#Plamo98 goodies

Plamo Linux is one of the few Linux distributions to support PC-98 series. Plamo 3.x is the latest distribution that can be installed on PC-9801 and PC-9821 directly. Unfortunately, it is quite old, and is missing lots of useful stuff.

This repo is to share a-ha moments and binaries for Plamo on PC-98

#Installation guide for Plamo 3.x

Check out the plamo3x directory.

#Upgrading to Plamo 4.0

Plamo 4.0 is a major upgrade, it comes with new XFree server, gcc-3.3 insetad of 2.95, Gnome 2.10 and KDE3. If your computer is beefy enough, you most definitely want all the newer packages that come with it. Unfortunately, it does not support PC-98 officially, and there is no PC-98 kernel. However, there is a workaround you could use to run Plamo 4 on your PC-98.

1. Install Plamo 4.0 on your AT computer (Qemu is fine).
2. Prepare a Linux-partitioned hard drive on your PC-98, and install the bootloader. You can use Plamo/98 3.x for this.
3. Copy Plamo 4.0 (IBM PC/AT version) root (as in, /) directory to your PC-98 hard disk
4. Copy vmlinuz and lib/modules from Plamo 3.x into your Plamo 4.0 install
5. Adjust Grub settings to load 2.4.22 kernel from Plamo 3.x

alternatively, unpack Plamo 4.0 in subdirectory and chroot into it, see plamo4chroot for details.

That's it! In theory, you don't need to do anything else special. The XFree86 packaged with Plamo 4.x should support all the PC-98 graphics out of the box.

If XFree86 doesn't work for you, well, it might be worth trying XFree86 4.3 packages from Plamo 3.

The stock XFree86 4.4 from Plamo 4 works on PC-9821Nw150, providing that XFree 4.3 from Plamo 3.3 was started before. It doesn't correctly handle the keyboard input: Shift and Ctrl-Alt-Bksp aren't working. You can install previous version, it's enough to replace /usr/X11R6 and run ldconfig. It will add some problems with libraries (libpng.so.2) and missing files, but nothing serious.

#Why Plamo 4?

It has KDE3, KDE Office suite, GCC-3.3, Python 2.3 among other things that Plamo 3 doesn't have.

#Regarding Plamo 5 and newer versions

Check out plamo5_and_more for a somewhat time-consuming hack that can allow you to use Plamo 5, Debian 5 and maybe even newer systems on your PC-98.

#Busybox

Plamo 3.x is over 20 years old. It is missing lots of modern convenience, and even its vi feels a bit hostile. It's pretty cool that modern-ish Busybox is more user-friendly than old bash and vi!

I've tweaked Busybox configs a little bit so Busybox could be compiled under Plamo 4. The 1.10 version is statiscally linked and should work on Plamo 3.x as well. The 1.29 cannot be linked statically for some reason, and will need Plamo 4.

Busybox-1.10 is a bit older, and has mostly working network things. Busybox-1.29 is much newer, it offers more tools, but I had to disable many networkig and low-level Linux tools from the config because it refused to play nicely with Linux 2.4

You might want to have both in your system, or you might be satisfied with Busybox-1.10 alone. How to use:

1. Put busybox into your /bin
2. Add symlinks: ln -s /bin/busybox /usr/bin/diff, ln -s /bin/busybox /usr/bin/vi and so on
3. If needed, invoke with busybox sh

#Xblast

The 2.9.14 version from Sourceforge can be easily compiled if the devtools are isntalled. xmkmf and then make should do the trick. Here is the binary provided, it seems to work with the resources from 2.10 - but it might be worth finding the resources specfically for this version. I failed to compile version 2.10, it fails to find some important headers. Shrug.

#Make 4.0

Some programs require newer Make version to compile. Make 4.0 seems to be relatively well supported.

#Perl 5.10 (mini)

OpenSSL 3.x needs Perl 5.10 or newer; I am not ready to package one. However, it seems Perl 5.10 builds just fine on Plamo 4.x. If you just want to play with Perl 5.10 (despite Perl 5.8 available in the system), here is a pre-built binary.

#libressl

A modern cryptography library. Surprisingly portable, and unlike OpenSSL, doesn't need Perl 5.10+ A small patch was needed to compile.

#tinycurl 8.4.0 and libcurl 4.8.0

They're expecting libressl, of course. If you're struggling to start them, say ldd /path/to/curl and it will show you which libraries are missing. Bring them to your $PATH (e.g. change $PATH or move the libraries to /usr/lib). If the libraries are in PATH, but can't be found, run ldconfig first. They're coming without any root certificates, it's bring your own thing.

#Links -g

Text-mode web browser with graphics support. It works relatively well, but needs OpenSSL. It can connect to modern-day-cryptography HTTPS websites.

#Upgrading even further

Last known patchset for PC9800 support in kernel is linux98-2.5.67-bk9. linux98-2.5.66-bk12 is working okay with Plamo 4.02. It is possible to forward-patch to linux98-2.6.5 without much of a hassle. Pros/cons:

• brings missing support for trackpad on our PC-9821Nw150;
• breaks floppy drive support, and breaks it again;
• IDE gets lba48 support and makes things extremely complicated;
• dev_t work in 2.6.0-test breaks many things.