this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2024
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It should work fine in a virtual machine. Just make sure you provide suitably ancient hardware like IDE storage and old ethernet cards. On something that old, I would only provide a single CPU. To be safe, I would also try installing with a low amount of RAM and then increase it later. Older kernels could not handle multi-processor or RAM above a certain size. I think I might start with 700 MB of RAM to do the install. That might sound like nothing but it probably runs in 8.
It is easy today in our era of resource richness to forget just how meager the hardware was when these distros were new.
A distro that old is going to require some fiddling to get XFree86 ( x11 ) up and running. It should be ok in a desktop VM but I have had problems with older versions of X in Proxmox in case you are using that.
I kind of want to go install this myself now. Or an old version of SLS ( pre-cursor to Slackware ). I ran them both at some point in my Linux journey but it has been a while.
What I really want to do is to make OCI containers from these old distros and try to run them in Distrobox on top of a modern kernel. Has somebody done that already? Really old versions of Red Hat ( not RHEL, Red Hat, < 6 ) would be cool too.
Confirmed. The minimum requirements are a 386 with 8 MB of RAM and 100 MB of drive space. Incredible.
@LeFantome@programming.dev If you haven't gotten the iso files already, I got them here: https://pd.spuddy.org/yggdrasil.html
@Drito@sh.itjust.works