Developing “stable” builds of old code for old hardware has many benefits:
- If you can be selective about what you’re working with then compared to making fully up-to-date operating systems it’s relatively easy: apply the patch, run the full system build, wait untold hours, then see if you broke anything (and repeat…). Good practice of the basics despite often being quite advanced software
- It allows me to deploy some of my own software on top of a fairly stable base on old hardware, solving some “it won’t work on my PC issues” with “just install a VM”
- It gives me (and/or others) a solid basis for test infrastructure and for porting of old software to newer systems, a lot of the old code in these systems will already run easily on new systems too so it helps to have a “stable” patched fork
- It gives computer users or resellers of legacy hardware an extended support or self-support window for old CPUs in general, your current solution may be unmaintainable but this solution will basically work forever (until the hardware rusts out, assuming there are no major hardware incompatibilities or showstopping bugs in the code)
So right now I’m working on at least two other OS builds for “legacy” hardware, these will not have any significant modifications from the upstream sources at this stage but will just be to test build infrastructure.
The builds are now coming out more stable after some initial failures, but I’ll write about those later.
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