In XFree86 3.* there is a separate “server” for each type of interface: one for monochrome cards (who remembers Hercules?), one for simple VGA, one for SVGA, etc…
And VMware supplies a “server” for virtual machines!

I tried the XF86_VMware server on Slackware 4.0, together with the sample XF86Config file.
I just had to change the configuration for the gpm-repeater mouse, include the 800×600 and 1024×768 resolutions and it worked fine in a couple of minutes!

Here is a screenshot of the result, in 1024×768:

As you can see, Netscape now works fine, at least with the not-so-sofisticated sites.
I tried to open linuxquestions.org, but had no success. Simply too many java scripts for good old Netscape 4.51

For now, this VMware driver is just working in Slackware 4.0 No luck so far in Slackware 3.5, although it uses Xfree86 3.* as well.

At first I had no luck, as this version does not support the standard VMware network card (PCnet32) and also lacks support for IDE CDRom drives. The VMware emulated SCSI cards (BusLogic & LSI) were also not recognized.
So the only way would be to install from floppies, just like the old days.

Since I haven’t used my internal 3.5″ drive in years and didn’t feel like formatting 50+ disks, I first gave up.
But then I remembered that VMware also accepts disk-images for floppies, so I wrote a quick-and-dirty script to create all the needed images from the downloaded directories:

#!/bin/bash

for dsk in *[1-9]/ ; do
   length=${#dsk}
   dsk=${dsk:0:($length-1)}
   echo -n "$dsk..."
   cp disk_empty.img disk_$dsk.img
   mount -t msdos -o loop disk_$dsk.img /mnt/floppy
   cp $dsk/* /mnt/floppy/
   umount /mnt/floppy
   echo " [ok]"
done


It gives an error trying to create a disk image from the libc444 folder, but you can ignore that.

Installation was straight-forward and after a lot of virtual disk-swapping, I had my Slackware 1.1.2 installation working.

Here is a first screenshot (look at the kernel version!):

And here you can see how this version is really easy on your memory (less than 4M!) and hard disk:

Configuring X

Now I had to get X working as well…
X looks for a Xconfig file in /etc (for all users) or in your home directory if you need separate configurations per user.
A sample configuration file can be found in /var/X11/lib/X11 so I copied it to /etc and started experimenting.

VMware emulates a standard VGA adapter (no SVGA) so we are limited to 640×480.
I added this line near the end of Xconfig in the “ModeDB” for a standard VGA screen:
"640x480" 25 640 672 768 800 480 490 492 525
In the VGA16 section I changed the Virtual values to 640 480

So now I had a working X, but no mouse…
So, back to reading more man-pages, and I changed my mouse settings in Xconfig to:
ps2 "/dev/bmouseps2"
and X is working!

Here is another screenshot, showing the standard fvwm window manager:

As you can see, we have nine (!) virtual desktops here.

One thing I noticed with this 1.1.2 version, is that it is much slower than the 3.5 version. It also puts a big load on the processor of my host-machine, that goes to 99%. Running 3.5 has almost no effect, it’s really easy on the CPU.
This probably has something to do with the 0.99 kernel.

I had to configure X by editing XF86Config that’s stored in /etc in this version.
After some tweaking I got it to work with the basic “generic vga” driver, with a resolution of 640×480. It should work with higher resolutions, but I guess I need something better than vga for this.
If I succeed, I’ll post the secret here

For now I’m using the fvwm2 window manager.
As you can see, the system is still running fine, using only about 14M of memory.

I couldn’t get Netscape to work, as it tries to open www.netscape.com, which points to aol, which tries to start a load of Java scripts that Netscape can’t process…

To be continued…