SuSE Linux 6.0 in VirtualBox
SuSE Linux 6.0 was released December 21, 1998. Notable if you care about US politics, this was released 2 days after the last time a sitting President was impeached. The dots in the acronym were dropped, renaming S.u.S.E. Linux to just SuSE Linux.
This was a fun release. This was the first release to include SaX, which was a handy tool in SUSE for modifying the X Window System configuration throughout the 2000's. I also found an included word processor in Applixware which resembles contemporary versions of WordPerfect, StarOffice Writer, and Microsoft Word in many ways, although it defaulted to a very likely dead word document format. Applixware ran surprisingly well with the 4 bit graphics and a 640x480 resolution. I also played with some of things included with the X window system, such as xfm (file manager) and my beloved game, XBill. Xbill was hard to play since the lagging graphics lag behind the evil Bills (little Bill Gateses holding packaged copies of Windows) who try to establish a Wingdows monopoly on the network. KDE remained at version 1.0 and seemed relatively unchanged, contrasting with its rapid evolution in the last few releases.
This release also included the well known Netscape Communicator Browser. For those who don't know, Netscape was in a way a predecessor to the Mozilla browser and later Firefox. It also competed against and lost to Internet Explorer for dominance of the web browsing market in the late 1990s and early 2000s. For someone born in 1996 (don't laugh), the desktop seems reasonably similar to the MacOS and Windows desktops that I played with in my early childhood.
Although the graphics are still stuck at 16 colors, it's fun to tinker with early versions of SaX. Throughout the SuSE 6.x series to get graphics it was easiest to go to a root terminal, type "sax -w xterm", which tricks SaX into opening xterm alongside itself. Once a bunch of tiny windows with loading bars finish, I then typed kde into xterm to get into KDE. Setting the OS to Linux kernel 2.2 in the VirtualBox New VM wizard, there were little hiccups with set up and installation.
Back one, S.u.S.E. Linux 5.3: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...tualbox-38138/
Next up, SuSE Linux 6.1: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...tualbox-38140/
This was a fun release. This was the first release to include SaX, which was a handy tool in SUSE for modifying the X Window System configuration throughout the 2000's. I also found an included word processor in Applixware which resembles contemporary versions of WordPerfect, StarOffice Writer, and Microsoft Word in many ways, although it defaulted to a very likely dead word document format. Applixware ran surprisingly well with the 4 bit graphics and a 640x480 resolution. I also played with some of things included with the X window system, such as xfm (file manager) and my beloved game, XBill. Xbill was hard to play since the lagging graphics lag behind the evil Bills (little Bill Gateses holding packaged copies of Windows) who try to establish a Wingdows monopoly on the network. KDE remained at version 1.0 and seemed relatively unchanged, contrasting with its rapid evolution in the last few releases.
This release also included the well known Netscape Communicator Browser. For those who don't know, Netscape was in a way a predecessor to the Mozilla browser and later Firefox. It also competed against and lost to Internet Explorer for dominance of the web browsing market in the late 1990s and early 2000s. For someone born in 1996 (don't laugh), the desktop seems reasonably similar to the MacOS and Windows desktops that I played with in my early childhood.
Although the graphics are still stuck at 16 colors, it's fun to tinker with early versions of SaX. Throughout the SuSE 6.x series to get graphics it was easiest to go to a root terminal, type "sax -w xterm", which tricks SaX into opening xterm alongside itself. Once a bunch of tiny windows with loading bars finish, I then typed kde into xterm to get into KDE. Setting the OS to Linux kernel 2.2 in the VirtualBox New VM wizard, there were little hiccups with set up and installation.
Back one, S.u.S.E. Linux 5.3: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...tualbox-38138/
Next up, SuSE Linux 6.1: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...tualbox-38140/
Total Comments 0
