installing .01

Hi,

i just recently joined this mailing list because i need help. And Linus suggested i join the kernel mailing list, and quote his email to me as a starting point.
I want to install the linux kernel 0.01 on my 386 machine, and im lost on how to do it.
I am 16 and only worked with linux for the last two years. I see running .01 on my 386 as a learning experience into the depths of the machine, and how to use assembly and work on OSs. So i need some help here is what Linus told me:

Well, historically in order to be able to install the 0.01 kernel, you had to have a full minix-386 distribution - that was the only way to make the filesystem, and to copy the necessary files over etc.

And quite frankly, it's been ten years for me too, so I don't remember all the details.

You probably don't have access to minix-386 anyway, so I suspect that what you _should_ do is try to use a newer version of Linux to bootstrap with. You need a really old compiler to compile Linux-0.01 with - I think it needs gcc-1.40 or similar. It simply won't compile with newer compilers.

All in all, yes, it can be done. I haven't done it personally in ten years, and never hosted from Linux, though. I suspect your best option would be to try to get a discussion going on how to do all this on the kernel mailing list or similar, feel free to quote this email as a starting point.

Linus

I hope some one on this list can help me. If anyone has any
information of helpfulness i would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you,
Tristan Sloughter

Hi tristan;

kernel 0.01 is well before my Linux time, so I can't help with that at all. What I can suggest is that you get a version fo Redhat up and running on your
PC. Then install find a Virtual Machine system that will allow you to install
another version of linux that you can run in a VM session. Use this image as
your learning environment. All that having been said, do understand that I've
never done this, so others may have comments that are more relavant.

MY thoughts are these:
First; the kernel is constant being updated. Your best bet to get relavant help
with any thing is to be working on current sources.
Second; many of the tools that are shipped with Linux are vastly improved in
thier later revisions. Using these tools should result in an over all better
experience.
Third; the quality of the kernel is constantly improving. This improved kernel
should serve as a solid base to learn about operating systems on.

Thanks
Dave

Go up a few versions, to 0.02 maybe, if you have any hopes of running a compiler on this system. You will need at least 4 MB of RAM for compiling, since the early kernels didn't support swap.

Minix-386 is a hacked up Minix. Minix is an educational OS for the 8088 that was just recently made free. There once was a collection of patches that would add 386 feature support. So you could get Minix running, patch it, then build Linux.

Try this:

The Minix filesystem can be 64 MB at most. Make a partition for that, one for swap, and one for a newer Linux distribution. This pre-Slackware thing would be a good choice:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/MCC/2.0+/

Um, you really don't want to be building gcc on a 386. You might have to build intermediate versions, since the old gcc might not compile with the most recent gcc. Perhaps you have or can borrow a modern machine for builds.

Finding the extras, like libc and a shell, will be hard.

You might need a boot loader called "shoelace". You should be able to run this from LILO.

hacked up? not anymore...

http://www.cs.vu.nl/pub/minix/2.0.2/