command line editing and file name completion. I love top. I love being able to compile my own kernel.
It's nice to have what amounts to a low-end UNIX workstation. The stability and performance I enjoy each time I use my computer is wonderful. The absolute configurability and saneness of FreeBSD system is a godsend.
There are other UNIX compatible OS' available for the 486 class computer, notably OpenBSD, UnixWare, and also Solaris x86. But I doubt the performance of the latter two would come close to matching what I have now on my system. And the availability of both FreeBSD and Linux software is a definite advantage.
There are two things I learned from this experience I consider most important. First, one really doesn't need the fastest, or even the third or thirtieth, fastest computer for an acceptable level of functionality as long as the right operating system and software is installed. This used to be an ideal once. Now it is something I know from first-hand experience. This is not to say that you should sell your $2-3k computer and buy a 386, but it is a warning against wasting money on over-powered hardware if less expensive, but not cheap, hardware will do the job just as well. The second thing I consider important is that you should try FreeBSD. There is a learning curve, but it is well-worth it, and, IMHO, getting past it will reward you for the rest of your computing days.
Now that I've experienced what kind of performance to expect from a UNIX compatible operating system on PC hardware, I've come up with a few guidelines for an inexpensive, but high performance, PC UNIX workstation.
For multimedia a SB32 is very well supported. Any ATAPI IDE cd-rom will do, but I personally have not needed or used one, even during installation. A low-end 2 piece set of altec lansing's for speakers will probably do.
* You should buy the cheapest processor that is AT LEAST this fast that you can get RETAIL. The latter is optional, but processor prices are so cheap these days, so why not?
The above configuration is very powerful. For an X terminal, the requirements are span less. My friends and I have a 386 20 with 387, 8 mb's memory, 80 mb hard drive, smc isa nic, a mach32 isa video card, and a 15 inch vga monitor set up as an X terminal using Linux based distro Xdenu. My recommendations would be anything compatible with Xdenu, meaning a 386 compatible processor, math co-processor and accelerated video card strongly recommended, and 8 mb's memory. A hard drive isn't even required. An X font server somewhere on the network is, however, highly recommended. A 486 DX with a mach32 and a large monitor is probably the ideal. The Cirrus Logic 5426 and 5428 are also good, cheap accelerated ISA video cards. 8 mb's of memory is absolutely necessary, and more would be a waste if you're not going to run programs locally.
Copyright © 1997 Mark Santos. All rights reserved.