Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqoNTxpnh3c
Exploring Red Hat Linux 6.1 (1999) On Original Hardware
Introduction
Red Hat Linux 6.1 was released in October 1999, 25 years ago this month! Previously I installed it on my Pentium 100 and worked through a few configuration issues - now it’s time to check out the state of those early GNOME and KDE desktops and the rest of the Deluxe package!
Script
This is my 100MHz Pentium PC from 1997. It has 64MB of RAM, a 4GB hard drive, a Crystal Audio sound card, and a RealTek network card - so it is very much a product of its time. However, unlike most PCs of its time, as you can probably see, it’s not running Windows - it’s running Red Hat, Linux 6.1, and in a previous video I had a lot of fun getting this installed and working through some minor installation and configuration issues along the way.
But as you can see, it is all up and running great now, and I promised at the end of that video that I would revisit this and share with you the experience of actually using Red Hat in 1999 - what are the desktop environments like, what packages does it come with, and what’s it like to use on a day to day basis?
And so that is what this video is all about - and what better place to start than with the default installation from Disk 1 that I installed in the previous video - and of course that includes the GNOME desktop environment which Red Hat were pushing as the default even way back in ‘99 when the project was still quite young, and the reason for that is is because they were an early corporate sponsor of the GNOME project. Now just talking about that first video I should very quickly address a bit of controversy from the comments section: yes, I say GNOME with a silent G, I’ve been saying it that way for the past 25 years. I know some people say Guh-NOME because of the connection to the GNU project and all of that, and of course that all makes perfect sense, but I will point out that the developers of said project have said that they don’t really mind which way you say it, both pronunciations are equally as valid so I’m not going to change the habit of a lifetime - it’s GNOME.
So let’s dive in and have a look at some of the stuff that Red Hat deemed worthy to be part of the default installation way back in 1999.
So we have shortcuts on the desktop to the home directory and the floppy drive - so we’ll just have a look at the file browser situation, see what that looks like - and yeah, I mean, it’s a pretty standard looking file browser, no real surprises there. What actually is this? Ah, okay, so this is GNU Midnight Commander 4.5.39. Of course, quite a famous name - it’s been around for a very long time, yeah, ‘94 to ‘99 - so yeah, rather than reinventing the wheel, why not use something off the shelf like this that’s already well established?
So we have all of the standard Linux file structure here as you might expect - and I didn’t mention this in the previous video, but Red Hat Linux 6.1 actually uses ext2 as its file system - so there are still some modern distros that are using ext4, which is a direct descendant of this, of course.
We have dev with our devices in there, we’ve got etc with our configuration files, we’ve got, of course, our libraries and our mounted drives and all of that lovely stuff. Well, that loaded quite quickly, actually, considering dev’s probably going to be the biggest one with thousands and thousands of items in here - so yeah, these are all of our devices, disks and sound card and all that kind of stuff so that’s good to see.
But I guess browsing files isn’t all that interesting so let’s move on to some internet stuff. So we have shortcuts here on the desktop for redhat.com, Red Hat Support, Red Hat errata. Now, that’s a certificate error there, of course the root certificates would have expired a long time ago and changing SSL cypher strengths and that kind of stuff, which is always a problem with these older browsers.
So yeah, this is my mirror of Curt Vendel’s old Atari Museum website, which I set up for two reasons - I have done a video on this on my channel, by the way, but I set this up for two reasons - one being that, of course, I didn’t want all of his work to be lost when he sadly passed away and this went offline.
But also, it’s quite useful for testing out these older browsers and stuff. It’s very much a product of its time and it works absolutely perfectly in this this screen resolution and in this older version of Netscape Communicator - so yeah, this is all working really nicely, actually. Of course the connection here is blazingly fast compared to what most people would have been using in 1999.
But again, Red Hat, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, going with something off the shelf that was already working very well and well established in the form of Netscape - so, another good call there.
So we just have a few more shortcuts here - we’ve got Red Hat Support, of course. We’ve got the errata, we’ve got the Linux Documentation Project, which is still around today. The website as well still looks very much like it did 25 years ago, which is certainly no bad thing. But yeah, this is actually trying to use a redirect via redhat.com - and of course, we’ve run into that SSL error again - so we’ll move on from that.
In the corner, as you might expect, we have our GNOME menu, and it’s a rather nicely organised hierarchical pop up type menu - Windows 95, Windows NT Start Menu style, I guess - so in Applications we just have an address book, we’ve got a calendar - of course I’m not going to run literally everything on here, because that would take all day - we have gEdit here, or gEdit, however you want to say it. This is quite a nice lightweight text editor, this is actually still around today and I use it on Raspberry Pis mainly - we have some that we use for work-related purposes that end up installed in various places and it’s quite handy for just, you know, if people need to edit configuration files and that kind of stuff. So cool to see that as part of the default installation.
We’ve got GHex, I guess that’s a hex editor, we have another Notepad-type thing - this has always been a very typical Linux thing this has, just installing multiple text editors so you can take your pick. I suppose they’re very lightweight, they don’t really take up a lot of space.
Notepad+ - there we go - so I don’t know, there’s the official website members.xoom.com/ackhan/gnp - Andy Khan - so yeah, I don’t know if that’s part of the actual default GNOME installation - so that is cool to see. What else do we have? So yeah, this is something I wanted to show off - so this is the Gnumeric spreadsheet - of course it’s a basic GUI graphical spreadsheet application that comes as part of GNOME. Of course, it’s all free, it’s all installed as part of that default installation - so if we just go…
…there we go! That can do very basic maths, so that is good.
Gnumeric 0.35 - wow!
So here’s the fun part - Games - and we have Aisleriot and Freecell, which as far as I know, are just pretty basic card games-
Loading images, dealing game-
Ah! Klondike. Ah, okay, yes, of course - so this supports, I remember, loads of different types of solitaire-type card games. Of course, Klondike is what a lot of people would know as Solitaire from Windows, so that’s cool to see but yeah, look at all of these!
GNibbles - with the hard G - making an appearance again. I very quickly demoed this in the first video. This is just a snake type game. It does have basic sound effects.
Gnome Robots II.
Now, this game has very strange controls from what I remember - so yes, we can move diagonally, and we can teleport, and we can wait, and essentially every time you move the-
Oh, do I need to start a new game?
Every time you move the robots also move and you basically have to evade them for as long as you can. That’s a teleport - and that’s that. I’ve never really understood or been very good at this game.
Right, we have a Gnome Mines - I guess this is going to be minesweeper - yep, there we go. That’s minesweeper. I’ve never really understood minesweeper.
There you go - perfect timing.
Gnome-Stones, this looks very familiar. Of course all of these are - well maybe not all of them - but obviously quite a lot of them are clones of classic games that you might recognise.
Hours of fun.
And another one of the OGs that I remember from back in the day - Same Gnome, and this was 1.0.4, copyright the Free Software Foundation - so original idea from KDE’s same game program. So there you go - it’s a GNOME clone of a KDE game and it’s literally just matching up groups of matching colors.
So what graphics stuff do we have? We have Electric Eyes…
[A few minutes later]
Nope. Not really sure what that is!
GQView - this looks like it’s just a basic image viewer program, but seems to work quite nicely.
The Crab Nebula.
Well, that’s quite a big image, that took a few seconds to load, but yeah, look at that - the Crab Nebula as taken by the Hubble Space Telescope - and all of these space backgrounds do come as part of Red Hat Linux 6.1, these were just installed randomly on my hard drive - so yeah, why not?
The GIMP! Okay, so this launches, obviously GIMP, GNU Image Manipulation Program, which we should all be familiar with - starts an installer, which is quite strange. User installation log…
Here it is, look at this! This is a really early version.
Look at this! Oh!
“Welcome to the GIMP. Nearly all image operations are performed by right clicking on the image and don’t worry, you can undo most mistakes…”
That’s quite ominous, isn’t it!?
Perfect!
As you might expect, under Internet, we’ve got our usual dial-up configuration stuff and web browser, so not too much. What’s this? Red Hat Network Monitor?
Oh, okay, so that’s monitoring inbound and outbound network traffic - I tell you what, let’s leave that running for a second because we have an FTP client in here…
…and there we go - so we’re actually connected to the FTP server that I have running on the Desk PC!
Receiving file - and we can see the actual the network traffic up here with the Network Monitor.
Oh, okay - so this is Electric Eyes again - so it’s actually using this as the default viewer for images. I guess that’s what it’s for, but there we go. That is a screenshot from my Windows Update video - in fact, that’s what I used for the thumbnail for my Windows Update video.
Multimedia. We’ve got the audio mixer, which I showed off in the previous video. I installed this in the first place - so that’s just GMix and we can change all the different levels of the various channels on the sound card. I haven’t actually tested all of those, but I assume that works.
Volume Meter…
Oh yeah, that’s quite cool! A cool little thingy there. In fact…
…I have just the thing to test this!
The Desk PC, the gift that keeps on giving.
Oh-
That doesn’t seem to be working with the CD player, but I guess the CD drive is connected directly to the sound card, so it probably bypasses whatever that uses, or, hey, maybe it just doesn’t work.
…and look at this, XMMS, X MultiMedia System, version 0.9.5, “The sound of the planet”, 4front Technologies, and this plays mods and mp3s and all sorts of things, really nice little media player application.
So not really much of interest in the System menu, as you might expect, we’ve got this user information thing, so you can add your phone number and change your default shell - it’s a bit random. Okay.
What else have we got in here? You can change your password, Desktop Switching Tool, Disk Management.
Oh, I see - so it’s like a user file system mount, so we can mount the floppy and the CD drive. I guess that makes sense. We can also format the floppy from there.
What’s this? RPM - of course, the Red Hat Package Manager. This is what we use to install and uninstall software - so we have amusements, games, I guess this is just showing what’s currently installed. Yep, and we can go in and install new stuff. I guess if we put the CDs in the drive, so we’ll check that out a little bit later on when we check out those other CDs.
Ooh! An Update Agent - and we need the root password for that which I guess makes sense. Is this online updates maybe? The Red Hat Update Agent, so let’s try to connect…
“Retrieving package”, oh, “Error connecting to package server.” Okay.
Oh, and it’s gone!
Come back!
Yeah, we can configure this - so this of course, if you’re a registered user, you get that priority FTP access which was advertised on the box - so I guess this is what that’s for. You go to the Red Hat website and sign up for a username and registration key - so we have this, we’ve got “Retrieval” - so we have the server here, it couldn’t actually find that server - in fact, let’s fire up a terminal, it gives us an excuse to do that, doesn’t it?
priority.redhat.com… unknown host.
Yeah, okay, so networking is working, it’s just that priority.redhat.com doesn’t exist. How dare they turn off the updates for a 25 year old operating system!?
So we can pin packages here - which obviously you can do with a modern package manager as well - so if you just want to stick to a specific version, you can tell it to ignore updates for that. So yeah, fairly simple, but has all of the functionality that you might need, I guess.
Okay - so the Settings menu and yeah, this is a bit all over the place, isn’t it? Wow. Look at this “CD Properties” - what on earth is CD properties? Ah, so these are all shortcuts to the GNOME Control Center. That’s quite cool.
So yeah, “Automatically mount CD when inserted.” “Start autorun programs.” “Open a file manager.”
We’ve got a run command which will actually run- okay, so if we insert an audio CD, it will actually fire up that CD player automatically, that’s quite streamlined. We’ve got Keyboard Settings, I mean this is your very basic control panel stuff - and as mentioned in the previous video, the one thing that’s kind of missing from this is like display settings, you know, stuff like your resolution and refresh rate and that kind of thing. Because you have to configure all of that through X itself.
Ah, the old pillars of creation there, classic!
We can tile that, we can center it, we can scale it, or we can indeed just stretch it. Try! That’s interesting.
Oh, look at that!
Yeah, I’m not going to keep that. That Revert button - that’s quite useful, isn’t it? Yeah, that’s a nice feature.
So we’ve got loads of screensavers here I’m not quite sure why you would need quite so many screensavers, but there you go. But this is something that’s quite interesting - so we have the Theme Selector - so even right back at the very beginning you could actually theme your desktop environment and…
GTK_LCARS, is that what I think it is!? Oh my goodness…
That is quite something.
This is like - this look was quite popular for websites at one point, I remember.
Oh, look at that!
Is there anything classier than a bit of marble? I don’t think so.
So let’s check out some of the packages on the CDs - and I guess the logical place to start would be that first CD, actually. I’m not quite sure, have we installed everything?
Because I didn’t install this in Expert mode, I just went for the recommended default basic installation.
That is interesting - so, I’ve inserted that CD and it has recognised this as being full of RPM packages, so it’s actually fired up GNOME RPM automatically - and I think this is the same list we had before, so this is just the existing stuff. But if we go to “Install”…
…right, that took a second to load, but let’s see what we have on the first disc here. So we’ve got a few games that aren’t installed - we’ve got chhextris - “X Window System Color Version of xhextris” - I guess that’s a Tetris clone. We’ve got GNU Chess. We’ve got the KDE Games. We’ve got Trojka - “A non-X game of falling blocks” - I guess that’s another Tetris clone.
“Stop Bill from loading his OS into all the computers.” What’s this!? Let’s install that. That sounds fun!
“No packages selected.” Bill, I wonder who that could be!?
Story of xBill: “Yet again, the fate of the world rests in your hands. An evil computer hacker, known only by his handle Bill, has created the ultimate computer virus. A virus so powerful that it has the power to transmute an ordinary computer into a toaster oven. Bill has cloned himself into a billion…”
What!?
“Rules”
“xBill has been painstakingly designed and researched in order to make it as easy to use for the whole family as it is for little Sally.”
Okay…
“Whack the bills, restart the computer, pick up stolen-“
Okay, that’s all logical. Oh!
Okay.
New game? Yes.
Ha!
Get away, Bill!
I like these computers with the little- of course we’ve got the apples here, the OS /2.
Ha! Oh dear. Okay.
KDE Graphics, KDE Multimedia - so it looks like we need to go through - KOrganizer, that’s a KDE thing - and select all of these individually, otherwise we’ll just get a very basic desktop environment, which isn’t necessarily the end of the world.
System Admin Tools, KDE Utils…
Right.
Let’s get all of this installed and I will be right back with you, hopefully in the land of KDE.
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Okay, so we are back, and it only took a couple of minutes just to get that installed, no problems at all - all from that first CD as well, which I appreciate is something I’ve already mentioned, but yeah, what, 700-odd megabytes, and you get a full blown desktop operating system, you get a choice of environments, you get your web browser and email client, and basic office stuff, multimedia stuff and indeed some server stuff as well - some stuff like Apache web server and MySQL - and it’s pretty incredible what you actually get all crammed onto that one CD. But anyway, we’re back at the login screen and now it’s time to log into our KDE session - so if I just go to “Session” here, we can choose it as our session from the dropdown…
…and it’s just the username and password as before - so hopefully this will work. I haven’t actually tested this yet.
Wow, so straight away that is quite a bit different to GNOME that we just checked out - dare I say a bit more professional, I guess, first impression. Obviously we’ve got the default X mouse cursor here on the desktop, which is a bit strange, and when we go over the KDE Panel at the bottom, and the top here, that does change into a proper cursor, so I’m not quite sure if that’s a bug or something that’s not quite installed properly, but anyway, we shall persevere - so what do we have on the desktop here? We have an Autostart folder, that’s quite useful - so I guess we can just drag stuff into here that we want to start automatically. Immediately we have this difference here with the window decorations and the styling and stuff - it certainly has its own unique look and feel, which is quite cool to see.
We have “Printer” - “so if you don’t know which spooler is installed on your system, BSD is probably a good choice.”
And we don’t have an option- or do we have an option to cancel this? I’ll just close that. Yeah, let’s not go into setting up printers in this video - so “Templates”, what’s this? WWWUrl
“The requested action, get https://kde.org, is not implemented yet.” Okay.
“This page is untrusted, but it contains a link to your local file system.”
What even is this? I have no idea what’s going on here. We’ll ignore that for now - so we have a “Trash” - a recycle bin type thing, I guess - that’s quite advanced, I don’t remember seeing that in GNOME, so that’s quite interesting - and we just have those Red Hat links that we had before - so just going into the menu…
“Advanced Editor” - ah, okay - and that’s a different selection. Oh, I see. Oh, that’s quite clever - so yeah, I wasn’t sure if the GNOME native stuff would appear in the menu here in KDE, but what they’ve actually done is separated it out into its own separate menu - so you can still run all of your native GNOME stuff. So if we just fire something up, these are actually built on different libraries and things in the background, but of course KDE can load those libraries and just run them as if they are native, which is quite cool.
We don’t seem to have sound… That’s interesting - I’m not sure if we can maybe fix that. Or maybe that’s just because it’s a GNOME thing running on KDE. But anyway, let’s see what we have here - so we have the Advanced Editor.
That’s quite ironic, isn’t it? It’s just a very basic text editor, but it’s called the Advanced Editor. I like this at the top showing our running applications - obviously that’s a bit different.
Text Editor. Is this- how is that different to the advanced editor?
Is it different!?
“About Kedit?” So that’s Kedit… and that’s KWrite.
So they are actually two different applications apparently.
Okay…
Well that is interesting. Obviously I only went with the basic set of packages for KDE here with the default set, so there is some other stuff that I could have installed.
We have a Minesweeper clone, of course.
“Snake Race.”
Oh, I remember this! I actually remember playing this. Back when I installed whatever my first- yeah, it’s like a two player snake game - and you can block the other player.
Oh!
Oh… What’s going on there!? Some kind of weird font scaling thing. Okay, I guess I can probably change that font somehow, but yeah, okay, that’s interesting. I must admit, I think I was expecting KDE to be a bit more complete and a bit more sort of polished than GNOME, but maybe-
Oh, Sokoban, classic!
Maybe of course, because Red Hat were kind of pushing GNOME as the default, perhaps they put a bit more effort into it - so this, of course, is the classic Sokoban Japanese warehouse simulator game. Probably, hopefully needs no introduction.
So, there is a Fax Viewer - I suppose that’s quite useful if you have a fax modem and use your PC to receive faxes.
A fractal generator! Oh, look at that!
See, this is something that you don’t see anymore - a nice fractal generator. Nice Mandelbrot set, and we can zoom in on that - presumably forever…
Yeah, let’s not spend all day doing that. That’s quite an interesting choice of default application to include with the desktop environment. We’ve got the Icon Editor, we’ve got the Image Viewer. Paint!
Snapshot - is that just a screenshot tool? KSnapshot.
Ah, that’s something that I didn’t actually spot in GNOME, so a nice screenshot tool - I use these quite a lot actually, they’re quite useful, so that’s a nice thing to see just built into the desktop environment.
CD Player, and that’s a bit more advanced looking than its GNOME counterpart, isn’t it? In fact, that looks a lot more like the classic Windows CD player - and conversely, that actually looks quite a bit worse than XMMS! Do we have XMMS? We don’t because that’s a native GNOME thing, I guess.
Oh.
We don’t seem to have the option to run it under KDE.
That is interesting. A karaoke player!?
Oh yeah, KMid.
“KMID 1.7, MIDI slash karaoke file player.” “ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.”
Settings, I expected to be quite a bit more comprehensive in KDE, and it certainly seems that that’s the case - I mean, we do have the old KDE Control Center here, KDE version 1.1.2, in case you were wondering - and so this is from September 27th, 1999, and if we just go through here, we have various things that we can configure. Got the login manager. Don’t have read write permission. Okay.
Web browser…
Panels…
Yeah, it’s all pretty standard stuff. But again, all very similar - very, very similar actually.
X-Server. This is what I was looking for. Okay, so this just displays the information - we still can’t actually go in and change stuff like the screen resolution.
Sound. OSS. “Driver loaded as a module.” “Card config.” It seems to think it’s configured - so it’s a genuine Intel Pentium 75 to 200, 100MHz, FDIV bug. It’s got the f00f bug, which we saw pop up during that previous video - the infamous f00f bug!
Ah, here we go - so confusingly enough, there’s also a Red Hat option in here, and that’s where they’ve hidden XMMS.
I’m not sure what differentiates the Red Hat applications from the others, but there we go.
Moon Phase…
“Moon is 5 days old.”
I don’t think that’s true. I think the moon’s been around a lot longer than that…
So KDE, unlike GNOME, which was using Midnight Commander, actually seems to come with its own, yeah, KFM, its own file browser - 1.167 - and by default it’s configured using this horrible single click configuration.
So yeah, it’s just a single click. I guess you can probably change that? I’m also not a huge fan of these icons with the kind of underlined text under them. Can we, yeah, so there is a text view - oh, that’s a bit better.
There we go! So we’ve got text and the icons and can we-
So you can disable underlined links, but it’s still single click, which I don’t think I’m a fan of.
Still, it’s a choice.
Oh, and I had actually glossed over these at the beginning, but I’ve just tried to open one and we get this error: “The requested action get https://redhat.com is not implemented yet” - and that’s true of all of these shortcuts on the desktop. There’s no “Internet” option in here - so is there something I need to install? Of course, if we go into “Red Hat” and then “Internet”, we have Netscape Communicator still. Oh, there we go. Yeah, that’s Netscape Communicator - so a bit weird that URLs aren’t associated with that by default. Although we do get this rather snazzy start page, which we didn’t have under GNOME.
The mind boggles.
Now, of course, this is the Red Hat 6.1 Deluxe Edition. What does the word “deluxe” refer to? Well, it means that it comes with a load of extra content in the form of three whole extra CDs - so, I thought it was about time we checked out what was on those three CDs.
So first up, let’s check out disc 2.
Okay, so this has just opened up a file browser rather than going into the package management stuff - so no installable packages on this disk, I guess. But, in fact, there’s not really a lot at all: we have a README file - and we’re being prompted to choose an editor, so we’ll go with Old Reliable - and that’s a README file, not really much in there, just support information.
That’s the GNU GPL we have there, version 2. That’s literally all that’s in there - and then we have this SRPMS directory - and these are source packages here, so for every RPM file that we have on the other disc - or at least every one where the it’s licensed in such a way that we have to include the source - we have a source package here so we can actually install this and that will allow us to compile any of these applications from source - and that is a requirement of the GPL - so that’s all that’s on the second disc.
So this is what we get with the Deluxe package - it’s Red Hat’s “Linux Applications and Library Resource Guide”. How interesting - so, the first disc we have in here is “Third Party Workstation Applications” and it has that RPM logo on it - so I’m guessing this is gonna have a load of packages that we can install.
We have a single game - Krilo - “a fun strategy / puzzle game.” Shall we install that? Let’s install that. In fact, let’s do that now, because that should only take a second.
Okay, so what else do we have here? We’ve got some emulators.
Executor. “Macintosh environment for PCs.” I’ll probably leave that for another day, I guess, if there’s enough demand.
There’s a CAD- “VariCAD CAD system”. Hmm. JRuns, SITEWare, execmail…
…Productivity … Sound … ViaVoice…
…SDL…
…a load of development tools on here. We’ve got KCC C++ Optimizing Compiler, Paradise distributed computing environment, “Linda Parallel Computing Language.” These descriptions aren’t very descriptive, are they?
[A little longer than a few minutes later.]
Well, I’m not sure it was really worth paying the extra for that disc back in the day, unless I suppose there was a specific tool on there that you needed.
But nothing that really jumps out there as being particularly exciting - oh, we installed that game, didn’t we? Where’s that!?
Krilo! There it is.
This is our “third party workstation” game…
“Krillo is loading, please wait.”
What!?
I appear to be floating!
[Boing boing boing boing boing boing]
I can see why that was worth paying the extra for - okay, who knows!? Let’s have a look at this other CD - so this is “Power Tools Applications” - maybe there’ll be some more interesting stuff on there? Again, it looks like it’s another one of these RPM CDs and it’s launching the RPM tool here in GNOME.
“Games”, ah, loads of games on this one!
Repton - “a clone of the old BBC Micro Repton game” - and S, I think means it’s a source package - so you’ve got the actual source code for some of these. I’m going to install some of these and we’ll have a play with them, but let’s just see what else we get here - so we’ve got some graphics tools, we’ve got xscreensaver - “a set of GL screensavers” - xsnow - “an X Window System based dose of Christmas cheer.” That’s er…
“A widely used IRC client.” that’s an interesting name!
“xcopilot, an emulator for-“ oh, so that’s a Palm Pilot emulator! Okay.
Emulators. Stella - that’s the Atari 2600 emulator! That came with Red Hat!
UAE - that’s the Amiga emulator, isn’t it? Wine. Windows. xNES. xMAME - and this was on the Power Tools CD!
This is probably a whole separate video in and of itself, isn’t it?
Flash. “Unofficial Shockwave Flash plugin for Netscape.” Desktops - so we’ve got even more desktop environments. 9wm, “X window manager resembling the plan 9 interface.”
“blackbox, a window manager for X.” IceWM, whatever happened to IceWM!? I think it’s still around actually. There is so much, so much stuff on this CD.
“imwheel, a utility to make wheel mice work under X.” Well, I don’t have a wheel mouse, I’m not living in the future!
Right, I’m going to install some of this stuff and I will report back…
…and I’m back, as promised - so, I thought we would check out some of these games, as I think they’ll give us the best bang for our buck. So, we’ll just go to the Games folder here, and we have a new option, LinCity. Only one new option, and you’ll see why in a second.
Let’s have a look - so yeah, as you can probably see the graphics are a bit corrupted - I’m not quite sure what is going on with this, but we can go through and start a game. This is LinCity, as you’ve probably just spotted, and if we just click through, it’s a clone of the original Sim City. But to be honest, I haven’t really got very far with this. OK, I mean, there’s a help thing that keeps popping up, but I haven’t really got very far with this because it’s basically completely unplayable due to this graphics situation. I really don’t know what’s going on here.
I guess - and this is going to be a bit of a recurring theme with some of these games, I’m afraid - I guess this is probably the reason it was on the supplemental CD, the power user CD, because it isn’t all packaged up nicely and pre configured ready to run with GNOME. It’s probably going to take some tweaking to get it working properly.
But anyway, that’s LinCity - so that’s the first of the games that I wanted to check out - but let’s very swiftly move on from that - so, speaking of things not being configured very well, the next thing is in this “AnotherLevel” menu, which I must admit I did skip over earlier because I thought it was basically just duplicates of some of the stuff that’s in the other menus - and by and large, that is the case. But under “Games” we do have one of our new games. There’s xBill, which we checked out earlier, and xGalaga, which is a clone, of course, of Galaga.
Not quite sure what the copyright situation is with this - I’m pretty sure Joe Rumsey didn’t officially license this, but anyway. This is Shareware and we can press space to start a new game and all looks okay - until you go to fire the second shot and then it crashes! And it’s done that consistently no matter how many times I’ve run it - so yeah, that’s also not working properly.
And to check out the rest of these games I’m going to fire up a terminal - yep, the dreaded terminal - so, they are located in usr/games - and I’m not going to run every single one of these, but just a bit of a representative sample, and another thing that I need to do, you’ll notice that a lot of these are owned by root - and they actually try to write to locations that only root has access to, only root has permissions to write to - I could modify the permissions on some of the files - some of them also fire up terminals, which you need to be a root user to do - so it’s just easier to run these games as root.
So I’ll just run NetHack - now, NetHack is quite an infamous dungeon crawler slash - I’m not quite sure what you would describe it as - and I must admit, I’ve never actually worked out how to play this game. It’s very old school - of course, it started life on mainframe computers, Unix terminals, and that kind of environment - and yeah, I honestly don’t know what to do! I don’t know what the keys are. I don’t know where I’m supposed to go.
“What do you want to use or apply? ef or ?*”
“An uncursed lock pick?”
“An uncursed sack.”
“Your sack is empty.”
Well… Anyway I don’t have the first clue what I’m doing with this game, so sorry about that. I’m sure all the NetHack fans in the comments are screaming at me saying, you need to do this, you need to do that, but yeah, definitely a game I’d love to check out properly at some point. Maybe I’ll have to learn it for a video or something.
So one of the games is Repton, which was, of course, quite big on the old BBC Micro, and the problem I have with this is that the mouse-
Right, there we go.
We have working sound, which is excellent. “Press a key when ready.” I was going to say, the problem with this is trying to navigate through the menus because the mouse sensitivity just seems to be completely crazy but hopefully we can play the game without the mouse - and here it is, Repton - and look at this!
It is a proper-
I mean, it looks right.
Again we have this strange sensitivity issue with the keyboard - I keep overshooting things and getting stuck - and I think, I don’t know if it’s because the game is just running far, far faster than it’s expecting to be running, I don’t know if this was designed for a much, much slower system or what, but unfortunately that means that it’s not really playable, but again, if you were a power user, perhaps there’s a way to tweak this to get it to run properly. I just don’t have time to try to fix it today.
Okay, so in slightly better news, this is Thrust, and the description on the package manager described it as a port of the classic Commodore 64 game. Now, I must admit I’ve never owned a Commodore 64 and I’ve never really had much to do with them, but I have played very similar games to this - of course, there’s Lunar Lander and the like, if you’re an Atari person - so thrust is right ctrl, and you can steer with these buttons, and there are things that shoot at you - and you can also, oop, you can also shoot back.
…and I can’t really blame this on the game not running properly - I think it is actually running perfectly fine - I think I’m just not very good at it.
Can we pick this up?
Ha!
Yes, a very, very tricky game this, but seems like it would be a lot of fun - I haven’t had much time to play with it today, but I think this might be one that I end up coming back to.
Connect 4, and this is another one of these mouse-driven games, very similar to that Repton clone that we just saw - and again, the problem with this is that the mouse is just far, far too sensitive. I can probably adjust this in a config file somewhere, or maybe if we run this outside of an X environment.
Oh!
That is nigh on impossible to control and I’ve lost anyway - probably because I’m rubbish at the game rather than blaming it on the mouse. But yeah, not ideal!
And finally we have FreeCIV, of course the famous Civilization clone and I’m actually gonna need a second terminal for this because there are two components to it - so there are…
…so if I run “ser”, that runs the server component - and then if I run “civ”, this is the client side. Now, this is an actual proper X desktop application this time around - and there it is - so we have the prompt to connect to the FreeCIV server - so we’ll connect to that - and there we go - we have a FreeCIV server running on this computer and we have the client connected to it.
The trouble is, this doesn’t-
I don’t really understand, like this, this is not what I would expect a game of Civilization to look like, or to be controlled… like. That’s not very good grammar, is it? But yeah. “Turn done.” Yeah, something…
…something is evidently quite broken here, and I can’t quite work out what’s going on so, again, a bit of a running theme with the games that have been installed from this supplemental disc. But, anyway, I think it’s probably about time we wrap this up.
I must admit, I was quite surprised with my testing of Red Hat Linux 6.1 on this machine. For a start, the whole desktop environment situation - I mean, it’s completely backwards compared to my experience back in the day. Back in ‘99, 2000, when I first started tinkering with Linux, everybody avoided GNOME as far as I was concerned, and KDE was the much more powerful option, the much more configurable option - and the much more mature option, I mean, it was three years old at that point, whereas GNOME was brand spanking new.
And yet, in Red Hat Linux 6.1, GNOME is complete, it’s polished, it’s a really nice, smooth experience, and KDE just seems broken - and I’m not quite sure if that’s the way it was packaged - maybe Red Hat were pushing GNOME so hard that KDE was a bit of an afterthought. Maybe they thought that it was just for power users and that they could sort themselves out? Or maybe - and I suspect this might be something to do with it - it could be because I used GNOME for the initial installation and actually added KDE later on - so perhaps there’s some configuration somewhere that’s been skipped that would have happened had I installed it as the kind of the default option.
I’m not quite sure, but quite an interesting finding there - and of course the situation with the bonus CDs in the deluxe pack was quite interesting as well. Everything on that first disc just worked perfectly fine - no configuration, no messing around, no problems whatsoever really - and yet you start to venture onto the extra disks, and all of a sudden everything’s broken in all sorts of mysterious and wonderful ways - and, to be honest, I think that’s very much by design. Of course, these were aimed at more advanced Linux users, and you know, perhaps they put extra work into getting the stuff that was in the default installation all working perfectly and seamlessly - and they could leave people pretty much to their own devices to try to get this stuff configured. I’m sure it’s possible to make it work, it just didn’t work straight out of the box - and I thought that was quite an interesting observation.
But as far as conclusions go, I don’t think my mind’s really been changed since part one, to be honest. Even having spent a lot more time with this, I still think that Red Hat Linux 6.1 is surprisingly polished for 1999, and I’ve had a lot of fun checking it out again, and I hope you’ve also enjoyed joining me on that journey.
So thank you ever so much to my channel supporters on Patreon, Ko-Fi, and the YouTube Channel Member page - and thank you ever so much to you for watching. Hopefully I’ll see you next time.
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