After recently completing the build of a 486DX2/66 machine I was reminded that this was nearly the identical build to one of my first "real" Linux machines, somewhere around 1993/1994. As I am prepping for VCFMW 2026 I thought, you know, why not get an install of some Linux types of that era on the machine and bring it along. This repo is the result of doing that.
A couple modern amenities I do enjoy using on old machines, a GoTek drive and a IDE CF or SD card. Floppy drives always seem to be in a state of barely working or on the way to breaking, a GoTek is all but an essential addition. I also like the ability to swap between OS's on the machines so I use an IDE to CF card adapter, an IDE to SATA or some form of that with an SD card.
I remembered using a few different eras of Linux then, the first was when it was REALLY raw, the 0.12 days. It's all but an alpha release, essentially unusable for anything real, but it shows what hit the public in January 1992.
The other one I used, a lot, was Slackware, probably like many of you that remember this period. I did use SLS and MCC for a bit but for now I'm going to get early Slackware as an option.
I'm currently working on this on a Windows 11 machine under WSL2, everything I've tested with runs there. I have an Ubuntu box sitting here to try these out on at some point, I suspect most things will work the same but YMMV if you're native Linux. Have not tried it on any of my Macs, might work but I sort of doubt it and have no real desire to test or mod for that one.
Yea, Windows 11, I know, it came on this NUC and what can I say, I hate reloading OS's.
See mcc-linux/README.md for the full details. Short version here.
MCC Interim Linux was put together by Owen LeBlanc at Manchester Computing Centre around 1993. It's one of the early distributions — same era as SLS, before Slackware had really taken over. I used it briefly before landing on Slackware and mostly forgot it existed until I started digging around for what was actually out there in that window.
It's version 1.0+, which is an odd way to version a release but that's what it says. Uses a boot disk / root disk approach like later Slackware, two kernel options depending on whether you have a CD-ROM drive, and packages are installed by swapping floppies and running tar off the device directly. No package manager, no installer magic — just tar.
Boot disk options:
- cdrmboot — kernel with CD-ROM driver support compiled in
- nocdboot — standard kernel without CD-ROM, works on most hardware
After the base install there are two sets of packages:
- packages/ — the recommended set: GCC, GDB, groff, info pages, man pages, gawk, flex, bison, and the Linux kernel source
- extra_packages/ — optional add-ons: Emacs, elisp, mail utilities, gprof, extra libraries, man pages, patches, timezone data
One thing worth knowing: emacsxtr.tgz in extra_packages is 2.3MB and won't
fit on a single 1.44MB floppy. It's in the source tree but gets skipped by the
image builder. Everything else fits fine.
See slackware/README.md for the full details on the scripts and how everything works. What follows is a summary of each version and where things stand.
This does not appear to exist in a complete form in any mirror I've been able to find.
Released in 1994, this is one of the earliest Slackware releases still available in a reasonably complete form. The tree structure is noticeably different from later releases — there's no slakware/ subdirectory, all the package series directories (a1/, ap1/, etc.) sit right in the root of the distribution tree.
The bigger difference for installation purposes: there's no separate root disk. Later Slackware had you boot from a boot disk, then swap to a root disk to load the installer environment. In 1.1.2 it's all one disk — boot it and you're straight into the installer. One less thing to juggle.
The distribution has a few series that didn't survive to 2.x — notably oi (Object Interfaces, the InterViews widget library) across 3 disks. No q series either, kernel source wasn't distributed separately in this one.
Full install with X is around 30 disks. Base system without X is considerably less.
Boot disk options worth knowing about:
- bareboot — standard IDE, no SCSI. Start here for most hardware.
- scsiboot — mixed IDE and SCSI system.
- onlyscsi — SCSI only, no IDE.
- color144 — like bareboot but with color terminal support.
- tty144 — plain TTY, no color, for simpler terminals.
This is the first one I started with and is the most complete in here. Step 1 was finding a copy of the original installation diskettes, fortunately they're available still. I put together a script to mirror the files down to work on.
If you remember Slackware, you'll likely remember the hell that was all of the floppy disks you had to make in order to install it. The full distribution is something like 50+ of them, a decent usable system with X is around 30. The script make-gotek-images.sh creates the image files from the mirror — it's doing what the MAKEFLOP script included with Slackware did at the time, just automated.
Unlike 1.1.2, this version splits the boot process across two disks. You boot from a boot disk first, then swap to a root disk when prompted to load the installer. The boot disk is just the kernel; the root disk is the installer environment (shell, setup scripts, fdisk, etc.).
Boot disk options worth knowing about:
- bare — standard IDE, no SCSI. Start here for most hardware.
- scsi — generic SCSI support.
- modern — for newer IDE controllers that bare doesn't handle.
- net — network-enabled kernel.
- scsinet — SCSI plus networking.
Root disk options:
- color144 — color terminal installer. Use this one.
- tty144 — plain TTY, no color.
At the end you're left with a bunch of img files that you copy to a USB key and feed into your GoTek. The copy-to-usb.sh script handles that part.
Mirror is complete and images build cleanly. The top-level tree structure looks the same as 2.0.0 — bootdsks.144/, rootdsks.144/, slakware/ — so the same layout detection applies. The differences are under the hood and the image builder handles them automatically.
The two things that changed from 2.0.0: the root disk images ship as raw uncompressed floppies instead of gzipped files, so no decompression step is needed. And the package disk directories don't have a 00index.txt manifest, so the builder copies everything in the directory rather than using a file list. Neither requires any manual intervention.
This is a noticeably bigger distribution than 2.0.0 — TeX alone went from 5 disks to 10, X went from 8 to 13. Full install with X is pushing 70+ disks.
Boot disk options worth knowing about:
- bare — standard IDE, no SCSI. Start here for most hardware.
- scsi — generic SCSI support.
- loaded — kitchen-sink kernel with a wide range of drivers compiled in.
- net — network-enabled kernel.
- scsinet — SCSI plus networking.
- old1118 — kernel 1.1.18, for hardware that doesn't work with the newer one.
- alpha — Alpha architecture kernel.
Root disk options are the same as 2.0.0:
- color144 — color terminal installer. Use this one.
- tty144 — plain TTY, no color.
One thing to be aware of: q2 (kernel source disk 2) has entries in its file list for some CD-ROM driver files that aren't present in the mirror. The image builder skips them with warnings and keeps going — the warnings are expected and the resulting image is fine for everything that was actually available.