💾 Archived View for librehacker.com › gemlog › starlog › 20240524-0.gmi captured on 2024-05-26 at 14:40:18. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Here are some screenshots of Emacs 24.3.1 running on Windows 2000, courtesy of a very old version of Cygwin:
Emacs on Windows 2000 exhibit A
Emacs on Windows 2000 exhibit B
Emacs on Windows 2000 exhibit C
I have a project going at work to restore an old aircraft simulator, which includes a network of Windows 2000 and QNX computers. They are running on the original hardware (mostly Pentium 4 IBM compatibles), except for a few parts I had to replace like hard drives, fans, and such. If you want to shutdown the whole simulator properly, without simply cutting power to the main bus, it takes like 27 steps to get all the W2K computers shut down, so I'm looking into automating that.
Unfortunately, none of the W2K computers were business editions, and there doesn't seem to be any built-in tools for remote admistration or sending commands remotely, even a telnet server. I went to a lot of effort to try to find an ancient version of pstools that would work on W2K but without success.
After exploring various options, I decided to try installing openssh, via an ancient version of cygwin. I was able not only to get cygwin and openssh installed, but I also got Emacs running, which was exciting! That is great, because it not only provides a nice editor to work with, but answers the question of what tool I can use for scripting.
My cygwin install includes lot of info manuals accessible through Emacs, including the Emacs and Elisp manuals. In Emacs 24.3.1, I see that Ielm and Eshell are available, though it seems that some of the Eshell syntax or functionality was not yet available. I get an error when I try to direct output into a buffer, using this modern syntax:
ls -1 > #<*test*>
Nonetheless, I was quite happy to go from having pretty much no tools worth mentioning, to having a full Emacs IDE.
Caveat: if you are considering installing cygwin on a W2K computer yourself, you should think twice, as it can be a painful process. It seems that the old version of the setup program, which you must use, does not do dependency tracking. So it is quite a lot of effort to make sure you get all the correct dependencies installed for a given package, extracting them from the setup.ini file. Alternatively, you could just install every single cygwin package at once, which is an option in the program, but I think you would need maybe 10 or 20 GBs of space for that. I also had a lot of work to do in order to download the old cygwin repository from CTM, using wget and some Emacs macro magic, since I could not give the W2K computer access to the Internet, and therefore I needed to create a local repository.
This work © 2024 by Christopher Howard is licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
