Report Blog Entry
THIS IS A (PERHAPS) LONG-AWAITED FOLLOW-UP TO MY BLOG ENTRIES ON SOFTLANDING LINUX SYSTEM, ONE OF THE OLDEST LINUX DISTRIBUTIONS OF ALL TIME. THIS DISTRO IS ABOUT THE SAME AGE, MAYBE EVEN OLDER.
Here's a basic rundown of the very early (pre-Slackware) days of Linux. After Linus Torvalds unveiled the Linux kernel in 1991 during his tenure as a student of the University of Helsinki, Finland, many interested universities around the world started creating their own distributions using the Linux kernel. Among these was TAMU Linux, a distribution that, as its name implies, came out of Texas A&M University.
The distro was unique in that it was the first ever Linux distribution to offer a graphical user interface out of the box, bundling in the XFree86 windowing system.
Unfortunately, for a time, the distro was believed to have been lost media, until it turned out that Princeton University has an archive of the (most likely) final release of TAMU on their FTP server.
So, today, in a long-awaited follow-up to my blog entries in which I attempted to install and tinker with Softlanding Linux System, another distribution of a similar vintage, I will now be installing TAMU Linux and attempting to run X windows on it.
I should confess. Someone got to blogging their experience with TAMU before me. But, there's no such thing as too much documentation (unless you were an OpenVMS sysadmin back in the day, holy crap the literal shelves of documentation they had to work with! I feel sorry for them).
In that respect, I've decided I'm still going to do this blog entry, and take some examples from the other blog.
SPECS
Much like the Softlanding blog, I'm again using 86Box. My specs are such:
- Intel DX4 @ 75MHz
- 64MB RAM
- Tseng Labs ET4000AX video card
- Sound Blaster 16 sound card
- Novell NE2000 compatible ethernet card
- 400MB IDE HDD
- 2 3.5" 1.44MB floppy drives
- Adaptec AHA-154xC SCSI controller card
- DEC RRD45 4x SCSI CD-ROM drive (installation is entirely floppy-based, so this won't be getting used, but it's nice to have)
The Princeton FTP archive of TAMU offers floppy images for both 3.5" and 5 1/4" floppy drives, but these must be converted into usable floppy images using dd.
Like such:
dd if=bin.01 of=bin01.img
After converting all 21 floppy images plus the boot disk, all you gotta do is put in the boot disk to get things started. After that, it prompts you to either install the distro or drop to a shell. Upon selecting the installation option, it'll ask you if you wanna partition the drive. I partition the drive, and installation can start. It all went pretty uneventfully, as I only had to put each new floppy in and press enter.
The install is complete and we can reboot.
After a metric boatload of configuration with XFree86, I was finally able
to get into the GUI.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get the mouse working, but this is a good stopping point, I feel.
WHAT DID WE LEARN FROM THIS?
Well, I personally learned that when messing with 30-year-old dead Linux distros that predate even Slackware, there be dragons. Not seen was my endless tinkering with the Xconfig file just so I could be greeted with a (partially) functional interface. Luckily, configuration of X11 has gotten much better over the years, which is why I stick with it (I also stick with it out of complacency and the fact that I find Wayland configuration even more annoying than 90s X11 configuration).
At the end of the day, however, this distro wasn't much more annoying than any other pre-Slackware distro, like Softlanding, MCC Interim Linux, or Yggdrasil (foreshadowing...)
I hope you enjoyed having me suffer with ancient Linux for the purpose of being late to the party. I sure know there were parts where I enjoyed it myself.
UPDATE: 5 DAYS LATER
Managed to get the mouse working, but as a PS/2 mouse, though it's extremely sensitive with my ThinkPad's touchpad. Instead, I use the TrackPoint nub to get a usable mouse experience on TAMU.
Comments
Displaying 5 of 5 comments ( View all | Add Comment )
Mamin
This is so cool! I wish I had the patience to emulate old software. Also question do you regularly use Linux ?
Yes, I use Slackware as my daily driver, and switch around between Debian and CRUX as my secondary.
by TronNerd82; ; Report
Humanhunter777
Absolute banger thanks so much for sharing !!!!
Rusty
finland mentioned YAHOOO!!! awesome blog ^___^
TronNerd82
Updated with a change of image hosting, since SpaceHey seemed to not be showing images from my Neocities blog (which I moreso use as a image host).
Now you all can see the pretty pictures. I'll be doing this with the rest of my blogs on SpaceHey.
Desert Cruiser
retro linux is SEVERELY underrated.