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."

Comments

Re:Modern distros on old hardware

[admbws]

Slackware recently dropped support for i386, as the ChangeLog explains (scroll down and look for the new GCC 3.3 packages):

Added the following test packages that we're not ready to merge in yet:
testing/packages/gcc-3.3/gcc-3.3-i486-1.tgz: This is GCC 3.3, compiled for
a minimum CPU target of i486. Why i486 and not i386? Because the shared
C++ libraries in gcc-3.2.x will require 486 opcodes even when a 386 target
is used (so we already weren't compatible with the i386 for Slackware 9.0
and nobody noticed :-). gcc-3.3 fixes this issue and allows you to build a
386 compiler, but the fix is done in a way that produces binaries that are
not compatible with gcc-3.2.x compiled binaries and which suffer a
performance hit. To retain compatibility with Slackware 9.0, we'll have to
use i486 (or better) as the compiler target for gcc-3.3. Therefore, it is
time to say goodbye to i386 support in Slackware. I've surveyed 386 usage
online, and the most common thing I see people say when someone asks about
running Linux on a 386 is to "run Slackware", but then they also usually go
on to say "be sure to get an OLD version, like 4.0, before glibc, because
it'll be more efficient." Now, if that's the general advice, then I see no
reason to continue 386 support in the latest Slackware (and indeed it's no
longer easily possible). People with 386 machines aren't going to have the
hard drive space for Slackware 9.1 in any case.

If you REALLY want to enable old hardware...

[Sleepy]

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.

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 /bin/sh grrr...).

A system built around BusyBox and dietlibc is pretty minimal. Just expect to learn a lot of the "old" command switches, and other workarounds...

Debian Archive..

[molo]

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

Huh?

[Lumpy]

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.

Re:a fun way to resurrect ancient hardware...

[leandrod]

> Running a 10 year old linux on a 10 year old computer is just as interesting as running DOS or Win3.0 on it, though only half as useful. (Mod me down if you must, but linux was still very much a toy for comp sci students back then)

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...