Dettux, Linux From Hell

[Trevoke]

Okay, so, after somebody (I forget. Gore, maybe?) mentioned Dettux in a thread about Gentoo, I decided to give it a go.
http://www.dettus.net/dettuxx/

First of all, vmware (or, I guess, a VM of your choice) helps because you don't actually need to use 8 floppies; you can virtually switch 'em around. So, I got the ... Let's say "basic distribution" installed. That's after the eight floppies.
I had to fight to get LILO to work, but that's probably due to my lack of knowledge of LILO (I can recopy files later if needed by someone here). My drive looks like this:

/dev/hda1 : /boot (30 megs or so)
/dev/hda2 : swap (big woop, it's not being used, heh)
/dev/hda3 : / (the rest, 4 gigs or so)

I have unsuccessfully tried to connect to the outside world, although I have been able to connect to the intranet (caveat emptor).
Thankfully, I guess, as I use Gentoo, I have a lot of source tarballs.
Unfortunately, the last update for Dettux was in 2002 or so, and as you are all aware, Linux moves fast. So, what I have on my machine just doesn't compile! And so, started the hunt for older stuff, in an attempt to, eventually, move to an up-to-date distribution...

Well, this is what I have compiled so far, in that order.

Aaaand at this point I'm kinda stuck, looking for an old enough version of coreutils that it'll compile. Oldest I have is 5.0 ... (right after gettext. I'm moving forward though)

slang-1.4.9
nasm-0.98.39
m4-1.4
autoconf-2.50
gawk-3.0.4
readline-4.1
libtool-1.3.5
gettext-0.10.40
ncurses-1.9.9e



So, I propose that this thread be a work-thread, where everyone who is toying with Dettux participate and help each other in figuring it out. ... Anybody interested, or am I alone in this foray into masochism?

[gore]

You're not in Gentoo land anymore wuss.

[Trevoke]

Found something else, another step backwards :
Previously these utilities were offered as three individual sets of GNU utilities, fileutils, shellutils, and textutils. Those three have been combined into a single set of utilities called the coreutils.

And you're right, I'm not in Gentoo land. Duh. What are you saying, no one's gonna help? Have you even installed Dettux? Do you have a working Dettux distribution? Do you *use it* ? What exactly is your point? Do you have particular interests in the distribution remaining obscure and no walkthrough being offered?
Hey, I have tremendous respect for you, but until you walk this walk, shut up, please.

[gore]

And to think I was going to help you *Sigh*.... Anyway, to help a bit anyway, The FTP for Gnu and Tux may have some of the software you're asking about

[Trevoke]

The GNU ftp is where I've been fishing for the past few days. I was unaware of the other one, though. Thanks.

[gore]

I do what I can I may have some more let me check.

[Trevoke]

Sweet. I'd give you antipoints but I need to spread them around, apparently.. I really need to become more active on the forums.

[edit : okay, we can add ncurses-1.9.9e to the list...]
ftp://ftp.tux.org/people/macgyver/linux/ncurses/
INSTALLATION:

Assuming that the binary tar file is in /, execute the following as root:

cd /
rm -f /usr/include/ncurses
rm -f /usr/include/ncurses.h /usr/include/curses.h
rm -f /usr/lib/libcurses* /usr/lib/libmenu* /usr/lib/libpanel*
rm -f /usr/lib/libncurses* /lib/libncurses*
rm -f /usr/lib/libform*
rm -rf /usr/lib/terminfo
tar xvfz ncurses-1.9.9e.bin.tar.gz
ldconfig

[gore]

Don't worry about APs.

going to check my FTP stuff in a bit to see if I have more.

[Trevoke]

A word of warning not to install ncurses-1.99 for now (or at least not to follow the full instructions and remove the libcurses and libncurses), because I killed libncurses.so.4 and so I'm left without ftp and less, whoo-hoo!

[Trevoke]

The list of installed software now has this added to the end of it (blame it on my impossibility to edit a message 1440+ minutes after posting!):

autoconf-2.52
yacc-1.9.1
textutils-2.0
bison-1.30
patch-2.5.9
grep-2.5.1
which-2.16
wget 1.9.1
sed-4.1.4

Okay, so with that, it's a compilation of gcc-2.95.3 and textutils-2.0 so I'm done with the doc! hah.. Now I'm on my own. Anything added after textutils has been edited to be added inside this post while I can.