Dolch Pac 65 - Part 7: Windows XP and Crunchbang Linux installation, and quintuple boot! 

What the ...? You can buy it for $10,742.99, in stock, ships same day. Complete with the latest 450 MHz Pentium II, 64 MB of RAM and a whopping 5GB hard drive. Just for fun I clicked and it added it to my cart. Joke? Proof that there are wrinkles in the space time fabric? Did they not update their database since 1998? Should I write a glowing review? Something does not compute. Mind blown.

Wow! It looks legit and all! Weird!

(spits in my mind after seeing McAfee listed as the manufacturer on the page)

I think my heart skipped a couple beats at that price point....

I'm pretty sure they sell it to some weird government/military agency that has to have that exact computer for some weird protocol that would require bazillion of dollars to change. Either that, or it's just used as part of some manufacturing process control/CNC machine somewhere. I worked at truck manufacturing plant that had plenty of hardware being controlled by very old PC with expansion card custom made by some company that doesn't exist anymore - most of my job was tending to early 90's era computers. If someone offered me NOS PCs with exactly same specifications I'd probably buy them for whatever ridiculous price they would want;)

Even for debian the runtime memory requirements have increased (even without X/Xorg/Wayland)

CrunchBang still developped, under the BunsenLab Linux name.

I have had that flaky screen connection problem with both of my Dolches with 800x600 screens. It's the low profile connector on the screen itself that unplugs. Very hard to get to. See my older, first Dolch video: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-gETTwDHAl_w.html

now you are adding the hard stuff. i gave up on them a long time ago... But true, i want to see that !

Yes I have to try again at lower res, and then try turning video acceleration all the way back up.

Thanks! That definitely sounds like the right option to use. For now it works, so maybe it does it by itself, but I'll definitely look into that if I run in trouble again.

Exactly what I thought when watching the video "you're missing this makeactive instruction in your win98 GRUB entry script". I guess CuriousMarc's solution works here because WinXP does not care to have its root partition active (so this privilege can be given to Win98). Probably "makeactive" would be mandatory if you wanted to boot both for instance both Win95 and Win98 each on a different partition.

As of this video, yes and yes. It even tried to update me with the dreaded Windows Genuine Advantage...

I once tried to run Linux on 486 with 4 MB RAM, but most distributions (even super lightweight ones like DSL) couldn't fit a kernel in 4MB ;)

As someone running Debian on a iBook G3 -- please don't remind me of the pain... In this case, the radeon driver in Debian 8 (In 7.x it was fine iirc) just refuses to play ball with the first generation Radeon chip inside. Screen goes black as soon as it loads, and there is nothing that you can do to change that. Only solution is to blacklist the radeon driver and run with radeonfb (framebuffer only -- no acceleration of any kind). Makes an already miserably slow system even more so. Turns out Linux devs aren't too concerned with continued support for 15+ year old hardware. What a shame. ;)

It's not just Mac and Dolch - video driver set up is a weakness in Linux, particularly in the more modern versions that claim to do everything automagically and dispense with xorg,conf. I've just been struggling with setting up a system on a brand new M/B CPU combination and it was a nightmare.

@@TechLeftBehind The Linux guys can't do anything for 15 yr old hardware if they don't have any access to it. It's just unobtainable.

Not that I remember, but I had already done a lot of messing up with the BIOS settings for DOS and Win98. Mine had the screen issue that I first thought was a crash, but it was just an unreadable dialog box. Googling up "XP hangs at mup.sys" I get a lot of hits. I did not spend time to look into it, but it seems to be a well-known issue, with hopefully with a well-known solution.

@@CuriousMarc Thank you so much for your reply! I really enjoy the channel. Unfortunately, it's non-trivial, I think it may be some sort of hardware failure or perhaps an issue with the BIOS settings - there are quite a few possible permutations so hard to know for sure, but it's exactly the same version that you have so I'm hopeful. And unfortunately the XP boot sequence isn't as verbose as Linux so difficult to get to the root cause. Will keep digging :)

Oops, that looks complicated indeed. Unfortunately I have no experience with that problem. If you want I dumped the BIOS for my board during my BIOS incident debug. I could post it on my web site. At least you would have the same BIOS version as mine to try.

​@@CuriousMarc Haha, probably not as complicated as restoring an Apollo guidance computer :) After looking through your videos, it seems like the IDE cable could be the issue - you're using 80-pin I believe whereas I'm using 40-pin. Need to wait for the part now to be sure. Thanks for your help!

​@@CuriousMarc Hi there, so I ended up trying a different cable and unfortunately, I was unsuccessful. I've come to the conclusion that it's either a hardware failure (which would be outside of my area of expertise) or a bios misconfiguration. Windows 98 runs fine, but I'm unable to get anything installed that is more recent than 2000 (win 2k, xp or crunchbang). If you do have the time, is there any chance you could please publish a quick video or pictures of your bios settings for this machine? Seeing the values that you've set on the following pages would be super useful: imgur.com/a/IolyQoK

It's a secret.

@@CuriousMarc 5678

Or maybe 6969

See the first videos - NT is the original system from this machine with the Fiber Channel software and drivers

But you get the free vintage bits for being the first comment! Lucky you.

Vintage bits?

@Bradley Nuckols How can you boot from SCSI when the drivers for SCSI are on the SCSI disk? They're not in the motherboard! 😱

It's a Pentium II. Why your suggestion won't work is left as an exercise for the reader.

Pentium 2 is not 64 bit. Might want to research the difference between cpu architectures.

N'importe-quoi! C'est comme si tu nous racontais que la Renault 4 est la meilleure voiture Francaise, et que tous les progrès qui ont été réalisés depuis sont un gaspillage de resources. (Je tiens aussi à souligner que Windows XP est de loin la version la plus moche de Windows. C'est la Fiat Multipla des OS)

Olivier Doriath Mauvaise comparaison, les Kangoo ne nécessitent pas un moteur de formule un pour marcher. Et on s'en fout que ce soit moche, je parles d'os pour le business. Pas pour l'entertainment. Seven est une horreur à gérer quand le système automatique de réparation d'erreurs ne peut rien. Et il peut peu. Et sinon, la meilleure voiture française est le DS et aucune, aujourd'hui, ne lui vient à la cheville question confort.

Autant j'ai de l'amour nostalgique pour XP, mais il y a une raison très importante de passer à autre chose. Le modèle de sécurité à l'intérieur était encore l'approche naïve du monde avant Internet. Il est tout simplement dangereux de fonctionner dans n'importe quel environnement en réseau. La sécurité de Windows 7 et 8 a été progressivement améliorée par rapport à XP, mais ils sont toujours risqués. Même si Windows 10 a de nombreuses failles à détester, la sécurité intégrée dépasse de loin toute version précédente. Vous devez vraiment l'exécuter sauf si vous devez exécuter des programmes avec des problèmes de compatibilité graves. (Désolé pour toutes les erreurs que Google Translate a faites, je ne parle pas un seul mot de français ...)

@Matthew Petry I'm sure we all understand English in an English speaking video's comments section. I wouldn't worry about it too much :) @Λογος Même pour le business, Windows 10 est supérieur à XP à mon avis, parce qu'il est plus stable et plus sûr, deux facteurs qui sont très importants dans le monde du business. Bien sûr, 10 utilise (beaucoup) plus de ressources, mais n'est-ce pas naturel d'utiliser les resources mises à la disposition de l'OS? Je souhaterais ajouter que tout environnement professionnel dépense beaucoup plus d'argent sur les salaires que sur le matériel et les logiciels, ce qui signifie aussi qu'il ne nuira pas à une entreprise d'installer un SSD et 8 ou 16 Go de RAM en plus sur leurs postes de travail.

Olivier Doriath Google transtlade did quite a good job actualy. Since you said it's a english speaking thread, I will continue in english. My experience with seven is that it's less stable that XP. And when the system is not capable of reparing itself you are left with no other option than prceeding to a complete reinstalation of the OS. It never occured with XP. The ressources are not there for the os to use, but for the apps. It's a pain in the back when 70% of the hard drive of your laptop is acctualy used by 10 or seven, forcing you to use an external drive when xp laptops with smaller hdd did well.

Not a fan of sudo either. I don't think the developers like it either. They were forced into it by the malevolent hacker activity unfortunately. But if you want, you can still enable a root super user account by simply entering a root password: just do "sudo passwd root". It might tell you it does not support it or wants a strong password, but just enter any password and it will work. And after that, when you need to do something, just do "su yourpassword" and voila, you are a super user like in the good old Unix times, no annoying sudo needed. It's a security risk and not recommended of course.