Old 98SE box as a Linux app

Forum: water cooler
Topic: Old 98SE box as a Linux app
started by: monkymind

Posted by monkymind on Dec. 16 2005,05:00

I know a number of people here breathe life into old computers, once running Win98, by installing DSL. What I'm planning to do is kind of the opposite ...... take a friend's fast Pentium 4 box running Linux and add a virtual Win98SE box using VMPlayer.

History:
I installed Linux on her PC about two years ago and it's been 100% trouble free apart from not running Tax software and Educational CDs. Attempts to get the Windows tax software working have been frustrating and ultimately a waste of time. (This year after a few days of experimenting I located a version of Wine that ran the software and confidently returned her PC. She then did her entire tax return only to find it wouldn't upload the completed data to the Tax office

)

Plan:
Since I've 98 licences from my dark old days :ghostface:

.... why not put at least one to good use. More importantly this 98 VM will only be needed once or twice a year and by burning the finished VM image to CD I'll always has a clean and ready to run backup!

Problem:
I've not used any form of windows for a long time and my re-acquaintance with 98 has left me under whelmed and struggling to find the right apps needed to tweak it to some sort of basic usefulness.

Do I need to run virus protection? Are there any great new apps/utilities I should know about (keeping in mind this needs to be lean as possible)?

Cheers
rob
Here's my v0.01 attempt....
<

>
Full size
< http://img225.imageshack.us/img225/344/vm98se26ia.gif >

Posted by skaos on Dec. 16 2005,12:39

You can find a free antivirus package at: < http://free.grisoft.com/doc/1 >

Posted by doobit on Dec. 16 2005,16:43

That's about the best free one out there. Adaware by lavasoft is a very good spyware/adware killer.

Posted by hawki on Dec. 17 2005,00:05

Hi
This is not an advertisement but for the last couple years I have been using TurboTax on the web. It runs with several good browsers with Linux. I did have trouble printing the completed forms but I think I stored them as .pdf files then printed and it worked. I can't remember now if it required Flash or Java but I think it needed one of them.
good luck

Posted by monkymind on Dec. 17 2005,01:04

Quote (skaos @ Dec. 16 2005,21:39)

Posted on Dec. 16 2005,21:39You can find a free antivirus package at: < http://free.grisoft.com/doc/1 >

Quote (doobit @ Dec. 17 2005,01:43)

That's about the best free one out there. Adaware by lavasoft is a very good spyware/adware killer.

Thanks I'll definitely try it out

I had installed AntiVir because a resident scanner seemed the best approach for a VM that will not be running often. Unfortunately the AntiVir resident program crashes from time to time

Quote (hawki @ Dec. 17 2005,09:05)

Hi
This is not an advertisement but for the last couple years I have been using TurboTax on the web..
good luck

I don't think TurboTax works outside of the US but I'll look into it. The Australian Tax Office uses some Linux in house and their tax software is written in Delphi (Kylix), so it could easily be compiled for the two platforms, but they won't do it.

Cheers
rob

Posted by cbagger01 on Dec. 17 2005,06:33

I use AVAST (free home edition) for some of my MSWindows OS installs without problems.

To keep it lean and mean, I only install the runtime/resident protection and skip all the extra fluff like mail/IM/peer-2-peer protection. The resident protection will catch virii from these delivery systems if a virus file is ever accessed by the OS.

Posted by monkymind on Dec. 17 2005,09:32

Hi cbagger01!
great tip as always :cool:

everything is stable now Avast has replaced AntiVir.

The nicest thing about using a VM image was zipping it up before making any major changes and then having these VM archives available as restorable snapshots.

Since this project was really about finding a way to run 2 programs which have no Linux equivalents .... I'm very happy with the results. Perhaps I could have achieved similar results with CrossoverOffice and Win4lin but it would have been expensive ......

The only interesting Windows program I found was an old freeware program which puts a network icon in Win98's system tray. (see screen shot in my first post)
< http://www.hplsoft.com/download/m_nstat.zip >
The newer shareware version has more features but didn't fit it to my recycleware constraints :blues:

Cheers
rob