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I'VE TEASED THE POSSIBILITY OF THIS BLOG IN MY PREVIOUS "ANCIENT LINUX" BLOG, AND RECEIVED NO SHORTAGE OF REQUESTS TO COVER YGGDRASIL ON THE LEARNIX LOUNGE DISCORD SERVER, WHICH I'M ESPECIALLY ACTIVE ON. AFTER LITERAL CENTURIES, HERE YOU GO :3
Yggdrasil is often remembered as one of the best pre-Slackware linux distros, as it was easy-to-use, feature-filled, and technically impressive for the time, as it was the first live CD distro, yet it predates Linux's adoption of ISO-9660 Rock Ridge standards which would've allowed a Unix-like OS to better boot off a CD. I procured an ISO for Yggdrasil from this handy site which has a bunch of Yggdrasil versions and supplemental CDs. I got the Fall 1994 version.
In order to boot on a computer that doesn't support booting from CD, one must uncompress the iso, which can be done on Linux like so:
7z x name-of-your-iso
and promptly use dd to turn the boot floppy image of your choice into a usable image. I described how to do this in my TAMU Linux blog from about a month ago, which itself is a followup to my two blog entries about Softlanding Linux System. The dd process is no different here.
The specs of my machine are as follows:
- Intel DX4 CPU @ 75MHz
- 32MB RAM
- Tseng Labs ET4000AX video card
- Sound Blaster 16 sound card
- 3Com EtherLink II ethernet card (probably won't get networking going, but who knows?)
- 400MB IDE HDD
- 2x 3.5" 1.44MB floppy drives
- Adaptec AHA-154xC SCSI controller card
- DEC RRD45 4x SCSI CD-ROM drive (essential for the install)
I insert the boot disk (because the machine I'm emulating in 86Box can't boot off a CD :( ) and things are underway.
I partition the disk as the root account, logout, and log in as "install" to kick off the installation. I should note that the install tool has a partitioning program, but I didn't feel like using it for fear that it was gonna be cfdisk. I'm definitely an fdisk guy.
The actual installation of the distro went insanely quick, and I can start doing the postinstall stuff.
The install is complete.
Fast forward past some fiddlefarting with the Xconfig file (much of which was my own fault), and I have a working X session.
If I log out and log back in as "demo", Yggdrasil will open a graphical demo from the live CD (provided it's still in the computer) and put on a show for the user, including MPEG playback (IN 1994! ON LINUX!! OFF OF A CD-ROM!!!)
All this and more!!
Y'KNOW, I LEARNED SOMETHING TODAY...
And it's that I really should've looked into Yggdrasil earlier, this distro is swag as hell!! Overall, things weren't very hard at all to get set up (just my own ineptitude biting me in the ass...) and the distro is a technically impressive display of ancient Linux on all fronts.
I'll see ya next time. (Have a lot of fun...)
Comments
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greasergeist
Yooo! This is really fucking cool!!? I've been dabbling in the OS / Distro scene and seeing something like this is really interesting!!!
xXFiveRainStormsXx
I have to show my tech nerd friend this! Awesome sauce. :3
raintania
Good.
Lili
so cool raah
Person125
Cool
Ariel
Wow, I found the spacehey linux community, how nostalgic I am to see this distro! =D
jojo
cool blog. neat to see old-school linux in action. i use mostly debian-based distros and windows for gaming.
kebasx
un tuto de linux? :0
increible, but i didn't understand it :c haha
Marea
no esperaba ver un tutorial de linux en SpaceHey... Genial!!
two_ko86
WHAT is that video card?
Tseng Labs ET4000AX. It was part of the ET4000 series of video chips found on a surprisingly large number of OEM video cards in the 90s. The ET4000AX was, to my understanding, the base model of the series, but a very welcome improvement over the ET3000 series. It could have up to 1MB of VRAM, which is what I opted for for the 86Box emulated machine. To my knowledge, Tseng Labs didn't make their own cards, just the chips, which OEMs such as Diamond and Hercules used in some of their cards. 86Box doesn't specify an exact card, instead just generalizing the whole chipset when selecting a graphics card.
Here's a picture of a graphics card using the ET4000AX chip:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/ET4000AX.JPG
by TronNerd82; ; Report
Cxndyflip
Looks fire haven’t seen this one ever, now do linux from scratch tutorial
LOL, I might be crazy enough to mess around with ancient Linux distros, but the second I start messing with LFS is the day I belong in a padded room :)
by TronNerd82; ; Report
LFS you already have a book, it's tedious lol
Compiling a compiler to compile a toolchain that will compile gcc which will compile everything else... Not worth it.
by raintania; ; Report