(Note: this is a guest post by Tenox)

I have accumulated a bunch of loose pen drives with different OS installers, imaging and rescue tools. I could never find them when I needed so I have decided to put an order to it. A System Administrator’s Key Ring was born!

This one is Windows centric, however doesn’t have Windows 8 and 2012 yet. I’m now working on Linux key ring with various distributions I use.

Note that I actually do have valid licenses for all the software.

If you want to make your own here is how to make it:

• Windows media are easiest. Diskpart clean and create an active Fat32 partition. Extract DVD to the USB key.
• Linux media similar but apart from diskpart and extracting media you need to use Syslinux to create the MBR.
• For bootable floppies use DiskImager to write the image directly to pen drive.

(note this is a guest post from Tenox)

I have been working with Linux since around 1992, both at home and at work. I have probably seen it all with exception of item in the title. Lurking around my files, there was a screenshot of a beta version of Caldera Linux. As time passed I somehow never managed to see it with my own eyes so for me it’s features were always covered by myths and legends.

Recently I came across install media for the OS and decided to to see how was it like for real. The system installed just fine through series of tubes^H^H^H err dialog based setup steps which were common at the time. However as I wanted to see the GUI in action there was a problem – 640×480 VGA mode, or rather lack of better video mode to work with.

Unfortunately neither VMware nor VirtualBox do not support anything better than the crippled VGA mode. They do it for all other devices, like network card, mouse, ide and atapi cdrom. But somehow not for graphics. Fortunately the other virtualization engines are bit better. QEMU supports Cirrus Logic and Virtual PC supports S3 Trio.

I have spent several hours trying to convince the ancient Xfree86 to work with QEMU, to no avail. All I managed t o get was this:

Out of options I have decided to try Virtual PC. Unfortunately the system would not install due to disk errors. Upon some research I’ve found the issue was IO-APIC which I promptly disabled in the kernel. It did not help the install much, but allowed me to run a qemu-installed and converted disk image.  This is a bit of shame that the best virtualization engine to run ancient Linux was Microsoft VPC. Anyway to my amusement I’ve got this:

And I was able to explore the GUI a little bit more:

Wait a second, these icons remind me of something! Apparently Visix Looking Glass became Caldera Desktop… I will need to dig in deeper in to this eventually.

Apart from that Caldera is loaded with tons of ancient software. Pretty much everything there was available on Linux these days and all working out of the box. Neozeed will be happy to see Neko in action (see the last screenshot)!

Update 1:
You can check more memorabilia including physical disks here.
Download install CD here.

Update 2:
Michal Necasek of OS2 Museum has fixed XF86_SVGA so that it works correctly with Virtual Box in higher resolutions as well. “You’ll have to set up the X so that it uses the XF86_SVGA server and tell it to automatically detect the graphics hardware. Then it should be just a question of selecting some sensible monitor and creating a few modes. If things are configured properly, you’ll see something like “SVGA: chipset: boxv” in the X server output.“. Download here.

Update 3:
I have scanned a Looking Glass User Guide

OLWM info:

Also managed to get 800×600 resolution under QEMU. To do so run with -vga cirrus and run the QW video driver with qw.vga_bios video7,1

Unfortunately the mouse doesn’t work under QEMU. Either in PS/2 or serial mode the cursor randomly jumps around with a tendency to hang around top line of the screen.