A friend contacted me saying his company needs to run an ancient piece of closed source software which talks with special scsi hardware (something related to radar; I do not have details). He tried it in different this-century distros, but it does not work.
The software was originally developed for SUSE 4.2, but he cannot find it anywhere (the oldest he could find was 6.something).
I looked at the “discontinued” ftp directory at SUSE, but they have deleted old stuff from there (and even then, 4.2 was not among those).
Does anyone know how/where to find this ancient piece of history?
4.2 (referring to Adam Douglas Hitchhiker’s Guide To The History) was the first “own” distribution of the SuSE GmbH (the ones before were German versions of Slackware) (Stefan Werden, …: Das OpenSUSE Handbuch), 2006, Page 367)
So maybe your friend can try an old (1996?) version of Slackware?
Or as 4.2 was developed on base of Jurix (OpenSUSE – Wikipedia)
this could be tried, too?
And I do not know if it is legal to make and give away a copy of a 4.2 distribution as I think at this time it was not all open Source … so your friend my have to buy a old distribution.
On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 14:06 +0000, jsveiga wrote:
> Hello,
>
> A friend contacted me saying his company needs to run an ancient piece
> of closed source software which talks with special scsi hardware
> (something related to radar; I do not have details). He tried it in
> different this-century distros, but it does not work.
>
> The software was originally developed for SUSE 4.2, but he cannot find
> it anywhere (the oldest he could find was 6.something).
>
> I looked at the “discontinued” ftp directory at SUSE, but they have
> deleted old stuff from there (and even then, 4.2 was not among those).
>
> Does anyone know how/where to find this ancient piece of history?
Unknown. Earliest I found here was 5.2.
But I didn’t check my floppies.
I imagine it will only run on really, really old hardware though if you
do find it.