[CentOS] Need a bit of 'archeocomputing' help on CentOS 7.

Warren Young warren at etr-usa.com
Mon Apr 24 14:55:41 UTC 2017


On Apr 21, 2017, at 10:11 AM, Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu> wrote:
> 
> 1.) Run Red Hat Linux 5.2 (or similar vintage) on KVM on CentOS 7;

For what it’s worth, I couldn’t get it working under a modern flavor of VMware, either.  I find that telling because VMware tends to have the best driver support of all the VM systems, if only because it’s been around the longest.

Unfortunately, current VMware appears to have dropped Linux 2.0 support entirely, along with other contemporaneous things.  For instance, even the “legacy Linux” version of its VMware Tools package contains Perl scripts that are written with the assumption that they’re running on at least Perl 5.8, which is contemporaneous with RHL 7.3 and kernel 2.4.18.

I spent some time trying to backport those scripts to the Perl 5.004 that ships with RHL 5.2, but gave up after making over a dozen changes with no obvious end in sight.

The way I see it, your solution involving CentOS 2.1 and the libc5 compatibility libraries just bought you the last upgrade to your software that you are likely to pull off without heroic efforts.  I advise you to use CentOS 7’s remaining supported lifetime to get off this old software somehow.

You say there is no open source alternative, yet clearly the software was useful to at least you, and probably others, given that it appears to be commercial software.  It might be prudent to sponsor the development of an open source replacement system.

> e1000 drivers are not likely available (I couldn't find any).

That series of adapters didn’t get Linux support until about 2 years after RHL 5 shipped, according to the sources:

    http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/drivers/net/ethernet/intel/e1000/e1000_main.c

That would make the e1000 driver about ~3 years too late for you.


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