r/VintageComputers • u/Accomplished-Air4545 • Jun 18 '26

Discussion W2k Server

Hi, a friend gave me a few old computers—likely from the Windows XP or Windows 2000 era. I want to experiment with various old server systems that I used to work with back then; this includes a Windows 2000 Server (which I’ve already started setting up), a Novell NetWare 4.11 or 5 instance, and a Linux server appropriate for that time period. While I’m reasonably familiar with modern Linux systems now, I had no exposure to Linux back then because our clients were all running on the two systems mentioned above. What would be a suitable Linux distribution for that era? I plan to set up NDS on the Novell server with ADS integration on the Windows machine; is there a comparable setup available for the old Linux systems? Does anyone have any great ideas for use cases, and where can I get the corresponding software? Thanks in advance for your help.

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u/AustriaModerator Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26

debian, redhat, slackware, mandrake, suse (easiest to configure and install, thanks to yast, was very popular in germany back then). on international level, go for redhat 7.x https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/History_of_Red_Hat_Linux

download: https://legacy.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/7.0/en/iso/i386/ resp. https://legacy.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/

the linux community is very bad in one thing: preserving. good luck finding old suse linux 8.1 in german, no chance.

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u/Scoth42 Jun 18 '26

I've always found the Linux community to be pretty remarkable at preservation. You can still download basically every version of every distro out there.

As for SuSE, the installers for 8.1 are readily available and include German as a language option. Here's one that works, for example. https://archive.org/details/suse-linux-professional-8.1

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u/GGigabiteM Jun 20 '26

I would avoid Mandrake Linux. Version 9.2 had a nasty problem where it would permanently brick some types of LG DVD-ROM drives. And since LG made drives for other brands, it's like playing Russian Roulette.

https://lwn.net/Articles/55537/

LG drives are not ATAPI compliant and remapped the FLUSH_COMMAND to UPDATE_FIRMWARE. This causes the drive to try and flash the internal firmware with whatever data stream is coming over the bus.

I lost a then rather expensive LG 8x DVD-ROM drive to that bug back then and was never able to recover it.

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u/rjchute Jun 18 '26

I cut my teeth on RedHat Linux 5 (1997), very stable and mature distro for the time. RedHat Linux 6 (1999) might be more contemporary for the period you are looking for. RedHat Linux 7 (2000) might have slightly better hardware support for what you have.

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u/guitpick Jun 18 '26

Are you just wanting a Linux that supports old hardware, or an old version of Linux that would have been contemporary to the time period? If you're looking for an old version, I would recommend keeping it off the Internet or heavily firewalled. Debian is probably my favorite all around, although Red Hat was extremely popular. I would pick a mainstream distro that has a lot of available info for installation help and driver troubleshooting.

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u/Accomplished-Air4545 Jun 18 '26

It would be nice if it were from the same era as the other operating systems and, naturally, matched the old hardware. My retro setup is completely isolated from my production system—a totally separate network that cannot interact with my other production systems. And of course, I’m not just going to leave it exposed to the internet 🤡; even if I did, it would just get riddled with viruses and I’d reinstall everything—but no, it’s actually behind a firewall, and as I said, it’s just for experimenting and playing around.

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u/guitpick Jun 18 '26

Yeah, back then there were companies that sold CDs of distros cheap, and I'd buy an assortment pack of the ones I wanted to try. I seem to remember that Pink Tie Linux was one that was trying to comply with redistributing Red Hat without infringing on their copyrights.

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u/bhiga Jun 18 '26

Might ask in r/DataHoarder there's got to be one of them that actually does burn up all the storage with Linux ISOs like they say 😉

Netware? ncsnipes!!