You wouldn't like it. The birds don't fly backwards. :p

Well, as promised, I uploaded Slackware 2.0.1 to my site. It can be downloaded from this link, which shows the tarball, the md5 checksum and the GPG signature.
It is a 250MB download, so be patient...

This version is very complete, with all the sources and patches necessary.

No instructions on how to install it - this is an exercise for the reader ;)

Found a mirror holding SLS 1.03 if anyone feels like recreating Slackware from scratch :p

http://ftp.ntua.gr/pub/linux/slackware/sls-1.03/

That unfortunately looks like just the X set. Weird that a mirror would only go back to Slack10 and then leap back to (part of) SLS. :)

Here's the whole thing: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-...ions/sls/1.03/

It has 1.05, too.

I don't have the resources but someone needs to create a central repository of open source - a software museum. There are subsets like TUHS and scattered things all around (the above ibiblio has a lot) but I don't know of an oss-museum.org.

-- Actually, reading the README of http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/, that's what he calls it. But it needs more exhibits, then. ;)

I think they used to sync from tds but that doesnt seem to be the case nowadays.

Neat.

Word.

This is tricky material... I've exchanged some e-mails with Pat a few weeks back about hosting all the old Slackware versions somewhere and he mentioned the problem with the licenses.
He pointed out that the GPL license requires you to offer all sources to reconstruct the final product you're hosting and for many of these old programs sources have been long lost, or there are simply no instructions or necessary patches to build them.

Huh, that's a good point. If it weren't mission-critical, I guess you could just remove the binaries of the things you didn't have the source for, but I'm definitely not a lawyer. Even a broken system with missing parts would still be something - archaeologists do a lot with reconstructing 10 ton critters with a handful of bones. But it definitely wouldn't be the same as the functioning systems.

http://www.oldlinux.org/
you may find linux 1.0.0 here!!!
enjoy!

A little late, but a suggestion nevertheless...
 

Okay, I just stumbled across this one, and I have no idea why someone (a self-admitted n00b), would want to do this, but hey, that's totally kewl and I applaud the OPs tenacity.

I run some really old stuff (software and OSes) on some really old stuff (Like IBM 5150's and 3270 ATs, etc.,), and have fun doing it from time to time, and then I pack up those old boxes and put 'em in the sea container for another year or so until that wild hair comes up again.

For what you want to do, I would actually recommend installing on an old 386, rather than a 486, but you should probably be fine if you use something like a 486 DX33 or SX25, etc.., (YMMV).

Anyway, I'm a Slacker from the get go, but you're going to have 'some' issues installing a Slack that old regardless of the platform, and therefore, to just play with a 0.99.x kernel, might I point you to a distro that should install (relatively) painlessly on an old 386 w/ne2000 NICs, etc.?

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-...ons/yggdrasil/

Particulars about 'LGX', as it was also referred to, can be found HERE

Of interesting note is the little factoid that Adam's,"Yggdrasil Computing" published the "GNU Testament" of the "Linux Bible" ;)

I maintain .iso images of old Yggdrasil versions, and use them in VMs w/varying degrees of success, which I've made from the shrinkwrapped versions of the distro.

Since the notion of a bootable CD was still on the horizon back then, you'll need to boot and begin the installation from the floppies - you can use 'dd' or 'rawrite' to create those. Hm... if I recall correctly, a 4x CDROM drive was considered blazing fast at the time LOL! The original 'SoundBlaster 16' was state of the art as well.

You can have a lot of fun trying to successfully run this old stuff!!!

Yggdrasil was actually touted as "Plug and Play Linux", but that was a misnomer, as today we call these types of distro spins, "LiveCDs".

Hope that helps :)

I'm almost afraid to admit it... but this sounds like a fun project for a rainy day. What's the oldest version of Slack I could reasonably install on a VM without running into trouble? I didn't start using Linux till '06, and I guess I'm a bit curious to see what the old stuff looked like.

If I could get my hands on an old enough PC, that would be a fun exercise!

That's an interesting question ;)

I haven't fired it up in a while, but I'm actually running a couple of versions of Yggdrasil and even some old DOS versions with AILANBIO Artisoft Lantastic), but not SERVER.EXE, because I have DesqviewX to support a few nodes of UltraBBS and SearchlightBBS.

I did it just to do it, but I *think* that it is only *slightly* more stable than it was in the 386 days :)

The only problem I really ran into was in setting up the various DOS versions, when I realized that I can't remember how to (by hand) correctly set up my config.sys, etc., for QEMM or smartdrv, etc., anymore - but except for the exercise in nostalgia, why would it be important anyway, LOL!

I'm doing it all in VirtualBox.

Kindest regards,

I thought i should test my google skills as the are not being used so much now days but i am giving up now as it 1:18am. This is the best mirror i have found it does not have the 1.00 release on it but does have the 1.01 and up so it should save niels bandwidth.

ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/slackware/

My plan from here was to look for a ftp.cdrom.com mirror old enough to have the 1.0 release as that is where it was originally hosted according to the Release notesEdit again i noticed as posting that definitely is spelled wrong in the change log

I have never been able to find a 1.0 release of Slackware, so if you find one, do tell me :)

I have 1.01 running in Qemu, btw...

A fast mirror which I setup thanks to the donation of a Virtual Machine on a gigabit pipe, includes all Slackware releases I could get a hold of: http://washer.alienbase.nl/mirrors/slackware/

Eric