What if you have a PC-98 machine, and you want to run Linux on it, as you do? I mean, CP/M, OS/2, or Windows (2000 and older) might not cut it for you, after all. Well, it turns out that yes, you can run Linux on PC-98 hardware, and thanks to a bunch of work by Nina Kalinina – yes, the same person from a few days ago – there’s now more information gathered in a single place to get you started.
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.
↫ Plamo98 goodies
The repository details “upgrading” – it’s a bit more involved than plain upgrading, but it’s not hard – Plamo Linux from 3.x to 4, which gives you access to a bunch of things you might want, like GCC 3.3 over 2.95, KDE 3.x, Python 2.3, and more. There’s also custom BusyBox config files, a newer version of make, and a few other goodies and tools you might want to have. Once it’s all set and done, you can Linux like it’s 2003 on your PC-98.
The number of people to whom this is relevant must be extraorinarily small, but at some point, someone is going to want to do this, only to find this repository of existing work. We’ve all been there.
Ukraine, US planning major arms deals, Zelensky says