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OldLinux: Ancient Linux Resources
- hackeraccount 4y agoWell the site looks and feels like the places I remember looking for Linux resources 20 years - or is it 30? - ago so they got that part right.
- HeckFeck 4y agoVery authentic! It even has a closed forum that's pending an upgrade. To complete the experience they could've linked to the forum but left in the PHP error messages.
- Gordonjcp 4y agoLittle animated gif digging man with an "under construction" sign.
- Dalewyn 4y agoThe site is written in HTML 4.0 Transitional, with uppercase tags and even a bit of table layout at the end. This is authentic, peak internet; note how fast it loads and how usable it is.
- 29athrowaway 4y agoThe HOWTOs that came in the RedHat Linux 5.2 CD were cool.
- ksaj 4y agoBack in the day, you could get Linux distros with printed manuals. And more importantly, stickers! RedHat is well known for printed manuals, but SuSE Linux also did this. I still have some of them on my book shelf. SuSE was shockingly inexpensive, given the high quality documentation and packaging.
- Bluecobra 4y agoI picked up Red Hat 5.2 at Best Buy like this. As a high school kid with little money it was like Christmas to find something so heavy and packed with software for like $30. Had a lot of fun with it at the time.
- ksaj 4y agoAlso that looking through the manual at things you already (think you) know, you learn a lot. There was a time when all OS's did this. I had a DOS binder, from which I learned 80x86 Assembler from the Debug chapter. And since I grew up on QNX, I managed to score myself a set of QNX manuals that are actually still on my shelf today because its such an interesting OS. Nowadays we're paperless. The info is all still there. Just not as beautifully presented.
- anthk 4y agoEnjoy. https://linuxgazette.net/archives.html https://linuxgazette.net/archives.html
- msla 4y agoLittle note: The Minix hard disk clone contains the text string "Copyright Autumnal Water Corp. 1991" which is consistent with a boot sector virus called "Autumnal.3072" so... I don't know, don't run it in a virtual machine hooked up to any other disk images you care about? This is the first time I've ever found malware on retrocomputing media, and goddamn if I don't love the verisimilitude. Don't Copy That Floppy and such. I found that with binwalk. Using strings, I found the string "Dis is one half." which is on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneHalf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneHalf > OneHalf is a DOS-based polymorphic computer virus (hybrid boot and file infector) discovered in October 1994.[1] It is also known as Slovak Bomber, Freelove or Explosion-II.[2] It infects the master boot record (MBR) of the hard disk, and any files with extensions .COM, .SCR and .EXE.[3] However, it will not infect files that have SCAN, CLEAN, FINDVIRU, GUARD, NOD, VSAFE, MSAV or CHKDSK in the name.[4] [snip] > OneHalf is known for its peculiar payload: at every boot, it encrypts two unencrypted cylinders of the user's hard disk, but then temporarily decrypts them when they are accessed. This makes sure the user does not notice that their hard disk is being encrypted like this, and lets the encryption continue further. It also hides the real MBR from programs on the computer, to make detection harder. The encryption is done by bitwise XORing by a randomly generated key, which can be decrypted simply by XORing with the same bit stream again. Once the virus has encrypted half of the disk, and/or on the 4th, 8th, 10th, 14th, 18th, 20th, 24th, 28th and 30th of any month and under some other conditions, the virus will display the message:[4] Dis is one half. Press any key to continue ... http://virus.wikidot.com/onehalf http://virus.wikidot.com/onehalf So that's at least two different viruses. This thing is more infected than a streetwalker after Fleet Week.
- donio 4y agoHere is the famous Tanenbaum thread: http://www.oldlinux.org/Linux.old/docs/linux_is_obsolete.txt http://www.oldlinux.org/Linux.old/docs/linux_is_obsolete.txt It's in RMAIL/BABYL format, open it with C-u M-x rmail and then h for the summary view. Or just read it as text.
- codetrotter 4y ago5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5.
- hulitu 4y agoLinux was slow as hell on Sparcstation.
- Bluecobra 4y ago> In the meantime, RISC chips happened, and some of them are running at over 100 MIPS. Speeds of 200 MIPS and more are likely in the coming years. These things are not going to suddenly vanish. What is going to happen is that they will gradually take over from the 80x86 line. They will run old MS-DOS programs by interpreting the 80386 in software. I guess you can say that finally came true with Apple’s M1/M2 chips + Rosetta 2. Just took longer than expected.
- InfamousRece 4y agoWhat finally came true? That the RISC took over from 80x86?
- benttoothpaste 4y agoThey took over in Apple universe. For some people Apple is everything there is.
- Bluecobra 4y agoI own both a gaming PC running Windows 11 with an Intel i9-12900K and an Apple MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro. I think the writing is on the wall for x86, at least from a general computing sense. I’m absolutely blown away on how well Apple pulled off the transition to M1. My previous Intel based MBP had atrocious battery life and could barely survive an hour video meeting on MS Teams. It might take a while but I can see ARM-based Windows taking off the same way if paired with a killer CPU.
- xkriva11 4y agoA blog post about playing with Boot/Root, the first Linux distribution, using images from this server: https://github.com/pavel-krivanek/articles/blob/master/BootRoot/BootRoot.md https://github.com/pavel-krivanek/articles/blob/master/BootR...
- 2b3a51 4y agoSlackware has fairly complete releases from 1.01 (the X floppy disk image sets appears to be missing). Around 1993 onwards so not quite the Ur-Linux. Version 1.20 starts the ChangeLog.txt file that records new and recompiled packages. So you have continuous history for just under 30 years... http://slackware.uk/slackware/ http://slackware.uk/slackware/
- IntelMiner 4y agoI wish Gentoo in particular had more of its history still saved. You can download day-by-day snapshots of the "Portage" tree for the package manager to know what packages to build, but actually building software requires googling for ancient tarballs and piecing together a "distfiles" directory one by one, typically without Gentoo's own patches(!) There was an attempt a while back to try and get it recovered, but the developer "Robbat" who claimed to have old tape backups never replied https://bugs.gentoo.org/834712#c4 https://bugs.gentoo.org/834712#c4
- codetrotter 4y ago> the developer "Robbat" who claimed to have old tape backups never replied Reminds me of that old story of a company that was diligently putting tapes into their tape writers every day for backups, and stored the backup tapes securely so that in the event of disaster they could recover from the tapes. One day disaster strikes. They fetch the most recent backup tapes and attempt to restore their data but the tapes are blank. They try the tapes from the day before. Blank. And the day before that and the day before that. They try all of the tapes. Every single tape is blank. They had been putting backup tapes into the machine for years. But the machine had never actually written anything to any of the tapes. And no-one had checked to see if there was any data on the tapes until the day when they needed the data and it was already too late. This story is meant to teach people that having a backup routine is not enough. You need to verify that the backups are actually working. That all of the data is actually being backed up.
- harel 4y agoI still have the InfoMagic Linux CDs from November 1995. Mostly slackware focused. Can't bring myself to throw it away....
- bityard 4y agoIn the mid to late 90s when dialup was the only way to get to the internet for most people, I remember buying magazines specifically to get the bundled software CD. Sometimes it was games, demos, and web browsers but quite often full Linux distributions. Yes, you could install Slackware from a stack of 30 floppies, but that was the kind of thing you realistically only did once, out of either desperation or novelty.
- Bluecobra 4y agoYou’re right about only doing something like that once—since your parents would have murdered you for running up the phone bill.
- harel 4y agoThe InfoMagic setup for Slackware went with a floppy for setting boot and lilo and the cd for the rest. Looking at the CDs now, the 1st was Slackware, and others were RedHat, Debian and what appears to be a dump of mit.edu, sunsite, and also GNU and X. I don't think I ever managed to install anything out of those. In 1995 I had the will but far from the knowledge to do any of that. The booklet also just went through the Slackware setup, and not any of the other distros.
- jcul 4y agoI remember sending cash or a cheque to someone and receiving 3 to 4 redhat CD-ROMs. Fond memories.
- megadopechos 4y agoSame with my stack of 2600 Magazines from the late 90s. I'm never going to read them, nobody I know is interested in them, but I'm never going to throw them away.
- pabs3 4y agoThe Debian snapshot server only has copies of every Debian source/binary package going back to 2005 :( https://snapshot.debian.org/ https://snapshot.debian.org/ There are copies of the older releases on the archive though: https://archive.debian.org/ https://archive.debian.org/
- anthk 4y agoLinuz Gazzete, from 1995 to 2013. https://linuxgazette.net/archives.html https://linuxgazette.net/archives.html A lot of old suff still works.