I’m a computer junkie — that’s how it is — so, when I ran across a couple of Compaq Deskpro computers with unknown specifications for the price of a carton of cigarettes, which I can afford since I quit smoking a few years ago, I bought them. Soon after I arrived home I "popped" the covers and learned that they had 550 MHz P3 processors, 256 MHz of RAM, 6.5 GB hard drives and no operating system installed. I checked to see if I could plug in faster processors but the motherboards wouldn’t support anything faster than 600 MHz and, even if I had a couple of 600 MHz P3 processors, that didn’t seem worth the trouble. Any of several full-featured Linux distributions would run on these machines but they’d be awfully slow so I tried DSL in the first one.
DSL, a live CD distribution which I like to call "Darn Small Linux", has worked just fine almost every time I’ve tried it but it wasn’t able to configure the PS2 mouse on the machine. I switched to a USB mouse which DSL found and configured with no problems and since everything else seemed to work just fine I opened a root terminal (in the menu the path is XShells/Root Access/ and I prefer "Light"), typed "cfdisk", used cfdisk to set up two primary partitions (hda1: 600 MHz, type 82, Linux swap and hda2: the balance of the drive, type 83, Linux), rebooted into the live CD and ran the "Install to Hard Drive" process (in the menu, the path is Apps/Tools/Install to Hard Drive). A few minutes later I was able to "test drive" DSL as an installed operating system and it performed very nicely indeed. I found it very easy to install additional software to the MyDSL folder and there are many more choices than I recall seeing in previous versions of DSL.
Before getting into the second machine, I visited distrowatch.com, did a little research to see if there were any new distros designed for older hardware and rediscovered KateOS. I tried KateOS a few months ago and wasn’t happy with it but I could tell they were onto something. I downloaded the latest version (3.6), learned how to burn an ISO file in GnomeBaker (yes, I’m still learning to use my Debian Etch Linux machine and this was the first time I’ve used Gnomebaker with an ISO file) and burned a CD with no problems. KateOS has followed the lead of several other popular distros and produced an installable live CD. The live CD ran fine and had no trouble configuring the PS2 mouse. This is a nicely done distro running Xfce with lots of popular software (Firefox, Thunderbird and the Gimp to name a few) preinstalled but the installation gave me some pause. When the text-based installer reached the HDD formating point in the install the software opened gparted to permit me to manually partition the hard drive. I’ve never used gparted and the help file for gparted wasn’t included with the live CD. Fortunately, there was a terminal icon on the Xfce toolbar beneath the gparted window so I opened a terminal, typed "su" for Super User (i.e. root) access, entered the root password (which was simply "kate"), typed "cfdisk", hit Enter, used cfdisk to partition the hard drive exactly as I would if I were installing DSL, closed cfdisk, closed the terminal, closed gparted and resumed the installation at the next step. KateOS was as fast as DSL on these machine, feels more like a "genuine" desktop distro (DSL is designed to be used as a live CD or flash drive distro), comes with more software choices and is built on a newer kernel version. What’s not to like?
KateOS or DSL are good choices for anyone who’s still using Win9x, 98SE or 98ME because they can’t afford a new machine and a newer version of Windows won’t run on the machine they have. Because they’e both live CDs, it’s easy to try them out without making any changes in the computer.