Tom Ross
PETROS is a new 32 bit operating system released by Trumpet Software that costs around $50. It has been designed to be a win32 clone and run on older hardware. For example the minimum system requirements are a 486 DX processor, 2MB of system RAM, and at least 2MB of hard drive space. However it can also boot off of a floppy. I took a look at this operating system because it is designed to run on older hardware. The social aspect of this is that poorer countries can't afford the latest hardware and newest commercial operating systems. PETROS would allow them to have an up to date relatively cheap operating system that can be run on old cheap hardware. This could be used to help close the digital divide.
For the this project I installed and ran PETROS on an old 486 computer and tried to see how usable it was. The operating system is actually very small and easily fits onto a floppy disk. As mentioned early it can even be installed onto a boot floppy which is what I ended up having to do when it would not boot off of the harddrive. On the floppy there is an ftp server and a telnet server which both seemed to function properly. There is also a mail server which can be downloaded. Since this is a win32 clone I did some tests to see how well it does. First off it needs a DOS partition to install on so it has little problem reading disks formatted in Windows. I then tried running simple win32 command line programs but encountered errors when I attempted to run them. This leaves PETROS with very few or no third party software as I havn't found any third party software that will work with it.
The operating system is functional but being a version one release it is lacking in many key features that can be found in other operating systems. I also encountered other various issues with booting and running it but that may be due to my hardware and not the software. At this time I would not say PETROS would make a good alternative operating system for general use. It could be used for an ftp server or a mail server with the proper hardware but I found it limited otherwise. You can get more for less with Linux which is also much more mature than PETROS and supports more hardware. However if developement continues and PETROS can become a usable win32 clone it could become a viable option when looking at a cheap operating system for older hardware. As for now though running Linux and using WINE would be a better option.