How to run classic distros with QEMU
Back in the late 1990s this author chose their PC magazines by what was on the cover disc, something that had started back in their Amiga days. One month they chose a PC magazine that had something called Red Hat Linux on the second disc which was promptly installed on an AMD K6-2 333MHz PC.
It’s fair to say that it wasn’t love at first sight. The sheer volume of application choices, the differing commands and file system was enough to scare this author back to Windows 98. A few months later and another coverdisc, and this time it was something different. It was still Linux, but Corel Linux 1.0 which was a little more “noob” friendly. The install went well and this was this author’s distro for quite some time.
In the 1990s, Linux was still in its infancy and the jump from Windows to Linux seemed massive and exciting. How can we experience these days again? In the absence of a giant Tux-shaped time machine, we can use virtual machines to emulate hardware of the era and install Linux on a virtual PC.
We’ve chosen three Linux distros from the past three decades of Linux and using virtual machines we shall install and use each distro. Our choices span the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s
