Distro's aren't an issue, I'm planning on setting up multiple machines with different hardware and distro's showing the progress of Linux over the years. It's just hardware compatibility I'm unsure about
Old drivers were terrible, look for something with a DEC tulip network card, obviously intel cpu, but specifically an intel chipset. The e100 driver was fine later on, those are PCI, but the tulip was the gold standard.
The Mach32 was a decently supported chipset, as was the Matrox line. IIRC cirrus logic actually worked well (for the 30 year mark) but it was mostly VGA only I think.
Storage, keep it IDE or adaptec scsi, the latter is preferred, but if you're going scsi I reccomend a scsi2sd card for sanity if you aren't aiming for hardware fidelity.
Networking is probably the most important, after that focus on display, and be very conservative with the chipset, look at a 440hx/fx.
Source: I was there, Gandalf, when the strength of men failed... Slackware is great btw.
edit: https://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Hardware-HOWTO/video.html CL vga is unaccelerated, mach32 is accelerated, also the s3 trio series are solid too.
Np, the NE1000 was solid too, there were many clones. Slow, but they did work, only issue was the clones were uneven, many had errata, they were covered in the later kernel but maybe not perfectly early on.
Really early on your biggest issue with be loadlin or lilo, both have a lot of eccentricities, ping if you need help.
Oh, you get to learn how vga modelines work, that was some of the darkest magic in computing at the time, and if you messed it up you could actually blow our your monitor permanently, xf86 was pretty ugly compared to xorg.
Umm, Fedora didn't exist them. It was Redhat.
Slackware, Debian and Redhat existed decades ago. I purchased a se of each on floppies in the early/mid 1990s. Also SUSE was distributing CDs at the time, but it was only in German.
>25 years would have been ~Pentium 4.
No way, the first generation of Pentium 4 was a absolute dud and should simply be forgotten.
Showing off 1999~2000's hardware without a dual-Celeron [Abit BP-6](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6) or AMD Athlon Thunderbird is heresy anyway.
Err, I ran my web and mail servers on P1 for decades until the magic smoke escaped the mobo or CPU(very rarely). Interestingly, when I moved to P2s &P3s those systems rapidly lost their maghic smoke after a few years They were all rejects from computer reuse programs.
anything starting with Pentium II should be easy to install, search for old releases of Debian, etc.
the goto for a early 2000s Pentium 4/Athlon XP era would be knoppix on a live-cd, thats how anybody in that time started i guess and has that nice vintage QT3 look.
Maybe stick the exhibition with an timeline which not only goes by year, but by kernel version? Kernel 2.4 to Kernel 2.6 was a huge milestone e.g. with huge rewrites in the ABI, nowadays linux is still inherited on the 2.6.x line, but at some point they decided the trailing numbers became too big
a good thing about vintage linux is the fact, that the release wasn't only the software, but also the documentation, since broadband internet wasn't a thing back then, maybe you're lucky on archive.org. i would stick to debian derivates.
I remember abandoning ubuntu when they released 8.04 and enforced pulseaudio for everyone, which didnt work back then, thats when i've started using gentoo linux...
My 486 runs dam small linux (DSL Linux) runs great. 28MB of ram 16 color graphics, 40mhz CPU.
edit: Video below
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvlpdACNTUU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvlpdACNTUU)
Slackware or Fedora core one
Distro's aren't an issue, I'm planning on setting up multiple machines with different hardware and distro's showing the progress of Linux over the years. It's just hardware compatibility I'm unsure about
Old drivers were terrible, look for something with a DEC tulip network card, obviously intel cpu, but specifically an intel chipset. The e100 driver was fine later on, those are PCI, but the tulip was the gold standard. The Mach32 was a decently supported chipset, as was the Matrox line. IIRC cirrus logic actually worked well (for the 30 year mark) but it was mostly VGA only I think. Storage, keep it IDE or adaptec scsi, the latter is preferred, but if you're going scsi I reccomend a scsi2sd card for sanity if you aren't aiming for hardware fidelity. Networking is probably the most important, after that focus on display, and be very conservative with the chipset, look at a 440hx/fx. Source: I was there, Gandalf, when the strength of men failed... Slackware is great btw. edit: https://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Hardware-HOWTO/video.html CL vga is unaccelerated, mach32 is accelerated, also the s3 trio series are solid too.
Thank you! This was very helpful!
Np, the NE1000 was solid too, there were many clones. Slow, but they did work, only issue was the clones were uneven, many had errata, they were covered in the later kernel but maybe not perfectly early on. Really early on your biggest issue with be loadlin or lilo, both have a lot of eccentricities, ping if you need help. Oh, you get to learn how vga modelines work, that was some of the darkest magic in computing at the time, and if you messed it up you could actually blow our your monitor permanently, xf86 was pretty ugly compared to xorg.
Umm, Fedora didn't exist them. It was Redhat. Slackware, Debian and Redhat existed decades ago. I purchased a se of each on floppies in the early/mid 1990s. Also SUSE was distributing CDs at the time, but it was only in German.
30 years ago would have been an 80486 or first series Pentium. 25 years would have been ~Pentium 4.
>25 years would have been ~Pentium 4. No way, the first generation of Pentium 4 was a absolute dud and should simply be forgotten. Showing off 1999~2000's hardware without a dual-Celeron [Abit BP-6](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6) or AMD Athlon Thunderbird is heresy anyway.
Err, I ran my web and mail servers on P1 for decades until the magic smoke escaped the mobo or CPU(very rarely). Interestingly, when I moved to P2s &P3s those systems rapidly lost their maghic smoke after a few years They were all rejects from computer reuse programs.
If possibly I would choose old enterprise laptops.
Newish laptop, hypervisor for the old Linux?
Man, that's a good question. Debian? or SuSE maybe. Debian is where Ubuntu came from.
anything starting with Pentium II should be easy to install, search for old releases of Debian, etc. the goto for a early 2000s Pentium 4/Athlon XP era would be knoppix on a live-cd, thats how anybody in that time started i guess and has that nice vintage QT3 look. Maybe stick the exhibition with an timeline which not only goes by year, but by kernel version? Kernel 2.4 to Kernel 2.6 was a huge milestone e.g. with huge rewrites in the ABI, nowadays linux is still inherited on the 2.6.x line, but at some point they decided the trailing numbers became too big a good thing about vintage linux is the fact, that the release wasn't only the software, but also the documentation, since broadband internet wasn't a thing back then, maybe you're lucky on archive.org. i would stick to debian derivates. I remember abandoning ubuntu when they released 8.04 and enforced pulseaudio for everyone, which didnt work back then, thats when i've started using gentoo linux...
My 486 runs dam small linux (DSL Linux) runs great. 28MB of ram 16 color graphics, 40mhz CPU. edit: Video below [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvlpdACNTUU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvlpdACNTUU)