Architectural Wizardry of the Mid-2000s, featuring Fedora Core 6

In the early-to-mid 2000s, Microsoft made a product for the Mac (and Windows) called Virtual PC. Aside from being fairly early for the days of home virtualization, the Windows version is relatively unremarkable. The Mac version, however, is the inspiration for this post’s title, as it allows the virtualization of x86 Intel binaries on PowerPC Macs, a process involving real-time binary translation of low-level hardware instructions between architectures of vastly differing design philosophies (RISC vs CISC, for example). If that isn’t some serious wizardry, I must have awoken today to an alternate reality.

Nevertheless I loaded up my copy of Microsoft Virtual PC for Mac 7.0.2 from 2005 and noticed an unexpected option for a guest operating system: Linux. Attempting to install a modern distribution yields no love as VirtualPC doesn’t support DVD images (plus Fedora 24 wouldn’t exactly be fair to my decade-old PowerBook). Instead, I opted for the equally ancient Fedora Core 6, released in 2006, and still available from Fedora’s archive.

Attempting to install in graphical mode resulted in a black screen, so I opted for the text installer. I chose to install the standard distribution, which includes GNOME 2.16 as well as the office and productivity tools, and the GNOME development tools (maybe they’ll come in handy if I ever decide to pick up the GNOME 2 Developer Guide I bought a while back).

Along the way, I noticed a couple features that aren’t present in the modern installer. For example, one section that asks for extra kernel options; another section offers to set up a bootloader password in GRUB. Also of note was that the Fedora Core 6 installer set up an LVM scheme by default. I certainly didn’t expect that from a distribution from the days when Ubuntu looked reminiscent of a construction site with all its white and orange.

What isn’t the same is the init system. Fedora Core 6 (and its derivative, RHEL 5) uses sysvinit. I’d almost forgotten how slow boot times are when every service is started sequentially, rather than all at once according to their dependencies (which is how today’s systemd works).

When the system finally came up, I received (unsurprisingly) a black screen, followed by a garbled mess. Thanks to a Debian How-To, I found the solution was to change the color depth in /etc/X11/xorg.conf to 16-bit. Booting with `vga=794` in the kernel line and directing X.org to use the fbdrv driver as the debian article suggested gave me 1280×1024. It’s not the PowerBook’s native 1680×1050, but it’s close enough to outweigh my desire for higher resolutions in favor of just not wanting to tempt X any further.

At this point it became clear that my PowerBook just doesn’t have the grunt to translate binary instructions in real-time all the while putting up with 1280×1024 worth of pure, unadulterated, Linux from 2006. It is only a late 2005 model, after all.

Still, I can’t say I’m disappointed with my success so far. I never anticipated I’d get X started, let alone have it usable (if laggy) in 1024×768. Perhaps I’ll experiment with Fedora Core 6 on more powerful hardware in the future, but for now, I declare this witch trial closed.