I hired into a community college IT dept ~2000. Manager told me they were a Windows shop. Ha np. I proceeded to replace 3/4 of their server room with Linux. email, cd servers, file servers, web servers, db2, PeopleSoft(gack!). I was working on a cs degree which they paid for about half
I did that too, but I came after the guy left and the lady running the department didn’t have the admin passwords for any of the machines. So… When they finally went down, that was the end of printing. I advised her to have the actual university IT department install real managed printers, instead of their windows xp virus infected underpowered computers.
Windows can’t even install its own old products! I remember back when I had to upgrade systems from XP to 7 and the users needed IE8 in able to use some internal websites. Microsoft was like “Fuck you, you can only use IE9 or above” there was literally no way to download IE8.
I also hate it when they only make shit available through the Windows Store or another convoluted process. No more downloading a simple EXE or MSI and double clicking it!
Wasn’t IE8 preinstalled on Windows 7? Wasn’t IE9 the only version of IE that wasn’t preinstalled on anything? I’m pretty sure someone (if not you) already downloaded IE9, in that case, I absolutely don’t know how to downgrade versions of IE.
I don’t remember what version it was exactly, this was like a decade ago, but I just remember that I needed the previous version and couldn’t find anywhere to download it.
Installing 25 year old binaries on Linux is rather interesting - relevant for stuff like some of the old Loki ports. Problem is mostly that they’ve been written with kernel 2.2 in mind, which does have different behaviour for quite a few things - you generally can find old libc versions compatible with the binary, but those libc versions don’t necessarily play nice with the kernel.
There are some compatibility flags which made things work last time I checked - but not sure if that’s the case, and it definitely won’t work forever, given that 32bit x86 support is likely to be dropped eventually.
It's funny, the only Linux software I've ever used that was only shipped as binaries was Loki games. Also, the only software that broke after binary compatibility went south. There used to be a giant tarball of old libraries and jiggerypokery that enabled the Loki games to sorta kinda work.
I was kind of sad to see that Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri didn't run too well, but then I tried to play the GOG version on x64 Windows 11 and there are occasional weird issues. So, eh.
There’s a lot of enterprise stuff that only ships as binaries. I had some fun in the late 00s trying to find the most recent distribution still shipping packages for egcs as that was the only compiler supported by the Lotus Domino SDK.
(For the younger ones here: There was some disagreement about gcc development, which resulted in the egcs fork. It got merged back into mainline gcc by he late 90s already, though)
At the time when the Loki ports happened it was a great thing - before that you pretty much had doom and quake available. Nowadays things are better with steam, but it’s quite likely that we’ll see some stuff break there in a few years as well, at least for older games.
replaced a $20,000 cd rack with 15 cd drives + windows os for network sharing, with a desktop PC running redhat(bureaucracy wanted a support contract). Ripped all their cds w/ dd bash script I wrote for automating add/delete cds for the non-cli types.
Windows: nope, too old. Find a version that’s compatible with your current installation.
Trust me, I tried playing some old CD games from my dad’s shed on Windows 10 for such a long time, it wouldn’t even let me do that without having to rely on a virtual machine. Most of those games were in French and German, btw.
I mean, I kind of understand with Heroes of Might and Magic 1 or Prehistorik 2 or something. But heck, even Guitar Hero 3 is impossible to install and play on Windows 10.
Uhm. Doom was originally released in 1993. 30 years ago. Dragon age Origins was released in 2009. 14 years ago.
So…
Not quite. got a couple years before that’s true.
FWIW, the first game I beat was the OG legend of zelda. I was 7, it was my dad’s game and i wasn’t supposed to be playing it for some reason. I got caught when my dad was strugling on the puzzles in the water temple and I gave some helpful advice… (“We won’t tell mom about this. now where did you say I go?”)
the first PC game I got heavily into was Age of Empires, though, a lot of my friends played starcraft, and insisted it was better than AoE; so I played one game with them. (They were all so very patronizing… so I let them be patronizing and then turned my ally to hostile and carpet-nuked the entire map.) (yeah. I went back to AoE after that, lol.)
incidentally, I noticed that the doom comics were issued in '96 when I was double checking my facts. It’s maybe annoying that I’m old enough to remember sneaking a copy of it
I have seen multiple streamers have problems with it on Windows, but for me it works completely fine on Linux with PROTON_FORCE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE=1 (even mods work).
There is a large address aware (LAA) patch for windows too that fixed it for one streamer, but you have to download a patched executable.
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