Niels Horn's Blog

After successfully installing Slackware 3.5 and discovering that Slackware 1.1.2 was still available on the internet at sunsite.unc.edu I simply had to try it…

At first I had no luck, as this version does not support the standard VMware network card (PCnet32) and also lacks support for IDE CDRom drives. The VMware emulated SCSI cards (BusLogic & LSI) were also not recognized.
So the only way would be to install from floppies, just like the old days.

Since I haven’t used my internal 3.5″ drive in years and didn’t feel like formatting 50+ disks, I first gave up.
But then I remembered that VMware also accepts disk-images for floppies, so I wrote a quick-and-dirty script to create all the needed images from the downloaded directories:

#!/bin/bash

for dsk in *[1-9]/ ; do
   length=${#dsk}
   dsk=${dsk:0:($length-1)}
   echo -n "$dsk..."
   cp disk_empty.img disk_$dsk.img
   mount -t msdos -o loop disk_$dsk.img /mnt/floppy
   cp $dsk/* /mnt/floppy/
   umount /mnt/floppy
   echo " [ok]"
done


It gives an error trying to create a disk image from the libc444 folder, but you can ignore that.

Installation was straight-forward and after a lot of virtual disk-swapping, I had my Slackware 1.1.2 installation working.

Here is a first screenshot (look at the kernel version!):

And here you can see how this version is really easy on your memory (less than 4M!) and hard disk:

Configuring X

Now I had to get X working as well…
X looks for a Xconfig file in /etc (for all users) or in your home directory if you need separate configurations per user.
A sample configuration file can be found in /var/X11/lib/X11 so I copied it to /etc and started experimenting.

VMware emulates a standard VGA adapter (no SVGA) so we are limited to 640×480.
I added this line near the end of Xconfig in the “ModeDB” for a standard VGA screen:
"640x480" 25 640 672 768 800 480 490 492 525
In the VGA16 section I changed the Virtual values to 640 480

So now I had a working X, but no mouse…
So, back to reading more man-pages, and I changed my mouse settings in Xconfig to:
ps2 "/dev/bmouseps2"
and X is working!

Here is another screenshot, showing the standard fvwm window manager:

As you can see, we have nine (!) virtual desktops here.

One thing I noticed with this 1.1.2 version, is that it is much slower than the 3.5 version. It also puts a big load on the processor of my host-machine, that goes to 99%. Running 3.5 has almost no effect, it’s really easy on the CPU.
This probably has something to do with the 0.99 kernel.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 12th, 2008 at 12:22 and is filed under Slackware, VMware, X. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.