Which OS for a Performa 640CD DOS Compatible?

[dot.this]

If you need a little background, it's got a 33 MHZ 68040 and a 33 MHX 486 in one box, and you can assign Mac folders to be PC disks.

I've got 8.0 and 7.5.5 happily running on the Mac side, but I want to install a real OS on the PC side. Recommendations? I'm a total Maccie, so I'd rather not learn a bunch of terminal commands.

[voidmain]

How much RAM?

[psyjax]

Old windows 3.1, fun to mess with.

But I bet you anything, Void will hook you up with a fine ol'skool Linux/UNIX OS.

Get 'em void  

[Master of Reality]

windows of course!!!!

it depends on how much RAM you have as voidmain said.
 FreeBSD can run on 4 MB of ram (needs 5MB for the isntall though)

[ravuya]

Win3.1 will work okay on the DOS side, but I think it'd be cool for you to learn a little bit of Linux or BSD...

[dot.this]

40 MB of RAM on the Mac mobo.

I think the PC card hasn't been upgraded, which should mean 4 MB of PC memory, ugradeable to 32 MB. I could probably get more PC RAM cheap, right? The PC side should also be able to borrow RAM from the Mac side, or that's what the manual says. Should I use Apple's PC Setup Control Panel or work around it? I've never set up a 486 OS on this machine.

Anything else? The PC has a 486 DX2 processor, 66 MHz, not 33, sorry about that.

[psyjax]

quote:Originally posted by dot.this:
40 MB of RAM on the Mac mobo.

I think the PC card hasn't been upgraded, which should mean 4 MB of PC memory, ugradeable to 32 MB. I could probably get more PC RAM cheap, right? The PC side should also be able to borrow RAM from the Mac side, or that's what the manual says. Should I use Apple's PC Setup Control Panel or work around it? I've never set up a 486 OS on this machine.

Anything else? The PC has a 486 DX2 processor, 66 MHz, not 33, sorry about that.

Hmmm... if I recall correctly using the Mac RAM caused some slow down. I had one of the PPC 6100 dual boot systems.

But other than that, the control panel should work.

Hmmm... but if you are planing to put linux on there, you may risk caousing wierd errors. I don't know how finiky it will be about your hardware.

So the best choice may be getting PC RAM.

[voidmain]

A 486 with 4MB of RAM?  I would suggest Geoworks.

[dot.this]

I really have no idea what to do with it, but I got the Mac side running so well (with OS 8.0 of all things!) that I wanted to rig up an equally good PC side.

[voidmain]

I don't think you have a chance of an equally good PC side without 40MB of RAM on that side.

[dot.this]

So I order 28 MB from MemoryToGo or get it at the Used PC shop nearby. No big deal, shouldn't be more than $30.00. Assuming I've got the full 32 MB, what then?

(I was thinking about what I can do. I want to make serious use out of it. Word processor, for sure. I could hook it to a StyleWriter or even a GCC laserwriter. Translating files, maybe. It's ethernet-challenged, but I could AppleTalk it to my 6400, which isn't. I've got a spare 56k serial modem, so it could be a fairly serious net machine, for e-mail or browsing, but not net games, unless you like bolo.)

[voidmain]

How much disk space does the x86 side have available to it?

[dot.this]

I've got a 1.0 gig ext SCSI drive, and a 350 MB IDE internal drive; it can boot from either.

[voidmain]

Ouch, not much room. I just did a little searching and I see where people have like 4GB disks hooked up to them. At any rate, it looks like Win 3.1 was likely the OS that ran on this box although I see mention of people running Win 95 also (I think win95 requires some sort of upgrade). If it were mine I would try to install Linux on it.  

[ September 30, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

[Master of Reality]

ftp://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/
version 1.0 to 8.0 of redhat Linux. Perhaps one of the older ones will work.