If you're going to try some Aass [this jokes never gets old, sorry], have a go with Aass Fatøl. It's OK but it's not great. If you want some really decent beer from Norway, I'd check out whatever's on offer from Nøgne Ø brewery.

I think it'd be worth documenting. Either here on by video, if you're into that.

Hmm, would it be another type of *nix?

Have a fully functional Pentium III machine running FreeDOS. And Slackware 14.2 on another drive for when I need to run ssh, do large file system operations and whatnot.

1.0ghz PIII slot 1 on that sexy Intel SE440BX2 board. 768megs of RAM.

Oh, and a non-plug-and-play Sound Blaster AWE32 with that fancy-schmancy MIDI goodness.

Basically the machine I would dream of as a kid.

Runs Quake in 640x480 (at almost 60fps) all day long. <3

Oh, and no Trusted-Security-Management-Platform or anything of that sort on-board. Full control (well... almost) of all hardware and software.

@Fat_Elvis
You make me remember my own oldest machine, a home built desktop from wayback:
Asus P2B-D 440BX, 450MHz Pentium III, 1024MB, floppy, SoundBlaster Live (PCI) with Creative CD writer, serial mouse and keyboard :-) and it is still running Slackware 12.x. If I remember correctly it started with Slackware 9.x.
I don't use it anymore of course, but as a kid I loved this machine! I probably still have a USRobotics external modem
56.6k with it in the basement. Downloading wasn't too bad since all manner of files were much smaller then...really large files would have been 1~2Mb. I'll stop there else I'll start talking about the old slide projecter I inherited from someone which still works just fine.

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It's been a while, but.. there were difficulties.


Yes, that's the original InfoMagic set from August 1995.

Since my other 486 seems quite unstable I've returned to the Amigo. I also added a CD-ROM drive and installed the HDD inside a removable enclosure, for easier access. Alas, I might have exaggerated a bit - this CD-ROM seemed ok at first, but it failed to read while installing. So, in the end I used another (DOS) partition for the Slackware installation source.
Apart from that (and some other HW related troubles), bash 3.2.48 (as well as 3.2) needs to be configured with
in order to avoid problems with undefined reference to `libintl_gettext' when compiling under older systems (such as Slackware 2.3)

After some adventures, this is what I ended up with:

xv grab of an rxvt window - now even the packages count is wrong


screen picture with more applications - it's good to have plenty of RAM.
Colors look strange because of DOOM (well, any program that changes colormap, in fact)

Full story is here: http://hawk.ro/stories/slack2.3/
My site is quite clean - no advertisments, analytics or anything like this. I hope it's not against forum rules to post it as such; if it is, please let me know and I'll copy it here.

@Lysander666, since he was the instigator
I still have one more idea to try neofetch on (going back to the mid 80s), but it must be NetBSD based (of course it runs NetBSD). If that succeeds I will post the result in the appropriate forum, I think I've monopolized this thread enough

Thank you all for the idea and encouragement! And of course, thanks to Patrick Volkerding for providing such a good distribution for at least a quarter of a century!

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Warms my heart to see Doom.

xdoom, is that the original linux port by Dave Taylor?
How well is it running on there?

Yeah, it was the spirit of the era!
It's running fine, I would estimate over 30fps (at least in that window; I don't know if it has an option for scaling but I suspect not). Wait, there is:


By the way, I don't have a soundcard installed in this computer, so can't say anything about the sound.

It might be. On the 2nd CD there is another archive and the README inside that one says:

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Slackware 2.3!

What a ride!

Haha! Awesome!


I think my actual first PC was either a 386 or a 486, with 1 meg of ram. I remember for sure that it could run Wolfenstein, but not Doom.

Yes but please link it through this one. I think your posts deserve more exposure, what you've done is so impressive. I especially enjoyed your blog post - green VDU font included.

Apologies for missing it, do you know why neofetch misses out the CPU/RAM info on the older computers? You've done such a thorough job documenting everything, I'll sig your posts. I really think your blog post should include pics and references to all your retro Slackware experiments.

2 members found this post helpful.

Thank you for your appreciation, including VDU style! The next entry will likely be amber (and the reason for its color, self-explanatory). Until then...

The Oracle has pondered your question deeply. Your question was:
Peering into the mists of time, the Oracle can vaguely discern the shape of /proc...
no, sorry, I can't keep that up. A short investigation found that /proc/meminfo has changed from older kernels era. Specifically, on the Amigo running Slackware 2.3:
(yesterday I upgraded it to 64MB - 4*16MB SIMMs; also I recompiled its kernel)

while on another computer running Slackware 14.1 (or 13.37; it's the same)
You can see how nowadays the values are split on separate lines, making life easier for neofetch (that is looking.. well, read-ing for MemTotal and so on)

Similarly for cpu, neofetch seems to be looking in /proc/cpuinfo for one of the following:
however, cpuinfo contains somewhat different information
Again, this is related to kernel version (implicitly Slackware version), rather than hardware. In other (more pompous?) words, it's related to how the Linux kernel delivers information about hardware to user-mode programs. I wonder: could a 2.8 3.0 kernel be compiled for the 486?

You owe the Oracle a Linux kernel capable to run on the 286.

(this vintage stuff distracted me to nethack and that lead to oracularities)

EDIT: forgot that there was no 2.8 kernel

1 members found this post helpful.

In the quest for older computers I left Linux-land and went to NetBSD

MicroVAX II: 32bit CPU at 5MHz, 16MB of RAM, no hard disk. But, it boots from a Slackware server
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest....php?p=5998801

Story here:
http://hawk.ro/stories/bsduvaxii/

4 members found this post helpful.

phalange,

I use exclusively ThinkPads from T and X series. My newest machine at this very moment is ThinkPad T61. I do not know too much about multitasking but I use it with Slackware Linux 14.2 and Window Maker. I usually run two simultaneous X Window sessions, three or more terminal emulators, one or two instances of Firefox using multiple tabs, OpenOffice.org, StarDict using 26 dictionaries, and some other programs such as Thunderbird, GIMP, Audacity, Calibre, etc. All this work well at the same time. If your browser sticks when you open a few tabs that means that you misconfigured this program and – maybe – you use some sluggish desktop environment.

keithpeter,

My ThinkPads T40 and T41 died long ago. I gave my oldest ThinkPad T60 to my friend – it runs Linux Mint 18.3 using my configuration. My main machine at this very moment is ThinkPad T61. I use also ThinkPad X60s as a jukebox, and ThinkPad X61s as a spare machine. Just as you I buy second-hand machines. They are cheap and reliable. Moreover they are designed much better than the newer ones. ThinkPads T500 and X201 are the last ones using acceptable 1680×1050 or 1280×800 screens and standard keyboard layout.

cowpoke,

I am lazy so I do not run 64-bit systems. I install 32-bit Slackware on my most powerful machine, I install a lot of programs from SlackBuilds, I configure the system and the programs, and – finally – I clone that on my other machines. I will install 64-bit system for the first time after my last 32-bit machine will die.

ttk,

Your working ThinkPad R53 is as impressive as keithpeter’s ThinkPad T42. I suppose that you bought better made machines because you both live in more civilized countries than me. My first two ThinkPads – T40 and T41 – were from Polish distribution. Poland is not very civilized country. The same products sold here are worse than their counterparts sold in USA or Great Britain. For the comparison: my former ThinkPad T60 was originally sold in South Korea. I bought it second-hand. When a few years later I bought ThinkPad T61 I put its newer keyboard into T60 and put older original Korean keyboard from T60 into my new T61. This keyboard worked for me for at least ten years. And you have to know that I use keyboard all day long, pour ash and tobacco on it, sprinkle crumbs on it, and – from time to time – spill a bit of beer on it so a sturdy keyboard is crucial for me.

STDOUBT,

I agree that ThinkPad T60 had best screen ever. Some folks tune this machine replacing its original screen with IPS one and putting into the most powerful processor. They call their tuned T60 “FrankenPad”.

3 members found this post helpful.

Your challenge caught my interest. :-)
I have a 386DX-40 computer named star which currently runs Slackware 8.1 (I installed it in 2003-Sep-14). (About a half-decade earlier I had assembled star using a motherboard which had been given to me as scrap by a computer-shop, and the case of an old computer I had bought from Duke University Surplus. I think I originally installed Slackware 3.2 on it from a stack of floppies.)

The hardware of star: I see no manufacturer's name nor date on the top of the motherboard. However, the AMI BIOS displays during boot-up a date of 1992-June-6. The BIOS is on a socketed DIP chip, and I never upgraded it, and I doubt the previous owner did. So, I estimate the motherboard was made sometime in the second half of 1992.

When I assembled star in the late 1990s its purpose was to be the gateway between my US Robotics modem and my Ethernet LAN; and it worked. :-) Eventually, I had a Netgear router to control the modem, and I put much more RAM in star --- then star was my DNS, NTP, and DHCP server.

From /proc/cpuinfo --> "bogomips : 7.93".

4 members found this post helpful.

I've got functional Compaq SLT/286 in the office

One Christmas my son (8 at the time) had been begging for a Laptop and found that under the tree
He wasn't amused... But did enjoy his Referb Dell

The oldest I have now is a Dell Latitude C400 from 2002 and an EPIA VIA Mini ITX 500Mhz thats from around the same time.