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Slacker's Time Travel -- Early Qemu image for Slackware
From https://web.archive.org/web/20150101052629/http://qemu-advent-calendar.org/
Slacker's time travel
What happens when you dig up the earliest Slackware Linux image to be had? Travel back in time and experience Linux in its early days. And when we say early, we mean kernel pre-1.0 early! The Slackware distribution is the oldest still maintained distribution.Gerd Hoffmann has provided this blast from the past. Unpack with tar xf qemu-xmas-slackware.tar.xz and check out the qemu-xmas-slackware/README file. Image source https://web.archive.org/web/20150101052629/http://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware-1.01/
I grabbed the qemu image but haven't tried it yet.
chronos@penguin:/mnt/chromeos/MyFiles/Downloads$ md5sum qemu-xmas-slackware.tar.xz
a5b930eceb0ebe9580a0d52f401671f5 qemu-xmas-slackware.tar.xz
chronos@penguin:/mnt/chromeos/MyFiles/Downloads$
Does anyone else have an early qemu image for Slackware?
If you try it, please let me know how it goes. Thanks! 
Comments
Not got quite that old, but I've still got the book and CD I bought in 1997 which comes with Slackware 3.2 kernel 2.0.29. Despite working at a university with very fast internet, it was still quicker for me to spend a couple of hours going to town to buy the book and CD than download the ISO, and I needed to get a new linux machine installed that day.
Somewhere I might still have my old Slackware floppies, but they've probably been long since formatted and overwritten. IIRC I needed 20 something 3.5" 1.4MB floppies for an early Slackware which might well have been 1.0.
@ralf Cool! Thanks!
A long time ago, I do remember shopping for a Linux CD, finding several distributions available, and buying SUSE because their CD came with a book while the others were CD-only.
I go back to Xenix / SCO Unix and apparently there are qemu images also available.
Same as @ralph - when I was a lecturer in Unix, I would have to build about 30 machines using about 15 floppies per machine. It took about an hour per machine, so I had 4 sets of floppies and the complete build took about 12 hours.
CD's then became popular but still machines needed configuring but total install dropped to something like 5 hours.
Now we can build multiple VMs in seconds (under a minute).
https://www.ebay.com/p/482550
I think mine was 3.1 but memory fog, glory days man.
I also remember cross-compiling a linux kernel for sun4c and IIRC that took well over 24 hours on my crappy 100MHz processor.
My slackware linux machine was a tulip 386sx desktop it had a whopping 33mhz and 2mb of ram. The default www webserver was still cern httpd. Apache was a new kid on the block then. Compiling the kernel costs a whole weekend, compiling your own drivers, loadable kernel modules was not available or very alpha. But when it ran, it was so stable and fast. Nothing like the defacto OS of that time; dos with windows 3.1 so much better was linux already that time. Changed to Redhat a few years later. Slackware is still something to feel warm about. The name Patrick Volkerding, remembers me the time that the IT crowd was still full with friendly helpfull people with mainly a scientific background. And we were not concerned about the color or shape of some button in a GUI. A grey GUI was GUI enough. LOL. How times changed.
About slack, I still refer their q&a (old v9 and older, if I remember it correctly) about moving zipslack to real linux partition. Still usable to copy / move linux manually to different phisical disk or empty disk image.
As a younger user, the first time I heard about Slackware was because it is the underlying system of Unraid.
My first Slackware was on 3.5" floppies in early 1994. You downloaded a couple dozen and each floppy had a name like A1, A2, D1, D2, N1, something like that. I think "A1, etc." were the base system, "X1, etc." were the X-window system, the D floppies were development, N was networking...or maybe News.
Wikipedia says that by late 1994 there was up to 73 floppies, though I think many of those were optional depending on what packages you wanted. It was at least a dozen, maybe two dozen, to get a basic system.
This was a dial-up modem era, and 14.4kbps was the standard at the time, though I think I had a 9600 baud because I was a poor college student. So each floppy download was about 25 minutes...assuming there was no connection drop. So downloading Linux could be 10 hours.
I went down to one of the U-Michigan computing centers and used their bandwidth to download and write the floppies, then went back home and fed them slowly into dual-boot PC.
You also had to compile your own kernel as I recall.
56.6 wasn't standardized until late 94, and it was some years before they were cheap enough for me. My first modem in the 80s was 1200 baud 🤘
I remember this era as a constant tension between staying late at my university student job to use high speed internet or investing the time to walk a couple miles to the campus computing center vs. staying at home with tragically slow dial-up.
My first! 300 baud lads.