Seum said:
I reduced the size of one of the partitions down to 114GB, then bad
news. Almost at the end of the ASUS User Guide is the rotton news that
the board does not support Win2K. What non-Micros*** OS would be closest
to Win2k or WinXP?
A few years ago I played with Simply Mepis for a few hours and I was
surprised that I was able to cruise the Internet so quickly. However,
I'll try to follow your instructions and rescue ole Win2K.
TIA
My approach is, I don't give up, until I hit a brick wall.
I would go to the Asus download page, and select "WinXP" as the OS,
then download and examine the drivers, for the evidence that they
don't really support Win2K.
Win2K and WinXP share a lot, in terms of underlying architecture. In the
past, it would have been relatively easy to make the same driver, work
with both.
A possible place you can get stuck on a modern system, is if you use
integrated graphics to drive your monitor. The VGA driver (a couple hundred
megabytes in size) may refuse to install on Win2K, and may do an OS check.
And then your 3D games wouldn't be accelerated. That's an example of a
brick wall. On one system, I installed an ancient card, an FX5200,
to solve that problem, as drivers exist for it. It's not a good
card, but it has drivers.
Windows also has a built-in VESA driver. That is what runs your
screen initially at 640x480 or 800x600. But that built-in driver
isn't the one you want for long term usage. It can be used if
the proper VGA driver isn't available, but the tiny screen would
drive you crazy.
You'd start with something like the chipset package, and see if
it has any drop dead issues. That one shows on the Asus site as
an 81.33 MB download. I'd start by examining that with something
like 7ZIP, opening INF files and seeing what OS support
is really in there.
LAN drivers are generally pretty good. Sometimes you even get DOS
support on new LAN chips. So LAN chips or interfaces, tend to get
better driver support (multiple flavors of NDIS).
I managed to install Windows 98 on one of my Core 2 systems. It
wasn't advertised, but I knew based on the chipset maker, that
it had potential. It's really a matter of going through all the
drivers, seeing which ones are essential, and which ones can be
worked around. On that system, I wasn't using any PCI Express stuff,
and if I tried to run Windows 98 and plug in some other cards, it
might not have worked too well. Windows 98 will only use one core
of the processor, but it was still smoking fast as an OS.
*******
Linux is an alternative. It's especially handy, to pop in a Linux LiveCD
and surf the web, to look for solutions to your Windows installation
efforts. So even if you have only one computer, Linux is great
for maintenance stuff.
You'll find the occasional distro, that can't get your LAN running on the
first try. I find those problems hard to debug (unless a second
computer is available and running). Every distro seems to do the
LAN stuff slightly differently.
Where I run into trouble with Linux, is some of the decisions the
distro makers have made. With Ubuntu, what they did with sound
was a sticking point. Sound didn't work well on low end systems,
and the solution they had required some pretty modern features
(I think some parts of the solution run "real time priority",
and rely on the best of the time keeping options for Linux).
They also tend not to document everything to an equal level.
I like to use things like "telnet" and "FTP" on my own home
LAN, for quick experiments. And I might end up wasting half
the day, figuring out how to do it. The purpose of "telnet",
is for connecting to a computer where the GUI has died and
the keyboard no longer works. You should be prepared for
some contingencies like that with Linux, at least if
you want to rescue something you're working on, like some
document you haven't saved. (Yes, there are more secure
protocol alternatives. I even use them sometimes, but it
means carrying a floppy diskette from one computer to
another, with security keys on it. A PITA! Eventually,
you get sick of walking that floppy around.)
My best experience with Telnet and FTP, was on my old MacOSX
box. It had a simple tick box for Internet services. You could
tick "FTP", do a quick file transfer with another machine,
then turn it off again. Those kinds of protocols are not
recommended for "Internet exposed" machines, as given enough
time, you'll get hacked. If you're behind a NAT box, that's
a bit better (i.e. don't port forward your Telnet setup
).
The best level of control, comes with Gentoo distro. In there,
I could cut out the sound subsystem I didn't like. But I found
desktop integration wasn't as "colorful" as Ubuntu. So on the
one hand, the solution could be "technically tuned" the way
I wanted, but couldn't compete with the colorful Ubuntu desktop.
This is a screenshot of my first Gentoo install, showing the
USE flags. The "-pulseaudio" entry, turns off pulseaudio, and
uses an older sound solution instead. It can take up to 24 hours
of compile time, to build Gentoo (if you include enough packages),
but they give excellent recipes on how to do it, so it's like
baking a cake. With Ubuntu, it's like being given a store bought
cake, and not liking the icing, and the cake tastes a little strange.
With Gentoo, you're responsible for more of the baking process.
http://img198.imageshack.us/img198/8893/gentoo.gif
I have a longer list of USE flags, on some of my other installs.
That was just my first attempt at it. You build that list
gradually, as you're working on one package after another.
When you "rebuild world" later, that's when those get reused,
and help make the whole environment consistent.
Paul
