While further searching around on Linux 0.01, I came across DrAcOnUx’s site which features a Linux 0.01 remake!

It’s really great, first off there are several versions in the steps of the evolution of the project:

Linux-0.01-1.x :
– need gcc 1.4
– few change from official linux-0.01, only some bug fix, + minor change to build it in a linux system instead of minix

Linux-0.01-2.x :
– same version as linux-0.01-1.7, which was just ported to work with gcc-2.x and gcc-3.x

linux-0.01-3.x :
– this is the last version
– need gcc-4.x
– use elf binary format instead of a.out, and you have some program working on it

As I actually do have a working GCC 1.40 + Binutils I though it would be great to build his first phase on Windows.  With a little playing around in the makefiles, and the build program to open files in binary mode, I had a kernel!

Obviously there is issues with the executables that I have from Linux 0.10/Linux 0.11.  But we are mounting the disk, and using the /dev tree devices.  I put the remake versions on my cvsweb to walk though what changed.

Using an older ‘modern’ Linux machine with GCC 4.1 I was able to compile the remake #3 kernel, and even better with the provided disk image from the downloads page it works!


# gcc -v
Using built-in specs.
Target: i486-linux-gnu
Configured with: ../src/configure -v --enable-languages=c,c++,fortran,objc,obj-c++,treelang --prefix=/usr --enable-shared --with-system-zlib --libexecdir=/usr/lib --without-included-gettext --enable-threads=posix --enable-nls --program-suffix=-4.1 --enable-__cxa_atexit --enable-clocale=gnu --enable-libstdcxx-debug --enable-mpfr --with-tune=i686 --enable-checking=release i486-linux-gnu
Thread model: posix
gcc version 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)


For any aspiring software historians out there, this early version of Linux from September of 1991 will be of course VERY interesting!