[SGVLUG] Memories of SLS Linux

[Braddock Gaskill]

I got SLS Linux 1.05 circa April 1994 installed and running in qemu.  It
was neat to go through the old process - actually easier than I thought.

I (eventually) followed a very good guide here:
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/node/2097

This is probably the oldest Linux distribution available.  There is an
earlier SLS 1.03 on biblio, but it appears to be incomplete and fails on
installation.  I tried VMWare before qemu without success.

It would be an interesting project try to get networking support.  You'd
either have to SLIP over the emulated serial port, or recompile a very old
version of the kernel if the emulated network hardware was by chance
supported in 1994 (which I doubt).

Another interesting project would be getting X windows to work.  startx
failed out of the box, as I expected.  I recall getting X windows running
at the time as a very difficult and frustrating process.

But I probably won't go further into this.

-braddock

On Thu, Mar 12, 2015 at 10:35 PM, Braddock Gaskill <braddock at braddock.com>
wrote:

> James was talking tonight about installing an "old" linux distribution for
> fun.  It brought me back to my first encounter with Linux, which I thought
> I'd share.  Maybe others can share their experiences.
>
> The fall of 1993 was the start of my freshman year at college.  I spent
> all the money I'd earned at my first programming job the prior summer on a
> new 486DX2, even though I had been raised on an Amiga.
>
> MSDOS on the 486 was a bore compared to the Amiga.  The DEC Unix
> workstations in the lab were far more interesting.
>
> My dorm-mate Mark had received a big box of used floppy disks from his
> mother's work.  We went to the computer lab and started downloading SLS
> Linux from MIT's ftp server.  Slowly.  One floppy at a time.  To speed
> things up we commandeered half a dozen lab computers at once, looking over
> our shoulder in case the campus IT department got mad at our flagrant abuse
> of machines and precious bandwidth.  We were sure we'd get in trouble.
>
> One by one we downloaded all 50 floppy disks of SLS.  I still remember the
> prompt coming up on my freshly installed 486 and thinking I finally had a
> real machine.  Linux was at version 0.99.  There was no ethernet in the
> dorm, we had to run SLIP over a serial line.
>
> I only had 4MB of RAM, which wasn't really enough to run X - although Mark
> hacked on my computer all night to get the modelines correct to at least
> start it up.  The rule of thumb was you could open one window per megabyte
> of RAM over 4MB.  The next summer I upgraded to 8MB and could even run
> Mosaic - I recall fondly feeling like I had a real workstation.
>
> I haven't stopped running Linux since.  I see there is a vintage copy of
> SLS on ibiblio, so maybe I'll give it another try.
>
> -braddock
>
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