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Historic Linux File Archive Created
jemagid writes "Ibiblio (nee metalab, nee sunsite)
has rummaged through all the old CDs and old
FTP archives we could find, to put together a
beautiful picture of the early days of the Linux community: Historic
Linux. The files include snapshots of
the early Linux archives including sunsite.unc.edu and tsx-11.mit.edu, and early distributions such as MCC (Manchester Computing
Center) and SLS (Softlanding Linux Systems), which were some of the first attempts to make Linux easy to install and use. The early RedHat releases are also included, as is early Suse, Debian, Slackware,
and Blade. The early distributions
ran on machines as small as 386's with 2-4 MB of RAM, so these could be
fun ways to resurrect ancient hardware."
Yeah, that's a great idea, I'll resurrect an old 386 with a 11 year old linux distribution, put it on the net, and watch all 11 years of security holes get exploited! yay!
I don't recommend that anyone put any of those distro's on a network without a pretty restrictive firewall, but then again, I'm one of those idiots that run a crap load of boxen at home with no firewalls at all. Heck, my passwords are 3-5 characters, that should be secure enough!
Don't mess with one of these old distributions. Seriously... things were broken in the old days, and often you had a bear of a time even figuring out what was wrong.
:-)
/bin/sh grrr...).
And good luck getting any answers!
If you want to go through the pain of this for HISTORICAL value... do so if you really really want to. Just don't put it on the net, ok?
If the intent is to squeeze some practical value out of an old system, then ignore these old distros and get something made for the job. One of the "Linux on a floppy" or "peanut" Linux distros would do nicely.
A really fun exercise would be "porting" all of today's "modern" Bash scripts to run on an embedded or stripped-down system.. nothing works because everyone uses the newer Bash coding styles (while still specifying the script as
A system built around BusyBox and dietlibc is pretty minimal. Just expect to learn a lot of the "old" command switches, and other workarounds...
I still have single CD labeled "Yggdrasil GNU/Linux/X11 Fall '93". This is the oldest CD-based distribution that I have at home. Before that, I used the SLS floppies but I have recycled these floppies in the meantime.
Saying that all Linux distributions had some rough edges in 1993 would be an understatement, but I was able to play with them on my old 486/33 with a mere 20 MB of disk space. The Yggdrasil CD had a nice option to install only the basic system on the hard disk and use the CD for the parts that didn't fit. Running X11 and emacs from the CD was painfully slow, but it worked. I could even do some real work on that crazy old stuff!
-Raphaël
For those that don't know, there is Debian Archive of older versions. I think ibiblio has this beat with 0.91 Beta though (Jan 94).
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
The early distributions ran on machines as small as 386's with 2-4 MB of RAM, so these could be fun ways to resurrect ancient hardware."
Hmm, I'm running 2.6 Rc1 right now on a 386 with 4mb ram...
why do I need an old distro to run linux on really slow or old hardware??
that has always been the magic of linux... pure scalability. and it takes 10 minutes to roll your own single floppy distro.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Slackware recently dropped support for i386...
This is true, but I suspect most of the packages would run on a 386 anyway (but haven't tested this, as the olde-original-slackware-devel-box is mothballed somewhere in the garage). Most of the kernels wouldn't boot on a 386 though, so you'd need to compile your own. The "lowmem.i" kernel is a notable exception.
BTW, said "old development box": Packard Bell 386SX16/4MB. Glad I'm not using that anymore.
Not really. While GNU/Linux was nowhere nearly as useful as it is today, it could already do things MS Windows can't do today. More importantly, it did so with decent performance and reliability and a compatible API, what means you probably can run much modern software there. Now try running modern software on MS Windows 3.0, or even finding old software to run on it...
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
but linux was still very much a toy for comp sci students back then
Linux had a very compitent TCP/IP stack, including SLIP and later PPP. Combine that with X11 and a Mosaic binary, and you had a fast and reliable Websurfer. Even at 14.4k bps.
As for the biz side, in 1993 I replaced a big IBM RS6000/530 with a dual proc Pentium 100 running Linux. Since there were about 100 dumb terminals on the system, IBM wanted around $100k for an OS upgrade. The Linux box was roughly twice as fast as the aging IBM and cost less than $6k to put together.
It wasn't until 1995 that I became a CompSci student, and found that completing my assignments was far easier than it would be on Windoze with Borland C or MSVC.
>Just because one is monoglot^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hanglophone it doesn't mean one shouldn't try to write accents when necessary... nee doesn't mean anything, the French word meaning born being nee in the feminine, masculine ne.
When a foreign word is anglicized, it typically loses its accents. See resume (the paper kind), for example. If you don't like how english operates in general, I humbly suggest you don't use it.
FYI: Nee is certainly a valid english word without the accents. Look it up before flaming next time. To REALLY bug you, noel requires no accent, also.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
that the date stamps are not preserved. I was looking at the old SLS distributions and all the date stamps say September 2003. You want to see 199[1234] for it to be really 3117 retro :)
v2sw7CUPhw5ln6pr5Pck4ma7u7LFw0m6g/l7Di5e6t5Ab6TH.
Ummmm... There are, I'm running a PDP-11 emulator with 2.11BSD on it. The 4.2 sources are available under caldera's ancient unix license.
Also, the 4.4BSD-Lite2 sources are in the FreeBSD CVS tree.
see: http://www.tuhs.org/
Perhaps the fellow meant MCGA? It was out on the market first, and if you bought an IBM name brand it was what you got.
Quick rundown..
MDA/Hercules = 2 colors, 720x360ish
CGA = 4 colors, 160x200 usually.
EGA = 16 colors, up to 640x350.
MCGA = 256 colors, up to 720x400
VGA = 256 colors, 320x200.
SVGA, 256 colors, up to 1600x1200. Memory bound and all.
Then there were the ones only computing professionals bought.
RGBI = 16 colors, up to like 640x320.
8514 = 256 colors, 1024x768.
EGA-II = 64 colors, 640x400.
XGA = 16 colors, 1024x768..
Seem to remember another one around 1985-86, PGA, that was capable of doing 640x480x16bpp.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Put Slackware on those older machines. Just install the A, AP and D sections if you want a machine that can do basic development and compiling. Also the N section for networking. Be selective in what you install, use the 'menu' selection process to enable just the packages you want, and it will work great. I learned a lot of what I know about TCP/IP networking by having three or four Slackware boxes running on 386sx machines, with wobbly old 3C501 network cards. It was about 30 bucks worth of hardware even back then, and it worked great.
A Good Intro to NetBS
FreeSCO (Free ciSCO .. not free SCO...) I didn't need any of my Linux experience to get a firewall/router up and running in about 30 minutes.
I did use a lot of my experience with Linux when I got it installed onto hard drive, and turned my Tandy Sensation I into the web server and email server for my domain, though.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Red Hat and Mandrake are pretty bloated, even their minimal installs. Try Slackware or Debian. The initial, basic installs are much smaller, and they try not to be bloated.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson