this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2024
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Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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[–] [email protected] 66 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

Legendary icons for Home and Root.

I'd kill for a functional DE that looks like this. Currently using Chicago95

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

NsCDE is amazing it genuinely has like the most consistent look of any desktop I've used and it looks so good and works so well

[–] nyan 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

TDE's CDE window decoration style pretty much matches the screenshot. There's also a matching widget style (Motif). I'd guess that the icon set exists Somewhere Out There On The Internet. So you can get this look if you want it badly enough to install a non-default DE that's currently limited to X11.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

I've looked into CDE before but the support seems pretty poor compared to Chicago95

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

What about Openlook? I guess it's still working.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/openlook/

[–] [email protected] 34 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Looking at that screenshot, even though I've been a very happy KDE user for many years now, I do kinda miss the days when many Xfree86 desktop environments were influenced more by NeXTStep than Windows.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I long for window decorations and borders like that. Anyone know a good KDE 5 theme that does it?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (2 children)

There's a very similar theme called Commonality

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Thanks, I spent a couple of hours playing around with that. It didn't work quite right but still I've got some glorious retro ugliness going on. A mishmash of CDE, Windows 2000 icons and KDE 5, it's mental and I love it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

The Motif look, what we are looking at here, is driven by the same UI guidelines that early Windows and OS/2 followed. You will notice a lot of similarity between them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago

I should clarify this is a screenshot I uploaded to Gunkies.org for the Yggdrasil Linux page

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago

Looks treemendous

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago

I bought a book that had Yggdrasil in a CD that I used so I didn't have to go into the university for the Unix labs.

I think that the entirety of the book, around 1,000 pages, was printed out man pages.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I saw this in a magazine and it was so cool looking. A few months later I got Linux on CD and never looked back. That 3D Motif/fvwm look was amazing.

Funny enough, my BIOS did not support booting from CD. I remember in DOS, I had to load MSCDEX from a floppy but I have no recollection on how I actually booted and installed Linux from CD.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

Looks like FVWM2.

I just learned that OpenBSD still defaults to that look.

[–] mindbleach 3 points 4 months ago

Possibly from DOS. It's a real-mode operating system.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I used an X-Terminal (i.e. a physical box) that had a desktop like that in 1994. I think it was HP but could have been SUN. Don't remember.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

If it was a real UNIX workstation, you were almost certainly using CDE ( Common Desktop Environment ).

https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/

https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/Home/

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago
[–] Drito 6 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Is it possible to make it working on a today machine ? Even with a virtual machine ? Sorry for my ignorance.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

It should work fine in a virtual machine. Just make sure you provide suitably ancient hardware like IDE storage and old ethernet cards. On something that old, I would only provide a single CPU. To be safe, I would also try installing with a low amount of RAM and then increase it later. Older kernels could not handle multi-processor or RAM above a certain size. I think I might start with 700 MB of RAM to do the install. That might sound like nothing but it probably runs in 8.

It is easy today in our era of resource richness to forget just how meager the hardware was when these distros were new.

A distro that old is going to require some fiddling to get XFree86 ( x11 ) up and running. It should be ok in a desktop VM but I have had problems with older versions of X in Proxmox in case you are using that.

I kind of want to go install this myself now. Or an old version of SLS ( pre-cursor to Slackware ). I ran them both at some point in my Linux journey but it has been a while.

What I really want to do is to make OCI containers from these old distros and try to run them in Distrobox on top of a modern kernel. Has somebody done that already? Really old versions of Red Hat ( not RHEL, Red Hat, < 6 ) would be cool too.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

@[email protected] If you haven't gotten the iso files already, I got them here: https://pd.spuddy.org/yggdrasil.html

@[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Confirmed. The minimum requirements are a 386 with 8 MB of RAM and 100 MB of drive space. Incredible.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

I just noticed that, in the screenshot, it is running in 86box. So, you know for sure it works there and 86box works great on modern machines ( Windows, Mac, and Linux ).

https://86box.net/

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (2 children)

That's cool and all but there's no vintage community for that?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago

Vintage?? I had just started middle school, that was like five years ago...

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago

@[email protected] I mean this place’s rules say anything related to Linux so…

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

I remember this. It was pretty cool at the time. I think it was the first Live CD I booted.