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OldLinux: Ancient Linux Resources

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140 pointshomarp43 comments

Little note: The Minix hard disk clone contains the text string "Copyright Autumnal Water Corp. 1991" which is consistent with a boot sector virus called "Autumnal.3072" so... I don't know, don't run it in a virtual machine hooked up to any other disk images you care about? This is the first time I've ever found malware on retrocomputing media, and goddamn if I don't love the verisimilitude. Don't Copy That Floppy and such.

I found that with binwalk. Using strings, I found the string "Dis is one half." which is on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneHalf

> OneHalf is a DOS-based polymorphic computer virus (hybrid boot and file infector) discovered in October 1994.[1] It is also known as Slovak Bomber, Freelove or Explosion-II.[2] It infects the master boot record (MBR) of the hard disk, and any files with extensions .COM, .SCR and .EXE.[3] However, it will not infect files that have SCAN, CLEAN, FINDVIRU, GUARD, NOD, VSAFE, MSAV or CHKDSK in the name.[4]

[snip]

> OneHalf is known for its peculiar payload: at every boot, it encrypts two unencrypted cylinders of the user's hard disk, but then temporarily decrypts them when they are accessed. This makes sure the user does not notice that their hard disk is being encrypted like this, and lets the encryption continue further. It also hides the real MBR from programs on the computer, to make detection harder. The encryption is done by bitwise XORing by a randomly generated key, which can be decrypted simply by XORing with the same bit stream again. Once the virus has encrypted half of the disk, and/or on the 4th, 8th, 10th, 14th, 18th, 20th, 24th, 28th and 30th of any month and under some other conditions, the virus will display the message:[4]

    Dis is one half.

    Press any key to continue ...

http://virus.wikidot.com/onehalf

So that's at least two different viruses. This thing is more infected than a streetwalker after Fleet Week.

Malwarebytes blocked this site instantly. Don't dip in without protection.

I opened this site on my Linux system, and now my house is on fire!

You live inside your printer (lp0)?

> This is the first time I've ever found malware on retrocomputing media

I have one of those windows 2000 n-in-1 discs that has some viruses embedded into it... it's the only one I can think of off-hand that wasn't actually back in the day. (Which reminds me, I should probably delete it)

Here is the famous Tanenbaum thread:

http://www.oldlinux.org/Linux.old/docs/linux_is_obsolete.txt

It's in RMAIL/BABYL format, open it with C-u M-x rmail and then h for the summary view. Or just read it as text.

5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5.

Linux was slow as hell on Sparcstation.

> In the meantime, RISC chips happened, and some of them are running at over 100 MIPS. Speeds of 200 MIPS and more are likely in the coming years. These things are not going to suddenly vanish. What is going to happen is that they will gradually take over from the 80x86 line. They will run old MS-DOS programs by interpreting the 80386 in software.

I guess you can say that finally came true with Apple’s M1/M2 chips + Rosetta 2. Just took longer than expected.

What finally came true? That the RISC took over from 80x86?

They took over in Apple universe. For some people Apple is everything there is.

I own both a gaming PC running Windows 11 with an Intel i9-12900K and an Apple MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro. I think the writing is on the wall for x86, at least from a general computing sense. I’m absolutely blown away on how well Apple pulled off the transition to M1. My previous Intel based MBP had atrocious battery life and could barely survive an hour video meeting on MS Teams. It might take a while but I can see ARM-based Windows taking off the same way if paired with a killer CPU.

The CPU part is the problem. Qualcomm is barely doing anything when it comes to making good ARM chips which compete, and most other chip manufacturers are not much better.

I have a bad feeling though that when ARM processors do finally become viable outside the apple ecosystem, that they will all be locked to running windows, thanks to lack of UEFI support on arm and the mess that is device trees.

Arguably, it came true with the Pentium Pro more than 20 years ago. Ever since then x86 processors have interpreted x86 instructions by translating them into multi-step sequences of microinstructions under software control. The microcode is basically a just-in-time translator with specialized hardware assists. (And it is very much under software control -- that's why the microcode needs periodic microcode patches to fix bugs.) The internal architecture today looks much more like a RISC/VLIW machine than a classical x86 processor.

Well the site looks and feels like the places I remember looking for Linux resources 20 years - or is it 30? - ago so they got that part right.

Very authentic! It even has a closed forum that's pending an upgrade. To complete the experience they could've linked to the forum but left in the PHP error messages.

Little animated gif digging man with an "under construction" sign.

The site is written in HTML 4.0 Transitional, with uppercase tags and even a bit of table layout at the end.

This is authentic, peak internet; note how fast it loads and how usable it is.

    <META name=GENERATOR content="MSHTML 9.00.8112.16450">

And MSHTML (Frontpage?) still wrote better webpages than webdevs do today.

I wish Gentoo in particular had more of its history still saved. You can download day-by-day snapshots of the "Portage" tree for the package manager to know what packages to build, but actually building software requires googling for ancient tarballs and piecing together a "distfiles" directory one by one, typically without Gentoo's own patches(!)

There was an attempt a while back to try and get it recovered, but the developer "Robbat" who claimed to have old tape backups never replied https://bugs.gentoo.org/834712#c4

> the developer "Robbat" who claimed to have old tape backups never replied

Reminds me of that old story of a company that was diligently putting tapes into their tape writers every day for backups, and stored the backup tapes securely so that in the event of disaster they could recover from the tapes.

One day disaster strikes. They fetch the most recent backup tapes and attempt to restore their data but the tapes are blank. They try the tapes from the day before. Blank. And the day before that and the day before that. They try all of the tapes. Every single tape is blank.

They had been putting backup tapes into the machine for years. But the machine had never actually written anything to any of the tapes. And no-one had checked to see if there was any data on the tapes until the day when they needed the data and it was already too late.

This story is meant to teach people that having a backup routine is not enough. You need to verify that the backups are actually working. That all of the data is actually being backed up.

Slackware has fairly complete releases from 1.01 (the X floppy disk image sets appears to be missing). Around 1993 onwards so not quite the Ur-Linux. Version 1.20 starts the ChangeLog.txt file that records new and recompiled packages. So you have continuous history for just under 30 years...

http://slackware.uk/slackware/

I still have the InfoMagic Linux CDs from November 1995. Mostly slackware focused. Can't bring myself to throw it away....

In the mid to late 90s when dialup was the only way to get to the internet for most people, I remember buying magazines specifically to get the bundled software CD. Sometimes it was games, demos, and web browsers but quite often full Linux distributions.

Yes, you could install Slackware from a stack of 30 floppies, but that was the kind of thing you realistically only did once, out of either desperation or novelty.

You’re right about only doing something like that once—since your parents would have murdered you for running up the phone bill.

The InfoMagic setup for Slackware went with a floppy for setting boot and lilo and the cd for the rest. Looking at the CDs now, the 1st was Slackware, and others were RedHat, Debian and what appears to be a dump of mit.edu, sunsite, and also GNU and X. I don't think I ever managed to install anything out of those. In 1995 I had the will but far from the knowledge to do any of that. The booklet also just went through the Slackware setup, and not any of the other distros.

I remember sending cash or a cheque to someone and receiving 3 to 4 redhat CD-ROMs. Fond memories.

Same with my stack of 2600 Magazines from the late 90s. I'm never going to read them, nobody I know is interested in them, but I'm never going to throw them away.

Ha, I feel the same way. I used to lug mine around from job to job to fill up my work bookshelf. Also I have some Phrack magazines mixed in as well. Did you buy yours at Boarders with cash as well? :D

Borders did sell them in the UK (until the eventually closed up shop).

They are in my Garage. Along with Amiga Format and other such magazines. They can use them to cremate my body but until then, they remain where they are.

I would pay cash money for a collection of old 2600 issues. I bet I'm not the only one.

Might want to consider ripping an image of these and uploading it to Internet Archive for preservation (if one doesn’t exist).

My first foray into Linux was around 96/97 with Debian that was included with Boot Magazine (later Maximum PC). It turned out to be a huge disaster and I trashed my Win95 system because I didn’t know what I was doing. It would be fun to find that CD again and try getting to work finally on period hardware.

I will do just that. Good idea.

The Debian snapshot server only has copies of every Debian source/binary package going back to 2005 :(

https://snapshot.debian.org/

There are copies of the older releases on the archive though:

https://archive.debian.org/

A blog post about playing with Boot/Root, the first Linux distribution, using images from this server: https://github.com/pavel-krivanek/articles/blob/master/BootR...

Linuz Gazzete, from 1995 to 2013.

https://linuxgazette.net/archives.html

A lot of old suff still works.

The HOWTOs that came in the RedHat Linux 5.2 CD were cool.

Back in the day, you could get Linux distros with printed manuals. And more importantly, stickers!

RedHat is well known for printed manuals, but SuSE Linux also did this. I still have some of them on my book shelf. SuSE was shockingly inexpensive, given the high quality documentation and packaging.

I picked up Red Hat 5.2 at Best Buy like this. As a high school kid with little money it was like Christmas to find something so heavy and packed with software for like $30. Had a lot of fun with it at the time.

Also that looking through the manual at things you already (think you) know, you learn a lot.

There was a time when all OS's did this. I had a DOS binder, from which I learned 80x86 Assembler from the Debug chapter. And since I grew up on QNX, I managed to score myself a set of QNX manuals that are actually still on my shelf today because its such an interesting OS.

Nowadays we're paperless. The info is all still there. Just not as beautifully presented.

Enjoy.

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