Retro – www.chrisrcook.com

Getting Red Hat Linux 5.2 up and running on 86Box

A somewhat oddly rendered Feb 2024 google.com in Netscape 4 on Red Hat Linux 5.2. I suppose we’re lucky a 26 old browser can access google at all..!

Introduction

One of my longer-running goals for Period Sites in Period Browsers was to include a good number of non-Windows hosted web browsers and the first stage in that is the creation of a functioning instance of the operating system hosted within an easily managed virtual machine. Unfortunately, whenever I’ve tried to install premillennial versions of linux within QEMU, I have categorically failed.

And, given the lack of guides on the internet, I’m not the only one.

In this guide we’re going to install and configure a working (albeit non-perfect) version of 1998’s Red Hat Linux 5.2. By the end of this guide we will produce a Red Hat Linux 5.2 install with a working network connection and functioning XWindows/Desktop environment.

Automatic Logon for Fedora Core 5

In the unlikely event that this is useful for someone else – an automatic logon for Fedora Core 5 can be set via editing /etc/gdm/custom.conf and setting the following values

[daemon] 
AutomaticLoginEnable=True 
AutomaticLogin=<Username>

Go! Go and have fun automatically logging into your nearly 18 year old operating system!

Period Sites in Period Browsers – An Update

Well, it’s been a little while since I last added one of these to my little retro internet project but… welcome to Windows XP Home x86 with Mozilla Suite 1.0 which is now on Period Sites in Period Browsers.

I have also taken the opportunity to renovate the the various tag pages and add a lot more information to them! Why not go and take a look!

Death By Chair

Possibly my favourite ever Doctor Who death – the man-eating chair from 1971’s Terror of the Autons. It’s great fun with 70s Doctor Who remaining true to it’s nature – spending almost 30 seconds on inflating a plastic chair – and, as always, Roger Delgado remains the consummate professional through out.

Retro Directory

Retro Directory is a listing of retro computing orgs, museums, podcasts and youtube channels. I knew about a few of these but most are a complete surprise to me!

Retro computing locations in Northern England

Youtube Channels. ‘RMC – The Cave‘ is a personal favourite.

My own little bit of retro computingness can be found at Period Sites in Period Browsers.

86Box config for RedHat 4.X

Recently I’ve been playing around in 86Box (build 3.7.1 for MacOS to be precise!) with 1997’s Red Hat Linux 4.2. After a little fiddling I seem to have got it mostly working – with one major caveat; I have had real issues with getting X/FVWM to work with any other display resolution than 640*480. Should I come up with a solution I shall, of course, update this page.

Missing Believed Wiped / Timeshift (BBC4 / 2003)

The Worst Game Ever – Stuart Ashens on ‘Hareraiser’

From my YouTube recommendations.

Hareraiser really does sound terrible!

Omniweb 4.5

Omniweb 4.5 – first released in August 2003 and, apparently, lost from the general web (or, at the very least, Google!) – can be found here. While the base URL isn’t an Omnigroup URL, it looks to be reasonably trustworthy as that particular file is linked to from the Omniweb 4.5 product page.

Anyway, in completely unrelated news, Omniweb 4.5 on OSX 10.3 comes to PSPB today!

Douglas Adams in MacWorld (May 1985)

An old (and, alas, they’re all old now) interview with Douglas Adams from the May 1985 issue of Macworld. Transcription is via OSX’s images to text service.