Know what? I changed my mind, the blue isn't bad. I recently reinstalled and haven't been arsed to customize the grub and slim themes and... it's fine. Sometimes I can be too picky.

Oh you rock, steve_v! Thank you so much for taking the time to run those test. I sincerely appreciate it.

I added the results to the spreadsheet and I used it to make this comparison between real and virtual CPUs. I think it's kind of interesting, especially the math and logic related test that aren't potentially affected by a difference in graphics cards.

The virtual CPUs are faster than their real counterparts, so that's a good thing to know as it becomes harder to find functioning old hardware. Personally I have three old machines of the era that are just e-waste now, broken and dead for various reason despite my best efforts to revive them.

I just don't have the money to throw at a replacement, given the crazy prices for this stuff now. Back in 2003 I paid a whole $25 for my Deskpro 4000 desktop and something around $20 for my now-dead Compaq LTE/25 laptop (486SX 25MHz). My other two dead computers were free from the computer shop I worked at in 2005. Back then this stuff was worthless junk - my boss had a literal barn full of old computers and parts! Now though, you're looking at $500+ CAD for a verified working system that isn't beat to hell or otherwise abused. Heck, people want $150+ CAD for untested junk. It's kind of insane.

So yeah, I sincerely appreciate your time and effort!

The idea here in this post is to get results using real hardware so there is an accurate baseline for performance characteristics.

I do have results from various emulators, but these results show that the emulators aren't entirely accurate (PCem Pentium 233MMX is 30% faster than my real Pentium 233MMX machine), so I'd like to get some accurate results from real hardware. Incidentally, DOSBox and DOSBox-X performance is identical when set to the same cycles, regardless of any core/cpu related setting available in DOSBox-x, so it's not worth the hassle of compiling/using DOSBox-x for this use case.

That's a nice machine! Technically my first PC was a hand-me-down 486DX4 100 clone that I used for a bit in 1998. Getting it running taught me how to remove a Master Boot Sector virus, shortly after learning what a boot sector was!

If you're able to down clock you 486 to 33MHz that would be great, but the results at 66MHz or 100MHz would be excellent as well, because I could compare them to my results from emulated systems (using PCem version 17). Also, from what I have seen through emulated system, a 486DX2/66 ends up being exactly twice as fast in the benchmark as a 486DX33, so halving the results on a real 486DX2/66 should be an accurate representation of a 486DX33.

As far as running the software goes, Qbasic is included in the DOS 6.22 boot disk available here,

https://www.allbootdisks.com/download/dos.html

So it's possible to you write that image to a floppy and boot your computer using it rather than FreeDOS. If you copy my BENCHES.BAS file onto the floppy disk, you can run it like so

qbasic /run benches.bas

The results can be saved to a text file, results.text. To exit Qbasic, press Alt to open the menu, then arrow down the File menu and select Exit.

Alternately, you could download QBasic 1.1 from qbasic.net here,

https://www.qbasic.net/en/qbasic-downlo … preter.htm

and add it to your FreeDOS installation, as it's 100% compatible with FreeDOS.

I sincerely appreciate your time and consideration! Please don't feel obligated to help, especially if it means futzing with your hardware to do so. My burning curiosity is not that important.

TIL how to mount the disk image file I use as a hard drive in DOS with PCem. This is one of those things that I used to know at one point, but suffered from the o'l "use it or lose it" problem.

Beforehand: Run PCem, configure the machine, make a new hard drive image, run the machine, configure the drive in the BIOS, install DOS on it (using floppy disk images), exit PCem.

These commands must be run with root privilages (I use sudo).

# Attach the hard drive image file as a loopback device
losetup -f -P /home/rob/.pcem/disks/dos_622_62mb.img

# Verify the loopback device is the expected number and has the expected partition
losetup -l

# Mount the partition and open in the file explorer
mount /dev/loop0p1 /mnt
caja /mnt

Copy files to/from the DOS hard drive.

# Disconnect and unmount the hard drive image file
umount /dev/loop0p1
losetup -d /dev/loop0

# Verify loopback is cleared (shouldn't output anything)
losetup -l

It's still way less of a hassle to use DOSBox, as it uses files directly on your normal file system, but each emulator has its use cases.

As a person who prefers a blue/white desktop/icon theme, I like this new theme better than the red theme (which I didn't like at all), however this shade of blue is somehow offensive to my eyes. No idea why, which I know isn't helpful, sorry. I prefer the lighter blue further down. That said, I will 100% be replacing Slim and desktop theme anyway, so my preferences are moot.

Your effort is appreciated none the less!

Having a bunch of Chromebooks around for the family and the Lenovo 100e also being sold as a Chromebook, I wondered how the browsing experience would be in ChromeOS, using CloudReady by Neverware.

I am sad to report that hands down, ChromeOS provided the best browsing experience of all my testing in Linux and Windows.

- I didn't have to fix any screen tearing issues, because it "just worked".
- Scrolling was always smooth, unlike using Google Chrome in Windows or Linux, where scrolling a image heavy page, such as an Amazon listing, jumps up or down too far. In fairness, that happens in Windows on any browser, because bloated OS is bloated (10 Pro no less).
- Youtube and Netflix worked perfectly.
- Online docs also worked perfectly.

The crazy part is that my setup of Xfce on Devuan is super minimal and lean, yet there's just something about it that makes browsing in all but Vivaldi a little janky. Google Chrome really does not like the tear free solutions for Intel that work just fine for Vivaldi and Chromium, all of which are based on similar versions of Chrome. Heck even Firefox works better than Google Chrome when compositing is disabled. It don't make sense!

After the CloudReady experiment, I also tried Devuan ASCII and the browser experience was OK apart from poor battery life, even with a 4.19 kernel and tweaking. It's now setup with Beowulf and kernel 5.8, which works great apart from the janky browser performance, which Vivaldi minimizes.

So I gave SeaMonkey a whirl, by downloading their binary package from their website, and it actually ran really well on this machine.  Youtube playback was smooth, but the audio didn't work. I imagine that it was compiled with the PA dependency, so can't fault it for that given that I don't have PA installed. Page loads were slower, but that's what ya get on today's Internet when you're not using Ad Block. It did seem to be more frugal with memory than Firefox, so it could be good for low end hardware.

Was neat how much SeaMonkey still looked like the Netscape Navigator I remember using in Windows 95.

Awesome. Thanks for explaining how that works! Now the question is, do I want to bother with all that? lol... I feel bad for not wanting to bother installing a Debian VM and reproducing/reporting the problem, but at the same time, I have a sneaky suspicion that nothing would come of the time spent anyway.

So I guess a summary would be...

If you are getting segmentation fault crashes with SQLite Browser in Beowulf, the easiest way to fix the problem is to remove the apt installed version and compile it from their GitHub source code instead. It's a fairly simple process and it only takes a minute or two to compile on low end hardware.

There are fundamental differences in the way GIMP 2.10 handles several important functions that I used all the time, such as moving layers or selections that are behind other layers - in 2.8 it's possible to grab/move layers/elections that are behind other layers, while in 2.10 it's not. I literally can't do my work without that functionality. There are other things that also don't work properly anymore, where "properly" is the precedent set by over a decade of they worked in GIMP.

Good for you if you like GIMP 2.10, but there's absolutely no purpose for you to say so in this thread. It's like coming to this forum to post, "Debian works for me". It adds nothing to the conversation.

Heh, I didn't even notice!

I appreciate this choice. The Debian Ncurses installer is better laid out than the Slackware Ncurses installer, making it just a little easier to navigate, but both are fast, functional, and fine even in 2020.