Best OS To Run On Pentium 1 Laptop? (Toshi Sat Pro 460CDX)

Legacy & Vintage
1

Hi

I have a little machine here that was my grandparents. After much fooling around, I have found that a sata adapter and a 320gb drive bump this machine to max storage. I think it has as much ram as I’ll be able to put into it, but past that rly I just need the display, HID, and sound to work. MAYBE the parallel and serial port, but I somehow doubt it, at least for now.

Basically what I want this machine for is:

  1. Zsnes, already tested, works as expected
  2. A music player with an EQ, I don’t care about graphics
  3. A notepad / Code Toy
  4. A floppy transfer tool / wiper (3.5)
  5. possibly maybe something to play sim city 2000 on

Now I am going to be honest I have been a bit hesitant about playing with this machine as the screen is dying and idk what the battery is doing, though it holds a charge for about 40 minutes.

I don’t really know what to run on it. I was thinking maybe void linux ran headless and try to run the newest possible, but that seems hard. I could try older linux, but I won’t know how to fix anything easilyor be able to get help.

Theres windows but if I am honest old windows just reminds me of digging through the god damn toy box. I can’t run 98 or 2k without feeling weird.

Dos? Never really used it, no idea about drivers or anything, but not scared of it at all. Idk about apps either, aside from obvious ones. Zsnes for example.

Open to suggestions

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Thought of something. If DOS ends up being the best, can I theme a dos terminal? Have like a background or something?

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Puppy Linux or Lubuntu maybe? However, since you said this was an old Pentium 1, your mileage with these distros might be limited.

Otherwise, there’s FreeDOS.

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Tiny Core Linux

It can run on i486DX, recommended is Pentium II and 128 MB of RAM.

If that’s too heavy, you may try Damn Small Linux, but its latest release was in 2008, so if you want to keep your box on the internet (idk, using curl and ssh), I’d rather try running Tiny Core.

FreeDOS is an option.

I never used any of these, but I remember seeing TCL on QuidsUp’s channel.

I rewatched the above videos. Yeah, other than the 3 OSes I mentioned, I’m not sure what you may be able to use. I am pretty sure Puppy Linux is way heavier than AntiX, which is also way heavier than TCL, so TinyCoreLinux would be the one I would have to recommend (or FreeDOS).

But you have to get used to cat-ing /sys and /proc, like

# instead of lsusb
cat /sys/bus/usb/devices/*/product
# instead of lscpu
cat /proc/cpuinfo

and so on. I’m not familiar with how to get all the devices from the /proc or /sys trees, but you can look it up on the internet, in case you will need to find drivers for the hardware you have.

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You can try daphile linux, which can be used as an audio server which will also share files
I have a 4 bay usb 2 box and access to all of those drives over the network and an lms server that can output to a usb dac
It’s a closed system however, you access it headlessly over a browser