I am trying to install Ubuntu 4.10 (warty) using warty-release-install-i386.iso (verified) on a sacrificial Dell Optiplex 745 which is currently running Mint 19.
I need this to test if an old (commercial) Linux 32-bit binary (P-Stat) will execute
(it should; back in the day I was running it on just such systems) and read some old stats files.
I have created a boot USB from the .iso but it’s not being recognised when I try to boot the old PC from the USB device. Other systems I have on USB (Mint 19 and other Ubuntus) all get recognised and boot up OK, but not warty (and not 8.04 hardy either).
I have burned warty to several different USB sticks, including one that five minutes before contained Mint 22 and booted just fine, but the system claims not be be able to find a bootable USB when I plug in the warty USB stick. The error message is the usual one you get for an unreadable USB stick:
Selected boot device not available -
strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility
Is warty in fact bootable from USB? Or do I have to find a CD writer and create that instead?
We generally don’t support “End Of Life” releases here, as a rule. But this does seem like an interesting challenge, and is a legitimate use of an old distro, in my humble opinion.
I don’t believe so. I believe this was added in 5.04.
What happens when you try to run P-Stat on a more modern release, that has 32-bit support - such as 18.04? I have a 32-bit 18.04 system handy, if you’d like me to test this.
Definitely try a current system with 32 bit support for your old binary. Use ldd to see which libraries are “missing”, then see if simply adding a link with the old name to the current library will fix the problems.
It’s surprisingly hard and annoying to get really old distros running in VMs, as many of the distros don’t support the newer virtualised hardware presented to the OS. 4.10 is especially irritating.
Surprising, indeed. I guess I’ve never tried. Worth a try, at least.
Actually, I found at least one site out there offering pre-installed virtual machine images. I can’t vet it and it’s been a long time since it’s been updated. Still, searching for something similar might prove to be the solution.
You may have issue that Operating system is too old for “newer” hardware. 4.10 is from 2004. but system specs say Dell is from 2006.
Typically Ubuntu distribution needs to be a year or two newer than hardware to work well to include kernel & drivers to fully support the hardware. Later Dell created Sputnik which was a package of drivers for new hardware before Kernel & drivers in a distribution included them. Later distributions then did include those updates.
Also old BIOS Dell systems had issues with either BIOS settings or Windows software that prevented writing to MBR. Dell Media direct or Uninstall Dell DataSafe issues with MBR.
I burned warty to a CD and the old system booted from it and tried to install Ubuntu (yay!)
But then it claimed I had no CD drive (!) and it wanted drivers from a floppy (!) despite actually reading and executing from the CD at the time!
I burned hardy and it booted Iso I went for Install and it started the character-cell (block-graphic) install, but hung when it tried to switch to full graphical mode. Rebooted and tried again, this time picking Run without Changes first, and that loaded fine, so I hit up Install and it worked OK.
But I really need an earlier version, so the problem still exists.
I missed this the first time reading it (I need coffee). This seems like a really good question. If that worked, that would be way easier to resolve. If it didn’t, you could just keep going back through the i386 releases until you find one that does.
The file command returns interpreter /lib/ld-linux.so.2 for that more recent version, but that version cannot open the older format of binary save-files (which my user had restored from tape). For that, the earlier version of the software is required, but for that one, file returns interpreter /lib/ld-linux.so.1 and I can’t figure out a way to have both active at the same time, not can I identify which packages would be required to enable the older interpreter (and they are probably not supported on my current platform).
So installing an older Linux on an older computer looked like a good way, but it’s proving a struggle to install even hardy, let alone warty.
I don’t have any old hardware to install it on, but I tried to install it on proxmox 8.3.3 running off a 12th gen i5 and it installed and I was able to get to a desktop. The mouse movement in the console was kinda iffy, but it loaded. I didn’t try to install any applications, however.
I’m holding off on that until I can find somewhere to do it.
So I can boot 32-bit Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) from CD, as the copy I installed to hard disk won’t boot to graphical mode, and adding ‘3’ to the grub boot line doesn’t give me a command-line boot.
So file on my binary reports
Elf 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 30386, version 1 (SYSV) dynamically linked (uses shared libs), not stripped
and I get the error “No such file or directory” when I try to execute it (or run ldd on it).
Running ldd on the same binary on another system says
How can I find out which packages to install to give me these (if they are even available still for Hardy)? sudo apt-get update lists lots of 404 Not Found messages regardless of whose repositories I select (IP address 91.189.91.81, for example), and the whatprovides command does not exist, nor does the what-utils package.
Just out of interest i tried installing 4.10 last night using KVM/QEMU but could not get the ISO which I downloaded from the old releases repos to boot irrespective of the settings chosen; it just continuously told me there was no bootable disk avaliable presumably because the new KVM/QEMU system is unable to boot such an old iso version.
I shall continue to view this discussion to see if anyone succeeds not because I need this old vesion of Ubuntu but simply because it was the first Linux distro I ever looked at all those years ago, then soon after got rid of my Windows-XP; I’ve been using Ubuntu systems ever since, though now it’s Xubuntu that is my version of choice!
Most of the config is specific to my environment, where my ISO and disk image are on a ZFS datastore, but that should translate to an ext4 file system.