Ask Slashdot: Is It Feasible To Revive an Old Linux PC Setup?

Qbertino (265505) writes I've been rummaging around on old backups and cleaning out my stuff and have once again run into my expert-like paranoid backups and keepsakes from back in the days (2001). I've got, among other things, a full set of Debian 3 CDs, an original StarOffice 6.0 CD including a huge manual in mint condition, Corel Draw 9 for Linux, the original box & CDs — yes it ran on a custom wine setup, but it ran well, I did professional design and print work with it.

I've got more of other stuff lying around, including the manuals to run it. Loki Softs Tribes 2, Kohan, Rune, and the original Unreal Tournament for Linux have me itching too. :-)

I was wondering if it would be possible to do an old 2001ish setup of a Linux workstation on some modern super cheap, super small PC (Raspberry Pi? Mini USB PC?), install all the stuff and give it a spin. What problems should I expect? VESA and Soundblaster drivers I'd expect to work, but what's with the IDE HDD drivers? How well does vintage Linux software from 2003 play with todays cheap system-on-board MicroPCs? What's with the USB stuff? Wouldn't the install expect the IO devices hooked on legacy ports? Have you tried running 10-15 year old Linux setups on devices like these and what are your experiences? What do you recommend?

Comments

try it in a VM?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's just to dink around with the old software, why not try it in VMWare or VirtualBox? It would probably be less of a hassle to get to where you want to be with the setup.

Re:try it in a VM?

[mlts]

I have a machine of a similar vintage running an age-old copy of RHEL. I keep it, but the chances of me firing it up are slim to none, because I can fire up VMWare Workstation with an older OS release. Plus, even if the hardware is rock stable, it uses more energy than a modern computer and OS. Running a VM from a SATA SSD consumes a lot less power than an older 3.5" IDE HDD which might have at most 128 or so gigs.

It is fun to fire up old hardware, but other than having the right stuff to play a game (DOSBox is good, but some older MS-DOS games won't work correctly unless they are on bare metal, and don't sound "right" unless they are played on an antediluvian FM-synthesis sound card), there isn't much of a point to it.

I recommend

[infernalC]

VirtualBox

Re:I recommend

[pla]

Seriously - This.

It will take you far less effort to configure a PC emulator to look like stereotypical 15YO hardware, than it will to actually put together that hardware.

About five years ago I had a similar personal project, to find a way to replay some of the great DOS games I had lying around, most on floppies nearing the edge of unreadability. After screwing around with various compatibility modes in Windows and even going so far as to set up a multiboot system with real live DOS installed, I ended up just putting together half a dozen Bochs images running DOS under emulation with slightly different memory management configs (remember the bad old days of extended vs expanded memory and segmented vs flat and real vs protected vs unreal (flat real)?). Once I set up one image, I cloned it and reconfigured it to the rest in under an hour, then just had to remember which games needed which styles of memory management.

We tend to forget how much old hardware sucked. If I never have to manually hunt for an available base address, IRQ, and DMA channel again, I will consider myself blessed.

Re:I recommend

[Nimey]

I've gotten Debian 2.2 to run reasonably well in VMware Player. Network and SCSI worked pretty well, don't think the sound did due to a missing driver, and I had to do some work to make X use the VESA framebuffer:

0) In lilo.conf, add "vga=791" (or another value) to the kernel invocation. May have had to compile a kernel with fbdev first.
1) install the xserver-fbdev package
2) copy /usr/share/doc/xserver-fbdev/examples/XF86Config.fbdev to /etc/X11/XF86Config.
3) edit XF86Config to reflect the color depth chosen in the vga= stanza in lilo.conf; with vga=791 it's 16 bits.
4) Same file, edit mouse information to reflect what VMware provides (device is /dev/gpmdata (I have gpm installed, otherwise probably /dev/psaux) and protocol is Microsoft).
5) Edit /etc/X11/Xserver and replace first line with the path to the FBDev X server, e.g. "/usr/bin/X11/XF86_FBDev".

Now you should have a functioning X desktop, assuming you installed the packages. It won't be fast, since it's just the VESA framebuffer, but it's probably the best you can get with VMware and the ancient XFree86 stack in Debian 2.2.

Note that the VMware guest utilities will /not/ work.

Shouldn't be a problem

[javajawa]

You should be able to run a modern linux distro, but you may need to install some old libraries to get those games working.

Re:Shouldn't be a problem

[javajawa]

You will, however, need to be on x86 hardware.

Re:Shouldn't be a problem

[rnturn]

The OP seems to have all the HW and SW he'd need. I'm not even sure why he's worried. Aside from the possibility of bit rot having degraded his media, I would be more concerned that the hardware would be a problem and become a major time sink -- bad capacitors on the m'board, etc., that have you chasing your tail.

You might be able to run a modern Linux on hardware of that vintage but you might have to borrow memory from another, similar motherboard to get the installer to run. Back when I was running Linux on a 486, I had to borrow memory from another system to get the installer to run during an upgrade. Then I returned the memory and Linux itself ran fine with only 16MB. The oldest system I currently have running -- an old Pentium MMX system with only 127MB installed (it used to only have 80MB before I stumbled across some more memory in a box of parts) -- hasn't been updated to anything really recent because I no longer have any systems that use the same kind of memory that I can borrow to perform an upgrade and the older RAM, while still available, is not something I want to invest in. (Yeah... I do have plans to phase that system out in the not-too-distant future.)

Let's see...

[jones_supa]

I was wondering if it would be possible to do an old 2001ish setup of a Linux workstation on some modern super cheap, super small PC (Raspberry Pi? Mini USB PC?), install all the stuff and give it a spin. What problems should I expect? VESA and Soundblaster drivers I'd expect to work, but what's with the IDE HDD drivers? How well does vintage Linux software from 2003 play with todays cheap system-on-board MicroPCs? What's with the USB stuff? Wouldn't the install expect the IO devices hooked on legacy ports? Have you tried running 10-15 year old Linux setups on devices like these and what are your experiences? What do you recommend?

Raspberry Pi is probably out of question as it is an ARM device. I do not think any current systems offer SoundBlaster hardware compatibility either. VESA is fine, IDE HDD should be fine in ISA mode, but you won't get UltraDMA and there's probably other limitations. USB requires a specific driver, I guess you might get some kind of OHCI/UHCI USB1.1 support if you are very lucky.

All in all, there will probably be too many missing drivers and all sorts of weird errors to solve. I recommend that you get some vintage hardware from the same era to go with the Linux distro that you have.

duh: arch

[vinn]

Obviously architecture is the biggest hindrance to what you proposed.

You could get away with some modern hardware, as long as it's x86 based. Or, maybe what you really want to consider is virtualizing an old distro on other modern hardware along with a modern distro, assuming the other modern hardware supports it.

There is some novelty in running old stuff, and I suppose everyone goes through that phase (along with the "I'm going to build a massive home network with multiple servers and run my own email" phase). But, I suspect you'll tire of it so you're just better off keeping it at a small budget and use hardware you can repurpose when you get bored with that little experiment.

raspberry pi is out

[epyT-R]

That stuff will only run on x86 anyway. You're better off with virtualbox or vmware. You might get lucky and get a distro from that era running on modern hardware too. You'll have to set the disk controller to ide compat mode and live with unaccelerated vesa video unless you've got a PCI slot and an nvidia vid card from that era. The drivers that ship with X back then won't validate the PCIIDs from today's cards, nevermind use them properly.

Another option would be to install the software on your modern x86/64 install and see if it runs. If it's missing libraries, copy them as needed from the old distro (or symlink current ones to the older names) to an oldlib directory and set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to it. Just don't dump them in your system's lib dirs or leave the environment variable set globally. Use ldd and grep to examine what libs are missing from the binary you're trying to run. YMMV.

The kernel guys guarantee ABI compatibility back to 2.0, but that's just the kernel. Today's userland has changed a lot from 1998-2001. It could also be that your glibc is not compiled with the compat symbols from previous glibc 2.0-2.2 versions common then, in which case you'll need to bring that over to your oldlibs dir too. That can get messy but it is doable.

Old hardware...

[LoRdTAW]

Old hardware is your best bet. Anything new would be unsupported by the older 2.2/2.4 kernels, PCIe, SATA, chipsets etc.
*Slot 2 Pentium II or III CPU's and Socket 370 CPU's are perfect. If you want multiprocessor, a Tyan or Supermicro dual slot/board is a good bet but stay away from any board with RDRAM using the i820 or i840 chipsets. They did however realize how big a mistake RDRAM was and Intel made SDRAM->RDRAM bridge chips so those chipsets could use PC-100/133 SDRAM. Tyan made a dual processor i840 board with dual slot 1 and SDRAM using the bridge chips.
*At least 256 meg of ram, 512MB - 1GB is ideal. Make sure your board supports the RAM you have.
*An AGP Riva TNT card or better yet, a Geforce 1, 2 or 3 graphics card. 3D support may not be available*
*Sound Blaster Live!, Ensoniq, Turtle Beach or Aureal sound cards should all work. Though the Sound Blaster Live! is probably your best bet.
*You are also going to need an ATA hard disk (2+GB) and CD/DVD rom drive, I am unaware of any P2/3 board that supported USB booting so you need the optical drive.
*If no onboard LAN card is present (most common scenario) you want a PCI 3Com 3c905B/C, or any PCI card based on the DEC Tulip chipset (21040/21041/21140/21142/21143). Many older Netgear FA311 cards also worked flawlessly, based on a well supported National semi chip that I think was a tulip clone)
*Bonus: decent 19"+ Trinitron CRT monitor. I still have a 21" Sun Trinitron.

Stay away from ISA cards as much as you can. I had a hell of a time getting my old ISA Sound Blaster AWE 64 Gold sound card running under Mandrake back in the day. And that was a "plug and play" card without jumpers. As for why to use Pentium 2/3 boards and not a pentium 4, the p4's after socket 432 willamette generation might not run a 2.2 or early 2.4 kernel. Socket 478 gained things like SATA and PCIe so its a crap shoot. Pentium 2/3 is a guarantee.

*Nvidia hardware 3D support does not appear to be supported on 2.2 kernels. I checked the README for the oldest Linux Driver and 2.4 and 2.6 kernels were mentioned. Have a look here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux-display-ia32-71.86.15-driver.html and check the hardware issues section in the README!

Have fun kickin it old school.

It's spelt A-R-C-H-I-T-E-C-T-U-R-E

[Arkan]

"Ask Slashdot" from someone confortable enough using Linux in 2001 for productive work and not knowing that a Raspberry Pi or a "mini USB PC" are not running on the same architecture as the PC from 2001?

How low have we stooped?