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.

Continue reading

Period Sites with Period Browsers – Machines No. 99 and 100

I’ve just added two somewhat interesting machine/browser combinations to Period Sites in Period Browsers.

Machine 99 – Windows 98 RTM x86 with Grail 0.6

Grail 0.6 running on the release to manufacturing version of Windows 98. Grail 0.6 is interesting as it’s a cross platform browser written by Guido van Rossum in Python and uses the Tcl/Tk windowing toolkit for display. Was Windows 98 the ideal platform for Grail? Probably not, but it did run and it did pretty well with pre-millennial web pages…

Continue reading

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.

Linux Kernel 2.0.30? Gosh!
Continue reading

Old Solaris Patches (Sunsite Mirrors)

sunsite.icm.edu.pl looks to be an old mirror of the pre-Oracle Sunsites. It’s quite useful for patches for older Solaris releases.

To get Internet Explorer 5.0 for Unix (Sparc) running on the Sparc release of Solaris 7 I ended up using:

108376-46: OpenWindows 3.6.1: Xsun Patch (Patch File)

106327-23: SunOS 5.7: 32-Bit Shared library patch for C++ (Patch File)

106950-24: SunOS 5.7: Linker Patch (Patch File)

And voila! Internet Explorer 5.0 for Unix running on the Sparc release of Solaris 7.0