User:NeddySeagoon/Historical Gentoo

Why?
Like everything else gentoo, because I can.

Background
Gentoo started life on 1999-10-04. I didn't join in the fun until April 2003. I remembered it as April/May 2002, when I finally got ADSL. However I unearthed my original gentoo-minimal-1.4-rc4.iso CD the other day when I was was looking for bits to get and old A7N8X install to boot. Thats another story.

Having unearthed the gentoo-minimal-1.4-rc4.iso I just had to take it for a spin. After 18 years, it still works. That was a suprise.

It also contains a i686 stage 1. I couldn'd have used that in 2003 as my original Gentoo install was on a 450MHz k6-2.

So, I have a bootable ISO, a stage1 tarball. What else do I need for an install.

A contemporary portage snapshot and some distfiles.

I still have a rather dog eared, pages out of order, paper copy of the 2003 handbook if I can find it.

So I'll try an April 2003 Gentoo Install just because I can.

Preparation
Spin up a Virtual Machine. I gave it 1 core and 8G HDD. Remember to put the HDD on an IDE controller and that the drive will be /dev/hda

Should you have real 2003 hardware to hand, you can read the compile commands as they scroll by.

In some video drivers MTTR support is optional, in others its not. XFree86 with the 256 colour VESA driver and twm works.

The Minimal ISO
Fetch thei686-gentoo-1.4-rc4-minimal.iso and attach it as the VM CDROM image.

The Portage Snapshot
The original Portage Snapshots have long gone, so in the Gentoo way, we need to make our own.

This cannot be made on our budding install as git is required. Originally, it would have been a download anyway. Clone the historical gentoo-x86 repo and make a portage-snapshot. Choose a date to match the stage tarball you happen to have handy.

A ready made portage-snapshot-2003-04-09 can be downloaded.

Untar the snapshot to /usr/portage.

almost works now. It will complain about a missing /etc/make.conf.

will fix that.

Base System Installation
Follow the Gentoo Linux 1.4 Installation Instructions with the exceptions below.

Do not. Make and install a new portage snapshot.

Set  in /etc/make.conf. All my distfiles since mid 2006 are there, including sources tracked down for this trip down memory lane.

Make an overlay. It will be needed lo work around missing source code files.

VirtualBox Guest Additions
See unresolwed symbol vunmap. In short "Actually we don't support all 2.4 kernels. The oldest guest kernel which is supported by VirtualBox is the RHEL3 kernel which is 2.4.21 with some modifications, among them vmalloc / vfree."

Gentoo Stats
Skip the handbook section 18.Gentoo-Stats. The code may well be available by the Gentoo server is no longer listening for reports.

Base System Files Missing and Workarounds
pam-login-3.10.tar.bz2 net-tools-1.60-gentoo-extra.tar.bz2 util-linux-2.11y-crypt-gentoo.patch.gz

Without  logins are not possible. Boot the liveCD and chroot instead or do a version bump of  to   in your overlay. That installs and works.

Without  there is no networking as   is required to bring up the network. The individual patches are still available so I've rolled a new. The size ane md5sum do not match the original. Copy the ebuild to the overlay and manifest it there.

is required to build util-linux with the default USE=crypt. Set USE=-crypt for.

That's two packages in the overlay so far.

Installing a DeskTop
Start with XFree86. xorg is a thing of the future.

Follow the Gentoo Linux Desktop Configuration Guide with the exceptions below.

XFree86 Files Missing and Workarounds
The only XFree86 that all the files are found for (so far) is xfree-4.2.0-r12, so use that.

Deal with the failures as they arise.

e.g. gtk+ should depend on pango.

GNOME Files Missing and Workarounds
digests don't match. I have four different sources that all agree with each other an disagree with the portage snapshot. Copy the ebuild to the overlay and remake the manifest.

is missing. as a workaround

is missing, however ...

slackware-9.0/source/l/arts has arts-1.1.tar.bz2 which is the same file size and md5sum as arts-1.1_kde-3.1.tar.bz2 which the arts-1.1.0 ebuild wants to fetch. With the aid of  on the distfiles server   builds

-1.4.3-r4 wants r128.c which is missing. Setting USE=-svga allows building to continue.

KDE
Lots of sources missing so far.

Resources
Gentoo Linux 1.4 Installation Instructions The Installation Instructions there are for Gentoo Linux 1.4 which is slightly newer than the 1.4-rc4 install we have here.

i686-gentoo-1.4-rc4-minimal.iso

gentoo-x86 git import of CVS

portage-snapshot-2003-04-09

Matching distfiles for portage-snapshot-2003-04-09. Incomplete.

Gentoo Linux Desktop Configuration Guide Not tested yet. Its unlikely will test KDE as I was GNOME user.

Sources of Sources
7.0-respin-SRPMS.iso shrike-SRPMS-disc1.iso shrike-SRPMS-disc2.iso shrike-SRPMS-disc3.iso valhalla-SRPMS-disc1.iso valhalla-SRPMS-disc2.iso

Fedora 1 SRPMS

Old Debian Sources

Slackware 9.0

Acknowledgements
All the source code archive sites around the web that have unknowingly contributed their archives to this effort.

All the contributors to Any Old Distfiles ?