Today I have a day off, so I'm going to do exactly what I do on my days off: useless stuff!

I found a curious program, but it comes precompiled for Slackware 3.0 circa 1995, so I have to install it. I assume a.out, though some say it's actually ELF, so maybe I'm looking at recompiling the kernel later.

Finding the distro alone is a bit of a challenge!

🧵

Wow this is very early 00s experience. Archive mirror hosts floppies as folders and files on them, which would require recursive wget. ISO can be downloaded from a mirror, but only at 2 megabits per second on average (which is a decent speed for 00s)

The boot floppies are actually not floppies. I'm going to use Qemu, and for Qemu to detect the floppy geometry correctly, I'll need to pad the images to 1474560 bytes.

Booting, booting, yay

"Don't switch any disks yet", said the previous screenshot. The instruction to switch the floppy disks comes unexpectedly and looks like yet another message in dmesg.

Could it be... that the Linux installation in the 90s was NOT user-friendly? No, impossible, each step comes with detailed instructions!!!1 /s

I pretended that I did not read the long wall of text telling me to partition my disk before running the setup, and started the Slack setup anyways. It handled the error gracefully, and has shown me even more instructions than the previous screen.

@nina_kali_nina a.out will probably be in COFF format? If ELF, you can see by the magic bytes at the start of your program. What do the say?

@root42 @nina_kali_nina The "file" command can tell you conveniently what it is w/o immediately looking at a hex dumps and magic bytes.

@root42 for that, I'll have to download the program :D I decided to trust the manual and install the recommended Slackware version first, and figure out the exec format second. Incidentally, Slack 3.0 uses ELF by default, so we're (likely) good.

@chainq I am going to troll you a bit and show how file is wrong in 2 cases out of 2 for this program

@nina_kali_nina oh boy, #Slackware 2.0.0 was the fist #Linux #distro I ever installed from a #CDROM drive instead of floppy disks, and that was in late 1994 ... can you believe that?!

Still got the CD I bought back then, well archived in my Bookshelf. Here are a few shots I just took as proof.

@Wintermute_BBS awesome design!

I got distracted in replies, but we're back on track with 1994's fdisk working exactly like fdisk in 2024 (and almost exactly like it was in 1984).

No swap, because I have 64M of RAM.

Finally, the setup utility. Something in the name of it (FD-3.0.0-ELF) tells me that it will require me to use floppies instead of CD, but if so, I'll just swap my install floppies to a different set.

ah, we might be actually good

@nina_kali_nina I am satiating my nostalgia kick for Slackware by living vicariously through your posts... This is just great!

@nina_kali_nina In my defense, I meant "file" as known circa late 2024, not as circa 1995. 😅 But yeah, I've also seen file dropping the ball on identifying things. Not on something as trivial as an ELF or a shell script tho'...

@chainq yeah :) Well, you probably weren't expecting me to be running Solaris on my Sun SPARC and Minix on my PC, were you~

@catsalad my pleasure!

Living the dream~

Series Selection. They called it Series Selection, folks!

The installer is clearly aimed for much slower computers and/or installation media.

@nina_kali_nina I say kudos to them for that. Much better than needlessly rewriting it in Flutter and removing the ability to install onto an existing LUKS LVM volume. But who would do that?! 😩

@indigoparadox I agree!

I don't know why I install X11 but I install X11. Now it feels like the installer wants me to know a great deal about my computer. Oh no, I'm not quite sure what graphics card I have (joking, I do know, but it is not in the list)

Now the files have been copied and unpacked, it's time to configure the system. Failing to do so will result in the system not being able to boot, duh.

Well, what do you think? If you'd like to make this your default font, select YES

@nina_kali_nina that's the 3.x versoin of X11 which had dedicated builds of the X11 server for each supported video card. Ther was no modular driver model in XFree86 yet.

@Wintermute_BBS for a LOOONG while, yes

You must choose a name for the partition for LILO. "Linux" might not be a bad choice. "THIS MUST BE A SINGLE WORD"

@nina_kali_nina it's so hideous. I love it. What is font?

@drj "scrawny" or something like that

It only took 47 minutes to install! Including all the screenshots and chatting online

We're in. The installer have never asked for hostname or users/passwords, but passwordless root just works.

@nina_kali_nina futon? ;-)

@millihertz aw too late

@nina_kali_nina Nice work! That's a seriously fun way to spend an afternoon.

@winterschon it'll get more fun as we'll go off the beaten path soon!

This is a pre-2.0 Linux from August 1995, but you know, I can actually live like that, compared to FreeBSD from late 90s or Minix from 2001. The shell doesn't hate me, colours for ls out of the box, autocomplete and readline just work, there's GCC and there's Perl.

As it happens, startx doesn't work, because XFree doesn't install a configuration file by default. There is no "Xorg -configure" just yet. I haven't read the manpages, but I suspect it'll be "copy this default config to /etc/X11 and then edit"

OK, Slackware, you TOLD ME that groff is "optional". Why did you fail to mention that it is required for man? :D Grrr

@nina_kali_nina That takes me back to my first Linux install. I knew pretty much nothing, and I couldn't find an editor. But I did find sed, and so I configured XFree86 from scratch using nothing but sed... 😺

@darkling wow :3 GJ!!!

As it happens, the config template was in /etc/X11, and it is mostly working but not quite. Gotta refresh my memory on modelines, it seems.

@nina_kali_nina It was on a 24 MHz ARM3 with only 8 MiB of RAM (and 32 KiB pages), so it... swapped a bit. 5 minutes of swapping to get the X trellis background. Middle click for the root menu... 30 seconds of swapping, then it drew half of the menu outline. 30s more swap for the other half of the menu outline.... Then it started work on the text.

I didn't use X much on that machine.

@darkling wow... I wonder if it was possible to stop some background services and make X work!

@nina_kali_nina Oh man. So many memories of this

@tvaughan Funny how they used to be stressful things and now they're warm fuzzies "wow I fixed this issue so many times"

@nina_kali_nina ah borrowing a trick from the commercial Unix vendors. When it was possible to spend 4 or 5 digits on a workstation, and not have man pages; because they were an "option".

@drj at least the man files are perfectly present, and less can less through them - unformatted

I had to reboot to change some options for my system, and uh... I even synced my disk before powering off. Authentic experience lol

Thankfully booting from install floppy with `mount root=/dev/hda1` and re-running LILO has fixed the boot.

Good news: startx works
Bad news: mouse doesn't move a bit, and I have both PS/2 and MSMouse configured in Qemu (and I've tried both in my XFree86 config)

@nina_kali_nina

@nina_kali_nina nope, do not miss those days one bit. Though this whole thread is rather nostalgic. Never installed Slackware, but there are elements of the experience similar enough to early Debian installs (minus the fun of dselect). Getting X working was a universal PITA.

@yvan I have a thread on Debian 0.91, 2 and 3 if you are curious:
https://tech.lgbt/@nina_kali_nina/111431340793521963

https://tech.lgbt/@nina_kali_nina/111437725968501402

Of course /dev/mouse was pointing to a random place. Finding the correct device and linking it, fingers crossed it'll help!

And it helped, and so I now can use Fvwm.

Look, there is a file manager, a paint app, a spreadsheet tool, and Xeyes! Cuuuute

It is a bit awkward, but the compilation works, and I have working Lua 1.0 now (why? no idea)

Now, the main goal of this experience was to try out an ancient user interface toolkit called (un-googlable!) "Andrew". Andrew used to include a whole Window Manager and didn't need X11, but by the version 7.5 I have here it absolutely requires X11 :<

The installation is as simple as unpacking the archives http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/atk-ftp/bin-dist/ix86_linux/ and setting up the environment variables.

The main component of the package, word processor ez, certainly looks far less impressive than any word processor I've seen so far in my life (including Palantir WinText, the first word processor for Windows)

@nina_kali_nina wasn't Andrew a CMU thing?

For a GUI program from 1996, I expected it to have easy-to-use menus. But "File" menu doesn't even have "open" option. There is no "open" or "save" dialogue, and no modal windows for that. "Save as" just expects you to input the file name in the input field. Usability!

I do expect that this is because Andrew and ez were actually designed in mid-80s and never had had a facelift since.

@nina_kali_nina hah, wow, just scrolled through all that... is this something you're documenting just for "fun"? 😅

0.98 pre-dates my first experience with a Debian install. Which I think was either 1998, or maybe 1997... 1.3.1r<something> rings a bell... it probably came via my cousin in Perth who was using Debian/Linux in his ISP job at the time.

@yvan correct! I love old computers and user interfaces, and I am amused to see how interfaces have changed with years, and how conventions that we are using daily might have been different in the past

(I'm still upset with no Ctrl+A support in the address bar of Explorer in Win 95/98)

Debian was a lovely system, and it sort of still is!

@nina_kali_nina - So, how long did you spend playing with cursor positions that make Xeyes have crossed eyes?

@jmax at least minutes :D

@noplasticshower correct!

@nina_kali_nina wow, this brings back memories

@binder I'm glad :)

- I want console busybox!
- We have console busybox at home...

Also, 13th of December 124 ("Y2K was never a problem!!!").

Also, it is ironic that I cannot start Andrew Batmail graphical mail client because it requires emacs to be installed. :D

@nina_kali_nina This is a blast from the past! I ran Slackware when it was “new” and I always thought the installer was a gold standard for software installation. It told you what it needed to do, WHY it needed to do it, and what options were available to you to customize the parts of the install.

I need to grab a copy and install it somewhere for the retro awesomeness. Thanks for this thread! :)

@jgeorge I got mine from archive.org :)

@noplasticshower yup
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Project>

used by a lot of places though

@binder I remember my buddy Greg Morrisett complaining about it.

Did you forget to register your XV copy?

@nina_kali_nina Xeyes is the best. Miss it.

@Oecan you know you still can install it? It takes a bit to load, but XQuartz still comes with xeyes on Macs.

@nina_kali_nina awesome program

@nina_kali_nina someone used the tm_year field ofstruct tm without thinking about year 2000 I guess. The question is, is it a bug in application code, or in the C library strftime?

@nina_kali_nina the percentage of virtual memory usage seems a bit too high, maybe that's the problem ;)

@pulkomandy it's a bug in strftime T_T

@nina_kali_nina half tempted to ask for a manual

After a bit of tinkering with XF86Config, I got myself 1024x768 256 colours, and it allows me to comfortably run such important business applications as xMahjong and spider

@nina_kali_nina I <3 this thread, but also its been interesting going back in my memory. I would have been first tinkering with linux in the time frame that all this software was made, but like I have no memory of the graphics looking like this. If you had asked me before, I would have probably said you would use gnome at that time, but the first release was 99 so after this time.

Thanks for the blast from the past, and a refresher in my apparently faulty memory

@APersonNamedDan it wasn't uncommon for X11 to come with twm, but early 00s were definitely dominated by GNOME, KDE, XFCE and such!

@erincandescent @nina_kali_nina I still have nightmares about it

@rotopenguin PTSD? :<

@nina_kali_nina Tinkering with XF86Config as a teenager in the late 90’s to get Linux working with my family’s slightly weird computer is something I don’t really know if I need to relive.

@nina_kali_nina

Maybe no graphic card chosen gives no X11 config file.

@ajlewis2 no, there literally was no XF86Config file. The manpages explain why, but they cannot be open without groff, which is optional

@nina_kali_nina I love this thread, it's such a stroll down memory lane for me. Your next challenge is to install Linux onto a UMSDOS filesystem 8-)

@nina_kali_nina I never registered xv! Is it too late?

@phooky the site was still up in August 2024, but seems to be gone now: https://web.archive.org/web/20240810191351/http://www.trilon.com/xv/

@xabean but I refuse

@nina_kali_nina lulz, as someone whose first linux was a slightly later Slackware 3 release, I was thinking "Oh no, without a CRT, she's probably going to miss the absolute joy that was getting a working modeline together!"

I'm glad you got at least a simulacrum of that experience.

(Though you really missed out on the community building that is pooling AOL floppies to download the disks with you and your buddy's 14.4 modem connections overnight. Those are nerd bonds that last a lifetime.)

@xek oh, don't worry, I've had the pleasure in the late 90s and early 00s!

@nina_kali_nina that's the only right answer :)

@nina_kali_nina Linux?

@icobra Slackware 3.0

@nina_kali_nina kalininux

@MisterMoo is not, not in this case ;p

@nina_kali_nina i love the way you use cat to find out which device your mouse is plugged into. and that you can apparently remember the order of the arguments to `ln -s`.

@drj I'm embarrassed to say that I am getting paid for knowing stuff like that

@drj @nina_kali_nina ln is the same as cp, it's what you're copying then where you're copying it to.

@hatter @nina_kali_nina yes, that's how I remember it too.

@hatter why when you can `cat >dest <src`

@nina_kali_nina go install Slackware 15 or -current on something. It's a bit of a time capsule. Much of the install process is unchanged. (Slackware is my goto Linux distro for workstations. Mostly because it's the most BSD like distro.)

@overeducatedredneck don't worry, I have regular Slack experience when I run sudo make install on my Mac

@nina_kali_nina @buherator good Slackware memories with just a pinch of PTSD 😜

@nina_kali_nina tinkering with xf86config isn’t as exciting as it was 25 years ago when you ran the very real risk of destroying your monitor if you got the frequencies in the modeline wrong 😆😱

@WiteWulf you're saying that assuming that I don't have a CRT ;)