The five operating systems (OS) that we have for you in this issue are really small. After all, they all fitted on to the same CD with plenty of room for other software. In a day and age when standard OSs span multiple CDs, what place do these smaller ones have in the larger scheme of things? Plenty actually!

Today India has an installed base of about five million PCs. And about half of them are so old that they’ll have to desperately struggle to run an OS like Win 98. Does that mean that users who use them should give up the pleasures of browsing the Web or sending e-mail? It’s here that the smaller OSs make their mark. QNX, for example, can provide fast and fully graphical Web browsing with all the bells and whistles on a 486. What if you don’t want all the functionality built into the OS majors, but just one function, say that of a proxy server. Again a 486 or a Pentium 100, running one of the smaller Linux machines, can do the job admirably.

QNX RTP (Real Time Platform)

Hybrid of a Real Time OS and a Platform OS

This modular RTOS runs happily on an old x486 with 16 MB RAM for console applications. To run its full-featured GUI properly, just add 16 MB more.

The OS has a small footprint and auto-detects a host of cards including display, network, and sound. Installation is straightforward. The executable (in the/os/qnx directory in the CD) runs from within Windows and installs QNX on the same file system. You are also given the option of creating a boot floppy if you want. The machine then goes in for a re-boot. Upon reboot, the Windows boot menu gives you the option of booting into Windows, QNX RTP or QNX RTP (DMA Disabled) mode. Boot into QNX RTP and the OS detects and mounts your devices and file systems.

Login to the Photon GUI with your username and password and enter the world of QNX. Applications included are full-featured browser (Voyager), e-mail client (V-mail), media player (phplay), editors, and a graphics package. You can use the Package Manager to download and install more stuff from its WWW Repository.

Work on it for around an hour and believe us, you’ll be hooked for good. Strongly recommended, especially if you have an older machine.

Dragon Linux

(Lite version is on the CD with console and networking utilities only) Installs in your Windows partition

A free Linux distribution, which demands only a 486 processor with 8 MB of RAM to run the console applications or 32-64 MB for a full-fledged X-Window system. For a change, installation is simple. It can be installed from a DOS or Windows partition. Create a directory C:\DRAGON. Unzip DRAGONLINUX.ZIP from /os directory and copy the ‘DRAGON’ directory to it. Now restart into full MS-DOS mode. Next, run ‘SETUP.BAT’ found in the C:\DRAGON\SETUP DIRECTORY. In the login prompt presented, type ‘ROOT’ and then ‘SETUP’. This will start an installation wizard, which will guide you through setting up Dragon Linux. You’ll be prompted for the packages or applications you want to install. Since we haven’t included X-Window packages, you’ll not be able to install KDE or GNOME. You will then be asked for the amount of disk space to allocate for Dragon Linux. Dragon Linux doesn’t support more than 2 GB of hard disk space. After all the selected packages are installed, the installation finishes with a reboot.

You can’t run Dragon Linux from within an MS-DOS window. So you need to be in full DOS mode. Change to the directory C:\DRAGON and issue the command ‘DRAGON’. After a booting sequence, you are shown a login prompt. Login as root with no password, as the password has not been setup yet. It’s advisable to set up the root password at this point by using the ‘PASSWD’ command.

Dragon Linux includes the Slackware Linux utility called ‘SETUP’. This will aid you in configuring your system, setting up the mouse, network, dial-up connection, etc. Read the Readme file (included in dragonlinux.zip) for using ‘SETUP’.

You can download additional packages like X-Windows (KDE, GNOME), GIMP (a powerful graphics editor), Emacs, etc, from http://dragonlinux.net/. These are Slackware packages and can be installed using ‘installpkg’ command. Dragon Linux also has limited support for RPM packages.