Live CD with a kernel version older than 2.4 [retro]
 

I'm looking for a Live CD distribution (.iso) that uses a Linux kernel older than 2.4.

Please recommend historical live CD distros that have such a kernel version (for example, 2.2.26).

Yggdrasil might but I don't know if the ISO at archive.org is a live version
https://archive.org/details/yggdrasil-1994

For what purpose? I suspect in that period that the only instances providing a GUI would have been installers. Most installers provide a text shell on vtty2 at least, typically more. Thus you might pick any distro that existed in the period.

Thanks. The CD image from the link you provided is not bootable. Anyway, I hoped I could find something a little more modern. Like from the late 90's or early 2000's.

I think I actually found a viable alternative, "Deli Linux 0.6.1" which uses the 2.2.x kernel. But I can't find a working link to download it.
This is the only link I could find, but it asks for a user/password.
ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/delilinux/iso/deli-0.6.1.iso

Maybe you know of other sources where I could find it? Or a similar distro?

You can make whatever kernel you want.

https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
https://weeraman.com/building-a-tiny...i=b58267a72d54
https://www.linuxjournal.com/content...-make-kernel-0

https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/
https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.2/

That has a 2.4 kernel. OP wants older than 2.4. Oldest kernel on Distrowatch/Knoppix is 2.4.20.

I would check one of the least ancient versions of DSL (Damn Small Linux).

Oh sorry.

This stretches the definition of "live cd", but you can boot from it, get a shell, and run "dhcpcd" on your Ethernet connection.

http://slackware.cs.utah.edu/pub/sla...kware-8.0-iso/

demo linux is supposed to be a live version.

https://archive.org/details/demolinux-3.01pl5-fr

There's a 'live' CD image of Toms, likely to be a '2' series kernel, (can't remember for sure).

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/system/recovery/

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/sys...to.288.img.bz2

Fascinating search! I also wonder why you want this.

I'm guessing you're NOT willing to build=compile anything, so you probably don't want the old kernel source:
https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/

I even tried the infamous chatGPT, but it hallucinated up garbage non-existent links
(you can keep telling it that it is wrong, and it will politely keep trying again, forever, LOL)

My first thought was to find a very old book, apparently before Y2K, that contains a Linux CD.

I believe Damn Small Linux iso for 3.4.12 contains the kernel version 2.4 (2.04!) so well before 2.10.

The archives have older versions and it should be easy to download and test and find one using kernel version 2.2! DSL kept using older kernel versions because they were SMALLER and they had a self imposed size restraint.

RH 7.0 used the 2.2.16-22 kernel
https://archive.download.redhat.com/...0/en/iso/i386/

Thanks everybody for your help and suggestions, here's the follow up:

I know that distro and it is too limited... Thanks though.

That's the first distro I tried. I followed your suggestion and tried almost all versions, down to 0.6 and all have the a 2.4 kernel.
Thanks for your suggestion, though.

This one actually worked, thank you! It's a bit too much for this limited computer (maxed out at 80MB of ram).
Excellent, that worked and looks and feels almost perfectly.

Now the problem is: find the right module to bring up the 8-bit ISA NIC. On Windows the generic "NE2000 Compatible" works, but I can't load it on Slackware, even specifying irq=3 io=0x300 (correct configuration). Maybe I need a different module? It's a generic NIC with a UMC chip.

Do you know what is the minimum RAM required to boot the live cd?

On a system with 64 MB I couldn't boot it properly. On a System with 80 MB I could.

All 16-bit ISA network cards that I tried were not compatible with 8-bit ISA, sadly.

Can you recommend any that might work?

I believe the default for the ISA NE2000 was:

The thing is, this particular dinosaur only has an 8-bit ISA slot.

I tried a lot of cards configured with different IO addresses and IRQs, i.e.:

But none of them are cooperating on Linux, the module doesn't load.

An original Novell 2000 card didn't work, and lots of generic cards didn't work either.

Some worked on Windows 98 though, but they don't work on Linux for some reason.

I will get a 3COM card and see if it works.

Maybe it's that the NE module is not compatible with 8-bit operation mode?

Didn't you have to configure some things in bios for nic cards???

I guess I don't remember that far back.

The last Slackware version to boot in 64MB of RAM was 13.0.
I do not miss the days of setting jumpers and fiddling with ISA slot positions and BIOS settings to get cards to work.
I seem to remember using a lot of 3Com 3c509 NICs back then.