... tell the boss to stop being so cheap and upgrade to this decade
I heard the same argument from the Microsoft reseller that sold us a bunch of new machines with Win 8 on them so that we can have employees connect to an HP-UNIX server running a POS through a terminal emulator. Really. (I was mysteriously left out of this discussion ... the MS guys don't like me a whole lot).
We have a handful of registers that only work with the POS. Sure, employees can use them for web browsing here and there, but that is not a necessary feature of these machines. They exist to receive money from customers and keep the inventory accurate. Why in the world we needed new machines running Win 8 for this is beyond me, though, I imagine the MS resellers could drop a few buzzwords and make any average Joe think it necessary.
On a side note, my familiarity with Linux is limited to what I need to do to maintain some web servers. Can anyone point me in the direction of a free alternative to Reflections for HP (from Attachmate)? I am aware of QC Term, but it is not actively supported and it's rather buggy.