Arch Linux

ladyanita22

Member

Registered: 2023-08-24

Posts: 3

Retrocomputing in Arch

Hello all,

I've been reading some things about Arch, and I'm becoming quite a fan of it in some aspects. I like its philosophy of upstream-first, rolling, community-based and extremely flexible systems.

As a fan of retrocomputing, though, I'm not such a fan of Arch. I love Arch, but I also love old builds, and I have as a hobby to create computer builds using components and software from other eras. If I wanted a computer from back in 2005, and I used let's say Fedora or Ubuntu, I would just take the ISOs from back then and call it a go. The repos are archived, so I'd point to them and that would be it.

On Arch, though, I know there's the Archive, but it goes back to 2013, and I believe then they're stored in the Internet Archive, without any particular snapshot tag that I can point to.

Can you really do retrocomputing (being able to access old packages from back, let's say, 2005, with Arch?

cloverskull

Member

Registered: 2018-09-30

Posts: 206

Re: Retrocomputing in Arch

Hey there, OT (admittedly and I apologize if this isn't allowed) but I'd love to know more about you using old builds of things like Fedora or Ubuntu. I would like to virtualize these old builds and point at old repos - is there a decent guide anywhere you could point me to? The reason is that I would like to run binaries with no available source, compiled for libc5 i386 and that era of libraries.

topcat01

Member

Registered: 2019-09-17

Posts: 133

Re: Retrocomputing in Arch

Slightly off-topic, but have you considered NetBSD? It is great at supporting old (and odd) devices. I am running it on a Toshiba 4010 CDT. As for Arch, I do have a VT420 hooked up via serial, which can be considered somewhat retro .

Last edited by topcat01 (2023-08-25 02:27:27)

ladyanita22

Member

Registered: 2023-08-24

Posts: 3

Re: Retrocomputing in Arch

Slightly off-topic, but have you considered NetBSD? It is great at supporting old (and odd) devices. I am running it on a Toshiba 4010 CDT. As for Arch, I do have a VT420 hooked up via serial, which can be considered somewhat retro .

I'm not too fond off BSDs. The issue here is not supporting new software on old hardware (ArchLinux 32 and Debian exist for that), it's having access to old software in old hardware. And I believe if we had some snapshot of the repositories for Arch, that'd be possible.

ladyanita22

Member

Registered: 2023-08-24

Posts: 3

Re: Retrocomputing in Arch

Hey there, OT (admittedly and I apologize if this isn't allowed) but I'd love to know more about you using old builds of things like Fedora or Ubuntu. I would like to virtualize these old builds and point at old repos - is there a decent guide anywhere you could point me to? The reason is that I would like to run binaries with no available source, compiled for libc5 i386 and that era of libraries.

It depends on the system you want to use. I know both Fedora and Ubuntu have archive repositories for that.

Lone_Wolf

Administrator

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 12,930

Re: Retrocomputing in Arch

Before 2013 there was the Arch Rollback Machine but it was stopped, you may find https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 0#p1313360  interesting (for historical reasons) .

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Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.

clean chroot building not flexible enough ?
Try clean chroot manager by graysky