Do you know of a tiny OS?

Question

I have a really old laptop. It is a toshiba satillite pro 400cdt. 75Mhz 40Mb. (max) RAM, and a blank 2Gb. HD. formatted as FAT32 (can't reformat currently). I can dump stuff onto the harddrive. I cannot live boot from a CD, nor can I use a floppy drive. I am looking for small OS that I can just dump and run. I need it small because I need as much system resources for applications as possible. I desire some small media capabilities. I know, I'm very optimistic, and it is most likely not possible, but I need a compact OS to even try. Does anyone know what OS(s) I could use?

Answer 1

DOS 6.22 stripped - bootable and usable at a push with change from 1 MB

Otherwise, Linux ?

Depends if you need GUI interfaces etc. A tiny bit more info on what you want to run on it would have been helpful - but Linux would do the job anyway.

small media - as in just a bit of sound - or not tooo much video?? Different requireements. For just audio, both above would work, for video, may need to use Linux unless you can find some very old apps for Dos - they DID exist, but might be fun trying to find them.

If just still images, then converting BMP and JPG to a self-displaying .exe would solve that - along with time delays etc to control how long image is shown etc

Mark

Answer 2

Have a look at DSL (Damn Small Linux)... but you may be short of RAM for that. If you are, you're into cutting DSL down to have a smaller footprint.

Otherwise you're looking at DOS or WIn3.1... maybe win95. DR-DOS if you want not-MS.

75MHz... blast from the past. I know I ran Win3.1 on a 486-100 at a similar spec.

Answer 3

have alook around on this website where you can get FREE OS's

Answer 4

You can try minix