Need some old, old versions of Slackware
 

Okay, this is gonna sound kinda dumb. But I'm laid up... after walking around with a borderline case of pneumonia for almost a month I was given the choice between bedrest at home or hospitalization. Naturally I chose the former.

I'm bored, so I thought I'd check out some really ancient Linux just to see what it's like. I didn't start using Linux until late 2006! I was going to install the older versions of Slackware on Virtualbox starting with 1.0 and working my way up, but the problem is that some of the older stuff is kinda hard to find and all of the mirrors have gaps. Can somebody point me towards some really old Slackware isos?

http://slackware.cs.utah.edu/pub/slackware/iso_images/

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

Those should keep you busy... although I expect you don't realise that the early versions of Slackware were released as a stack of floppy disks =)

I do realize that... I lived through it, you know! I just wasn't using Linux at the time (I didn't really start using computers at all till I was in my mid-20s). But that still implies the existence of some kind of bootable medium that I could (in theory) load onto a VM. Anyway, thanks for the links!

If you search on here, niels.horn has a pretty extensive collection of slackware. I think there is a link somewhere on the forum.

just found the niels.horn stuff; thanks!

I had a go at running 3.5 and 8.1 in qemu about a couple of years ago (I think I had 12.2 on then), it was a struggle. Never tried any old releases in VBox, though. Good Luck!

I figured I'd start with a nice middle ground just to see what i was letting myself in for and installed 8.0. It was easy; not much more difficult than installing 13.1, really. Guess I'll have to go a bit older to discover the hard stuff.

It was fun to look around the KDE 2.x desktop and all of those old apps, though. I never saw any of that stuff... at that point I was running Windows ME (worst OS ever).

Yes, installing the old stuff is fun :)

Hi,

Not just fun but informative and allows one to experience the progression of Slackware from the beginning. Not a easy task. LQ Search will be of help. Early releases used Disk sets and may be problem at first.

How far back do you want to go?

Look here; ftp://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/slackware/

and

Historic GNU/Linux Slackware® for'Versions 1.1.2, 2.1, 3.0, 3.1, 3.9'

Have fun!
:hattip:

If you need historic Slackware versions, I have collected all of them on a big Internet pipe: http://washer.alienbase.nl/mirrors/slackware/

Eric

Eric, have I ever mentioned that you rock?

Okay, question. Slackware 8.0 shipped with both 2.2.19 and 2.4.5 kernels, but 2.2.19 is installed. Is there an easy way to switch it to 2.4.5?

I got the 2.4.5 kernel running, but maybe one of you veterans can tell me how to figure out which of the device listed in /dev is the virtual cdrom drive?

Perhaps a little something like:

dmesg | grep CD

Boy don't I feel sheepish... shoulda thought of that. Gimme a break, though... by the time I started using Linux this stuff was being automagically detected and mounted.