Low-effort Retrocomputing
So the other day, I wondered if anyone had put up pre-installed disk images for any of the really old Linux distros. I found installation media at archive.org and this blog post. with (excellent) instructions on how to do it, but nobody had done the work (so I wouldn't have to) and put it up for download.
So I took a run at it and installed Slackware 3.0 (from 1995) on a QEMU disk image:
You can download it here. The archive's sha256 hash is
28be1e75f8c5b8e9338f18589549ebc871e6daae3d4a7433826684d0cae446d1
(Please be considerate of my bandwidth.)
The image has two accounts: root and a user account named bob;
both have the password slack
. It boots into X11 but you can get to
a text console by pressing Ctrl+Alt+1 if you need to. Note that the
console's termcap seems to be a bit messed up.
Networking works, but there's no web browser or ssh client. There's
a C compiler though (I installed everything) so you should be able
to build period-appropriate ssh from sources if you need to. There
are also Linux builds of Netscape 3 on the 'net, although I have no
idea if they'll run on Slackware.
Configuring X took some hand-fiddling. You can see my work in
/etc/XF86Config and compare it to the original generated config file
/etc/XF86Config.orig if you want.
Anyway, feel free to download and play with it if you're curious or nostalgic or want to do pre-1995-tech dev jam.
# Posted 2023-01-19 16:43:08 UTC; last changed 2023-01-19 16:46:42 UTC