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#1 2008-10-12 11:52:57

dav7
Member
From: Australia
Registered: 2008-02-08
Posts: 674

Really, really, REALLY REALLY, really... really. Old Stuff.

In my quest to recreate what a UNIX desktop would look like in the 80s-90s, I'm on a quest to find old, old programs and make them compile with today's compilers. Sure, I can start a copy of X without the xorg-redhat-die-ugly-pattern-die-die-die.patch patch (yes, that IS the (hilarious) name for the patch that takes X's 20 year old crosshatch pattern and replaces it with something else, eg black - info here and here), or I could just start a VNC server (Arch's Xvnc server doesn't have the patch, nor does RealVNC's, so I'm covered even if Arch's ever gets it). Then, I just start twm, xclock, xterm, xmh, oclock, etc, and bam, UNIX desktop. Or I could take it a little further...

What I'm looking for (whether X or terminal based):
- File managers (like the NeXT/Solaris ones)
- X11 desktop toys, accessories and utilities
- Window managers (like uwm and MWM)
- Text editors
- Anything old that you might know of, commercial or open source, other than v0.1 of the Linux kernel big_smile

I also want to expand my C knowledge, so what better way to do so than make old, stably written programs conform to the latest C guidelines? I'll be working with (hopefully) well-written code that's grown and been bugfixed over time, and because I have to fix them to make them work with the latest gcc/g++ I'll likely remember what I did to fix them, which just so happens (;)) to coincide with today's guidelines. IMHO, Win!

What post like this would be what it is without an initial contribution? Mine is 'xvt', an X terminal that appears to have started in the early '90s (1992-1993) and appears to aim to be a lighter weight version of xterm. It sure is that: htop says it checks in 3KB of RAM (specifically 3088 VIRT (virtual memory, how much the program has asked for regardless of how much RAM you have - something could ask for 16TB of RAM and that would be represented as VIRTual RAM), 1384 RES (resource usage) and 1084 SHR (X shared memory). It doesn't have color support, you can't scroll (you can get at some of the scrollback by resizing the window from what I've seen), resizing the window after clearing it has interesting effects, and it flickers a little on resize and update. Ahh, the nostalgia big_smile irssi and htop work with it though (albeit in black and white, and without box drawing characters although xvt is supposed to support those... *pokes ncurses*) big_smile

Note that because of this program's age you won't find things like a website or sourceforge project for it (lol) - your best bet is to download my current work with it (URL at the end of this paragraph), which in a nutshell involved deciding which of the debian or ubuntu packages to install, picking the ubuntu one (which was probably an exact copy of the debian one heh), downloading the ubuntu package, compiling it successfully, running it, it failing, poking the source, giving up, downloading and applying the patch I saw, applying the patch file, trying to compile it again which failed, discovering a bunch of new patches added to the dir by the original patch and applying those as well, trying to compile it again which worked, tried to run it again and it failed again, using man and google to my advantage, adding some header references, and finally, getting it to build. To be honest, it was a lot simpler than my explanation, but at any rate, here's my work (its source is slightly changed, I changed the font to "fixed" since the original "8x13" font didn't look very nice): xvt.tar.gz.

I also have an old web browser called Chimera from 1995 (not related to anything for Mac OS X) that I found some modified sources for, but my copy is so heavily modified that I probably couldn't call it Chimera anymore. tongue You can still download the modified sources I used, and although Wikipedia isn't too keen on it, nobody's removed my install instructions from the page on Chimera I created a while ago (it contains a screenshot!!!), sooo... you can easily use those references to build Chimera if you want to try it yourself. big_smile

Note, I plan to tidy up these packages and make a couple of PKGBUILDs for them; if you do so, I won't be able to sad (but you can anyway, especially if you get impatient tongue)

-dav7


Windows was made for looking at success from a distance through a wall of oversimplicity. Linux removes the wall, so you can just walk up to success and make it your own.
--
Reinventing the wheel is fun. You get to redefine pi.

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#2 2008-10-12 12:11:15

k.mandla
Member
From: Japan
Registered: 2006-05-16
Posts: 86
Website

Re: Really, really, REALLY REALLY, really... really. Old Stuff.

HOLD THE PHONE! An xaw-based browser?!?! OMG! I must have this! yikes

I was poking around with X-based packages that are still in Ubuntu 8.04, and I have a list of rather interesting ones here:

http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2008/09/09 … sed-stuff/

Most of those probably postdate the kind of stuff you're after, but they might be of interest. And not all of them are really X-based. Hope that helps. ...

Edit: You might also look at the XView applications, which date back to 1988 if I understand it right.

http://packages.ubuntu.com/xview-clients
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xview

Last edited by k.mandla (2008-10-12 12:13:03)


Linux user No. 409907

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#3 2008-10-12 12:12:58

dav7
Member
From: Australia
Registered: 2008-02-08
Posts: 674

Re: Really, really, REALLY REALLY, really... really. Old Stuff.

Oooo.

Another Xaw freak. big_smile

Hi. tongue

I made a NotePad clone (an app that you open, type in, hit ESC or close, and it remembers what you entered) with C and Xaw many months ago. It's only 20 lines, but since I knew zero C back then I had a major case of cut-and-paste-until-it-works, so it took like a fortnight to write. tongue Also, *pokes lack of documentation* tongue

Also...

I can't really find anything that measures up as a browser that uses X-, Motif- or similar-toolset.

hv3. Small on disk - 2-3MB for an HTML, CSS and JS capable browser (yeah, ":o") written in tcl, using the wonderfully icky tk for GUI. I heard that it used like 47MB in memory though.. soo....

-dav7

Last edited by dav7 (2008-10-12 12:18:32)


Windows was made for looking at success from a distance through a wall of oversimplicity. Linux removes the wall, so you can just walk up to success and make it your own.
--
Reinventing the wheel is fun. You get to redefine pi.

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#4 2008-10-12 12:24:46

iphitus
Forum Fellow
From: Melbourne, Australia
Registered: 2004-10-09
Posts: 4,927

Re: Really, really, REALLY REALLY, really... really. Old Stuff.

You can still find binaries for netscape 3.x gold, they're on the netscape ftp and mirrors about the place. It is possible to make them run, but it takes a little bit of work.

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#5 2008-10-12 12:25:20

k.mandla
Member
From: Japan
Registered: 2006-05-16
Posts: 86
Website

Re: Really, really, REALLY REALLY, really... really. Old Stuff.

dav7 wrote:

Oooo.

Another Xaw freak. big_smile

Heck yes!

dav7 wrote:

hv3. Small on disk - 2-3MB for an HTML, CSS and JS capable browser (yeah, ":o") written in tcl, using the wonderfully icky tk for GUI. I heard that it used like 47MB in memory though.. soo....

I've seen that and watched as it matured. It's getting quite nice. I had lumped it into a post of GTK1.2-type stuff a little earlier, which is why I omitted it from that post.

http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2008/09/02 … k12-stuff/

Any chance of seeing something like a PKGBUILD for the Chimera browser? I'll tinker with it in a few days and see if I can makes something Ubuntu-ish.

The beauty of this, to me, is that you can actually have a functional, extremely lightweight desktop with nothing much heavier than xaw. I have a few closet-dwellers that might benefit from something like that. ...


Linux user No. 409907

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#6 2008-10-12 12:33:01

dav7
Member
From: Australia
Registered: 2008-02-08
Posts: 674

Re: Really, really, REALLY REALLY, really... really. Old Stuff.

kmandla: Not sure about a PKGBUILD... it might happen soon, it might not tongue btw, very cool list of apps big_smile

iphitus: Ha... haha.. hah ha aaha ha "little bit of work" *dies* YOU try getting 4.x to work! big_smile

-dav7

Last edited by dav7 (2008-10-12 12:36:22)


Windows was made for looking at success from a distance through a wall of oversimplicity. Linux removes the wall, so you can just walk up to success and make it your own.
--
Reinventing the wheel is fun. You get to redefine pi.

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#7 2008-10-16 02:15:13

k.mandla
Member
From: Japan
Registered: 2006-05-16
Posts: 86
Website

Re: Really, really, REALLY REALLY, really... really. Old Stuff.

I managed to assemble this for Ubuntu, and cobble together a somewhat functional .deb file, if anyone is interested.

http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2008/10/16 … buntu-804/

For dependencies, you'll want build-essential, xorg-dev, xutils-dev and possibly checkinstall. Otherwise, it works more or less as dav7 has said.

Last edited by k.mandla (2008-10-16 02:15:47)


Linux user No. 409907

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#8 2008-10-17 00:01:23

anrxc
Member
From: Croatia
Registered: 2008-03-22
Posts: 834
Website

Re: Really, really, REALLY REALLY, really... really. Old Stuff.

There is a great file manager (for a modern desktop too!) that could fit in your story http://www.newplanetsoftware.com/systemg/  Check out their other software too, they have some good projects.


You need to install an RTFM interface.

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#9 2008-10-17 00:45:45

heleos
Member
From: Maine, USA
Registered: 2007-04-24
Posts: 678

Re: Really, really, REALLY REALLY, really... really. Old Stuff.

That is the greatest patch name I have ever seen.

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#10 2008-10-17 15:00:54

dav7
Member
From: Australia
Registered: 2008-02-08
Posts: 674

Re: Really, really, REALLY REALLY, really... really. Old Stuff.

k.mandla: Cool! big_smile

anrxc: Not bad!

heleos: Yea, I agree, but... I dislike what it does sad I actually do like the checkerboard desktop! sad

-dav7


Windows was made for looking at success from a distance through a wall of oversimplicity. Linux removes the wall, so you can just walk up to success and make it your own.
--
Reinventing the wheel is fun. You get to redefine pi.

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