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Old Linix Distributions

Chuck(G) said:
What's "Linix"? :)
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Well noted. Linux for those in a hurry to post before the boss walks in post lunch break.

DOS lives on!! said:
Thanks for sharing these. Better for me to start from the early versions than the newest, isn't it. :)
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You could gradually work backwards or try Linux from scratch http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

The link I posted may not be that useful but I hope others like Ole have some useful links to historic (goodness are they really that old?) Linux distros.
 
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Caluser2000 said:
You could gradually work backwards or try Linux from scratch http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
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Actually working backwards is indeed probably more instructive. Linux from scratch is also a good idea if one is ambitious. I got the book a few years back. Perhaps I should have a look at it. lol

The link I posted may not be that useful but I hope others like Ole have some useful links to historic (goodness are they really that old?) Linux distros.
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Don't look at me! I thought you were the expert. :)

The link you posted has a lot of actually useful versions as well as a few originals like Yggdrasil and SLS. Still the 0.01 version is calling out to me. I plan to have a look at that some time.

The first version that I tried I downloaded from a BBS over a period of a week or so. One floppy image at a time. That was in '94 and I think it was Slackware 2.0 which used Linux 1.09. I had to look that up, so yes, they are really that old. ;) Writing half a dozen 1.44 floppies or more takes some time, and so does installing from them. That's a bit of an arduous task compared to sticking in a CD, clicking 3 or 4 times, and having a base system in 5 minutes like nowadays.
 
RickNel said:
This translates as "psychic text" (among other meanings). I could do with some of that for help diagnosing hardware mysteries.. Or even reading Chinese instruction manuals "translated" into English.
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Psychic text eh? I just took a random cut from the web page. :) I was surprised to see how popular the name Linix actually was.

So, has anybody actually tried UNIX for the Commodore 64 - aka Lunix?
 
Wow, I started with Debian 3.0 "Woody"... I think I'm going to play with one of the early 90's distros in QEMU. That should be interesting. I'd like to see just how far it's advanced.
 
Mike Chambers said:
Wow, I started with Debian 3.0 "Woody"... I think I'm going to play with one of the early 90's distros in QEMU. That should be interesting. I'd like to see just how far it's advanced.
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That'd be kawl. I'll load a few mid-late 90's distros on a ss7 system and post a few sceenshots
 
Finally got around to getting P1 166 with 128megs of ram, 8 gig hdd. Installed Turbo Linux Server 6.0 (released around the end of 1999 beginning of 2000). Just did and install everything letting it set up the partitioning. Went rather well. Setting up Xwindows required me to swap out the video card. The LCD monitor needs the menu selected before the desktop comes up otherwise it reports no signal and goes to sleep. Obviously not an issue with a crt monitor. Around 900megs all up of Hdd space taken up. FWTW it has a number of kernals i386, i586 and i686 along with their SMP equivalents. Kernal is 2.2.14-3 for those interested.

The "turbopkg" seems to be better at sorting dependencies than a lot of other rpm tools. I've got a few cds from the 1998 through 2002 era - Redhat 5.2-7.3, Mandrake 6.1 and SuSE 7.3. Installed and removed packages from RH 6.0, 6.2 and MD 6.1 Just add RedHat/RPMS/ to the default path and turbopkg goes off and does it's thing. Haven't tried packages from RH 7.3 or SuSE yet. I've left KDE stuff out for the time being. Kinda like the look gtk apps with metal theme. Usually I'd have a dependency issue by now.

No intentional reboots at all and quite snappy. I must admit I inadvertently press crtl-alt-del at one point though doh! Windows moment ;).

Initial Turbo Linux Server desktop is Gnome 1.2 with E16 as it's window manager. The second CD has source files with extra apps on the 3rd CD. I've set the desktop up to run WindowMaker (ver 0.60 from Mandrake 6.1) http://windowmaker.org/ , using wmakerconf sort out it's menu. I've installed a few other wms http://xwinman.org/ -Sawmill, AfterStep, Icewm to name a few, from the various distros along with icons, background images and tiles.

TurboLinux was critisied at the time of it's release for not having a pretty pointy clicky installation, prefering Redhat text style (which I like anyway) and splitting it's configuration tools up. It was also noted by the reviewers it appeared snapper in Xwindows to it's contemporaries. The user manual is a damn sight better than the documentation of a lot of distros of the time as well.

It's got the usual desktop apps Abi Word, Gnumeric, yadda yadda installed now. I'm going to see what the latest version of Opera static I can put on it just for the hell of it. Not networked yet but it's very straight foward. I can use an ISA pnp ne2000 compatible card as a last resort as long as it's address is set to 300.

So a few hours wasted installing an outdated unpopular distro on a oldish bit of kit just for the hell of it. What more could you ask for on a crappy winters day ahh?

Screen shot to come..........................

Edit: Got the monitor issue sorted More lack of familiararity on my part.
 
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I remember trying Linux back in about 1994/1995 - I think it was a very early Slackware on something like 14x 1.44mb floppies I downloaded at college. Something like kernel 1.0.12, very basic driver support in XFree86 (mainly Cirrus, S3 and Trident, IIRC), probably TWM or OLWM window managers. I ran it on a 8Mb 486DX2-50, and very cool it was too! :)
 
If you want an interesting challenge, see what distros will install on a 486 or 386. That was my huge hurdle when I had first started tinkering with linux. Most of the prettied up GUI type of install distros (I'm the opposite but I'm also a geek so I did like turbolinux and hated Caldera). Anyway long story short I had some knowledgeable folks let me know that few distros used the original kernel code and they had removed support for pre-pentium processors. Was a shocker since in the late 90's it was still one of those claims to fame that linux enthusiasts loved to brag about (linux could fit on a floppy, could run on minimal system specs, etc).
 
I have Linux 0.1.1 somewhere on 2 x 1.2MB 5.25" floppies! There was a boot disk and a root disk if I remember correctly. This would be from about 1992 or so.
 
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