Wow 1991 was so long ago. Â I didn’t get pulled into Linux until the summer of 1992 (0.12 I think?), but wow I’ve sure had my ups & downs with Linux but it certainly had a major impact on everything we do. Â Even if it is ‘kind of fringe’ it is in all kinds of things all around us all over the place. Â No doubt the whole 20 year thing has been covered pretty much everywhere.
You would be kidding yourself if you have used anything on the internet and not had any interaction with a Linux machine in some manner. Â Heck even this blog runs on a Linux VM.
While Linux 0.10 may have been the first ‘usable’ version to many, 0.11 is the first version that has been preserved. Â I had even did a Qemu bundle of 0.11 that oldlinux.org had put together as I find Qemu runs Linux better, and of course faster than Bochs.
So here we are and I thought I’d update the Qemu and add in a personal favorite this time…
Download it from sourceforge.
Actually there is 0.10 available. 🙂 Look here: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/old-versions/tytso/.
Btw, I’ve been reading your blog for a year or two and finally decided to drop a comment. Very interesting stuff you got here. 😉
Glad you’ve liked it! I’ve spent way too many hours on it.. lol
It is kind of funny what came out of a challenge to run Netware on Qemu then into being able to run Xenix on modern machines via emulation….!
I just wish I’d been more active with it….
On a downside you would probably have to compile it and bundle a small one disk distro yourself.
Hmm that may be worth some playing around with.. There is a tweaked version of Minix386 that’ll boot on Qemu/Bochs so the original gcc 1.40 toolchain would be available…
Might not be needed. You might be able to run it on 0.11. I read somewhere that Linus used to cross-compile gcc (for Linux) on Minix. Just took a peek at “Old Linux” archive and there it is: http://mirrors.kernel.org/oldlinux/Linux.old/Linux-0.11/binaries/compilers/gccbin.tar.Z. The archive seems to include as and ld, so it might actually work. 🙂
Btw, there is also gcc binary for 0.10. 😉
Just remembered you might also need the include files: http://mirrors.kernel.org/oldlinux/Linux.old/Linux-0.11/sources/system/include-0.11.tar.Z. LibC is already in the archive.
You might just check the whole directory in case I missed something else: http://mirrors.kernel.org/oldlinux/Linux.old/Linux-0.11/
Linux 0.11 is very runnable as it still has boot/root diskette images.. and it is what my image is. I’ve tried to boot a 0.10 kernel and I just get sudden reboots… 😐
Wouldn’t know. Haven’t had time to play with the old stuff since a try to get ELKS booting from virtual HDD without using boot floppy. So I put my computer archeology efforts down for some time. But not forever. 🙂