• Modern Machines

    From Karma@21:1/5 to All on Sat Mar 18 19:30:00 2023
    Does this run on modern machines:

    <https://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/warty/>

    Just a thought because it is small and probably very fast as well.

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  • From Marco Moock@21:1/5 to All on Sat Mar 18 20:39:56 2023
    Am 18.03.2023 um 19:30:00 Uhr schrieb Karma:

    Does this run on modern machines:

    <https://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/warty/>

    Just a thought because it is small and probably very fast as well.

    It will maybe run in Virtualbox, but it won't run on normal hardware
    because of the missing drivers (kernel modules).

    No drivers for GPU, SATA controllers, network controllers included.
    It might be possible if you find them and insert them into the old
    kernel - but it will likely not work because nobody uses ancient
    kernels.

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  • From Bobbie Sellers@21:1/5 to Karma on Sat Mar 18 23:17:22 2023
    On 3/18/23 12:30, Karma wrote:
    Does this run on modern machines:

    <https://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/warty/>

    Just a thought because it is small and probably very fast as well.

    It might work ok but it lacks all the security updates that even Canonical has bothered to make. Probably under VirtualBox or other
    emulation system that has all the drivers needed in the machine VB is
    being run on. If you could get to work on bare metal you would still
    need to keep it off the net as those security updates are missing.
    And Canonical does not do updates on the really old stuff.

    It you want a fast-running system on modern hardware you
    might want to look at the Puppy line of systems. I find my non-Ubuntu
    system quite fast and it is only a few years old plus I get all the
    upgrades and security patches in a reasonable amount of tiem,

    bliss - on the ever-faithful Dell Latitude E7450, PCLinuxOS 2023
    KDE Plasma 5.27.3 Kernel Version: 6.2.6-pclos1 (64-bit)
    KDE Frameworks 5.104.0 - Qt Version: 5.15.6
    Graphics : X11 - Mesa Intel® HD Graphics 5500
    15.5 GiB of RAM CPU 4 × Intel® Core™ i7-5600U CPU @ 2.60GHz
    Actually 2 real cores and 2 virtual cores.

    --
    bliss dash SF 4 ever at dslextreme dot com

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  • From Paul@21:1/5 to Bobbie Sellers on Sun Mar 19 10:47:33 2023
    On 3/19/2023 2:17 AM, Bobbie Sellers wrote:
    On 3/18/23 12:30, Karma wrote:
    Does this run on modern machines:

    <https://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/warty/>

    Just a thought because it is small and probably very fast as well.

        It might work ok but it lacks all the security updates that even Canonical has bothered to make.  Probably under VirtualBox or other
    emulation system that has all the drivers needed in the machine VB is being run on.  If you could get to work on bare metal you would still
    need to keep it off the net as those security updates are missing.
    And Canonical does not do updates on the really old stuff.

        It you want a fast-running system on modern hardware you
    might want to look at the Puppy line of systems.  I find my non-Ubuntu system quite fast and it is only a few years old plus I get all the
    upgrades and security patches in a reasonable amount of tiem,

    bliss - on the ever-faithful Dell Latitude E7450, PCLinuxOS 2023
    KDE Plasma 5.27.3   Kernel Version: 6.2.6-pclos1 (64-bit)
    KDE Frameworks  5.104.0 - Qt Version: 5.15.6
    Graphics : X11 - Mesa Intel® HD Graphics 5500
    15.5 GiB of RAM CPU 4 × Intel® Core™ i7-5600U CPU @ 2.60GHz
    Actually 2 real cores and 2 virtual cores.


    Fatdog (Puppy) is a 64-bit version using a slightly more
    modern kernel. Traditional Puppy, the kernel is perfect for
    old hardware, but on newer hardware, practically no drivers
    at all work in it with the newer hardware. There are software
    fallbacks, so it might still run, but traditional Puppy is
    hardly focused on new hardware. The Fatdog one comes closer
    to being useful.

    Since Puppy uses XVesa, when everything is converted to Wayland
    (and they discard XWayland because of designer ego),
    Puppy will be left in the dust (in a sense).

    As for the general topic of "do old things boot", some
    items don't do well at all. My older Knoppix media
    won't boot, and it doesn't get far enough along to be
    worried about drivers.

    One way to experiment, is install the item on an older
    machine, then move the disk drive to a newer machine
    and try to boot the installation. You can also do the
    inverse of that - on a 440BX-era motherboard, the BIOS
    does not understand the concept of "DVD" nor of "USB",
    so you install on a hard drive, using a newer machine,
    then move the drive backwards in time by connecting
    to the 440BX. That's how I ran a few things on an older
    machine. The 440BX BIOS doesn't even understand "SATA",
    and installing a SATA card is a waste of time (ignored
    by BIOS). You need a SATA to IDE adapter for such
    experiments (BIOS only "accepts IDE cables").

    *******

    The different versions of VirtualBox, don't have exactly
    the same support. A newer VirtualBox for example,
    would not really support Win98. Then, the next VirtualBox
    along, doesn't support WinXP. By the time you get to the
    current one, the OS support is so poor, it's no longer
    worthwhile virtualizing stuff. Just a warning of a
    possible outcome. There are other hosting softwares,
    like QEMU KVM which may work better. Their support policy
    could be quite different than the commercial ones.

    To be able to operate this pig, I resorted to a serial mouse
    and passthru serial port. That gave me a "tame mouse" to use
    to operate the screen in there. My regular mouse was a random
    number generator in there. I paid $5 for that serial mouse, out of
    a "barrel of surplus mice", part of me said "why are you buying
    this crap?" but the other part of me said "You'll see...".
    It's more than paid back the $5, in tasks like this.

    [Picture]

    https://i.postimg.cc/4NHnndM6/warty.gif

    Paul

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  • From Mike Easter@21:1/5 to Paul on Sun Mar 19 09:52:04 2023
    Paul wrote:

    https://i.postimg.cc/4NHnndM6/warty.gif

    Ha! I have an old machine I might try that on.

    Warty is 2004. My old inherited Dell laptop (XP era) is 2006 bios.

    --
    Mike Easter

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  • From Marco Moock@21:1/5 to All on Mon Mar 20 11:18:26 2023
    Am 19.03.2023 um 10:47:33 Uhr schrieb Paul:

    The different versions of VirtualBox, don't have exactly
    the same support. A newer VirtualBox for example,
    would not really support Win98. Then, the next VirtualBox
    along, doesn't support WinXP. By the time you get to the
    current one, the OS support is so poor, it's no longer
    worthwhile virtualizing stuff. Just a warning of a
    possible outcome. There are other hosting softwares,
    like QEMU KVM which may work better. Their support policy
    could be quite different than the commercial ones.

    What did exactly change so it doesn't support old Windows versions
    anymore?
    I haven't heard of that yet.

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  • From Paul@21:1/5 to Marco Moock on Mon Mar 20 07:29:14 2023
    On 3/20/2023 6:18 AM, Marco Moock wrote:
    Am 19.03.2023 um 10:47:33 Uhr schrieb Paul:

    The different versions of VirtualBox, don't have exactly
    the same support. A newer VirtualBox for example,
    would not really support Win98. Then, the next VirtualBox
    along, doesn't support WinXP. By the time you get to the
    current one, the OS support is so poor, it's no longer
    worthwhile virtualizing stuff. Just a warning of a
    possible outcome. There are other hosting softwares,
    like QEMU KVM which may work better. Their support policy
    could be quite different than the commercial ones.

    What did exactly change so it doesn't support old Windows versions
    anymore?
    I haven't heard of that yet.


    The graphics support used to be a single standard
    with a "DEADBEEF" hardware detection. All the OSes
    you were virtualizing, used this VESA compatible thing
    for their graphics.

    Then some chucklehead decided to change the graphics
    to three different standards. Then, when you run
    a Linux OS, it uses one flavor. If you run Windows, it
    uses a different flavor. If you bring your VM forward,
    now you have the issue of how does the machine get
    associated with the correct graphics choice, and then,
    how does the driver work in your Guest, if the graphics
    are wrong. You can't see the screen when this fouls up.

    I was seeing this today, when booting Warty Ubuntu in Virtualbox.
    Graphics screwed up, took some fiddling around to see the
    screen. May have taken a "vga=789" or similar.

    You can see I got the graphics working here, but I do not
    show the value of the boot line used for that. It might
    have been the "Compatible" boot option that made it work.

    [Picture]

    https://i.postimg.cc/4NHnndM6/warty.gif

    And for all of the changes to VirtualBox (such as the twits
    offering TPM passthru and not "swtpm"), Windows 11 is
    still not ready to go for most people using the latest
    VirtualBox. The VMWare people used the IBM "swtpm" to put
    a soft TPM within grasp of the Guest.

    A "lack of support" at VirtualBox, means that "nobody
    tests that the Win2K bug is properly fixed before the
    next release". When Guests are taken "out of support",
    nobody cares whether they work any more. Win2K was
    broken a number of times, but while Win2K was "in support",
    eventually someone would re-tune the multi-core handling
    until it worked again. Now, nobody gives a rats ass
    whether Win2K works or not. Even on modern OSes, modern
    VirtualBox hangs. You might find the Linux version is
    a tiny bit better (as it is not running under the
    thumb of HyperV inverted hypervisor).

    It's hard to tell whether the full team is still
    working on VirtualBox at Oracle. It has been limping
    along for a year or two.

    All I know is, I have a "Plan B", and for virtualization,
    I am already using "Plan B" for operations. You can test
    how your work goes with this stuff, and decide what
    path to use next.

    Paul

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