I wonder what would be involved in setting it up so I could pull up webpages served by the Linux computer from a Windows machine (offline, of course). Might be as simple as setting up TCP/IP on the Windows box, and then typing in the IP address of the Linux box.
At one point I had some sort of "client" software we used as the university where I could remotely log on to the Linux box

As long as you have a working httpd on the linux box and a tcpip network to connect them what is stopping you from just accessing it with any windows http client?

It has been a long, long, long, long time since I messed with any of that

Time to brush the dust away 😁

No sure if I would want to go back to rebuilding my kernel again and again until I have all the features I need and all the pieces of hardware working... Loadable kernel modules appeared sometime around 1995-96.

mtest001 wrote on 2024-01-11, 08:58:

No sure if I would want to go back to rebuilding my kernel again and again until I have all the features I need and all the pieces of hardware working... Loadable kernel modules appeared sometime around 1995-96.

Kernel modules were a thing all the way back in RedHat 5.0, and you don't really need to compile your own kernel unless you really need something very specific added. I remember RedHat 5.2 and 6.1 being particularly good kernel wise, for their time.

I was more of a Slackware user myself. Used to buy the Infomagic packs which were really great value for money: https://archive.org/details/LDR0497_6cd

Still got my first set ...RHL 3.0.3 days ... I keep it as a 'tangible' reminder of exactly how 'user hostile' linux was back in the day ... err... WatchTower on Amiga was worse =)

...it was my first introduction to a 'PC'...as some will recall, first 'task' to do after a successful installation, was to compile a kernel to suit the hardware you were actually using. I lost I forget how many sleepless hours dwelled in frustration, when achieving that seemed impossible on my kit - kernel would boot and immediately segfault. Eventually via mailing list, the cause was determined to be the model of Cyrix processor I was using -- it claimed to be pentium spec, but lacked the cmov instruction. Fun days...

Well, the mental dust is clearing up some 🤣
I remember the windows program we used to use to access Linux - it was something called Anzio (a terminal program?)
Anyway, you could remotely log on and check email (which was Pine back them)

I did some digging around in the junk box and found some Liinksys ethernet cards - I still have the install CD-ROM.
Next step is to get an ethernet card installed in an old Win98 machine 😀

Pine was and still is a fantastic piece of software, I used it for email and newsgroup.

I used pine for email on early linux, it's also incredibly good for accessing mail through telnet. I used to have an email account through a BBS before I actually had my own ISP account and I can't even begin to relate how much better pine was on a text interface in comparison.

What started out as a nostalgia trip might actually turn into a project here 😉

Well if anyone is reading this....still working on it. Very small baby steps, like changing MOTD. My project today was figuring out out to mount a cd-rom so I could upload some HTML files.

What I am finding out is the version of netscape (4.7) is really too old to support some of the javascript I was fooling around with. Which is okay; the purpose here was to set up a basic network.

I wonder what would be involved in upgrading the netscape....probably WAY more trouble than it is worth

You could try a modern Linux distribution, Debian still supports i686 though I did have trouble booting Debian 12 over PXE with nfsroot on a Celeron "Coppermine", it didn't present a login prompt at the end of the kernel and systemd boot, but it worked fine on a VIA C7-D. Debian 11 works fine under the same boot process on both machines as well as on a Geode GX1 (which doesn't have the long NOP instructions that Debian 12's kernel requires). I did not try X.org on any of them.
What you'll have trouble with is newer versions of Firefox requiring SSE2 and in Debian there are at least 2 bugs #961663 and #1002600 describing breakages at various versions though one poster claims that firefox-esr_102.4.0esr-1 works fine.
Alternatively, try T2SDE which claims to have an i586 compatible Firefox.

Well - depending upon how far I might want to go, I was already thinking I'd have to get an upgraded MB and a newer distribution.
I have an athlon board I am not using but I think even that would not really do it now. I ran PC linux on it for a long time, but ran into the problem you describe with lack of SSE2. It got the the point where it became unusable for getting on the internet.
There's another reason to upgrade motherboards as well. It's now impossible to get new hard drives for older boards; the parallel interface is gone. And even if that wasn't the case, most newer drives would likely be too big. I suppose used ones are an option, but in my experience hard drives are not the components you want to get used b/c they are mechanical and subject to wear.

Well if anyone is interested I set up an old win98 pc with a network card. The thing fought me tooth-and-nail; I wound up reinstalling windows
And boy what I pain to get the video card going again (apollo pro chipset)
Been a while since I saw win98 with the "network neighborhood" icon
Next step - get a hub

If anyone is interested, I tried to upgrade to netscape 6, but couldn't find the download
Then I started looking at firefox....the latest version I could run was like 0.70. Couldn't get that to run.
Maybe this is telling me something - that his really old stuff may not be worth fooling around with it.

I'd put HAIKU OS on it.

https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/installation-guide/

ncmark wrote on 2024-01-24, 15:35:

If anyone is interested, I tried to upgrade to netscape 6, but couldn't find the download
Then I started looking at firefox....the latest version I could run was like 0.70. Couldn't get that to run.
Maybe this is telling me something - that his really old stuff may not be worth fooling around with it.

I'm pretty sure RedHat probably has it as an upgrade RPM package on their ftp somewhere.. It also ought to be available as a deb package on older debian cd images if you dig around.