Posts

Posted on

Installing Windows 95 on VirtualBox on MacOS

Looking through a stack of CDs and DVDs on the shelf on my desk, amongst many other things I still have install CDs for Windows 95 and Windows 98. I wondered (as you do, well, maybe not everyone does) what it would be like to install 95 again from scratch so created a new VM in VirtualBox and off I went. If you’ve come across any of my posts before you might remember I’ve installed all sorts of OSes under VirtualBox before, because, well why not? OS/2 and AROS probably the most interesting.

The steps in this blog are very useful for a guide. Windows 95 install CDs were apparently not bootable, and I don’t remember having boot floppies. If I did I probably don’t have them anymore. I download a Windows 95 boot disk floppy .img from here, and attached it to the floppy drive in the VirtualBox config for this machine.

After booting to an a: prompt, attempted ‘format c:’ but got a ‘invalid drive specification’ error. Seems I needed to partition my blank attached virtual disk first, so from the a: prompt, ran fdisk:

entered ‘y’ for large disk support, and then selected option 1 for ‘Create a DOS partition’ and then ‘Create Primary DOS partition’. Next, formated it:

format c:

then change to R: (the attached CD Drive)

and then

setup

Next, Windows 95 setup was telling me that my newly created and formatted disk was reporting an incorrect size, so started a Scandisk:

After this completed it still gave the same error, so I skipped this step:

Unfortunately at this point the install fails, and says the issue must be fixed before it will continue.

Possibly my 20GB attached virtual disk is not supported (too large), so reading around, it looks like a 2GB install disk is a supported size, so I was about to delete the 20GB disk and started again, but quitting the Scandisk before it completes with an error puts you back in the installer, and off it goes:

Some of the info screens during the install are rather interesting, promoting Window 95’s ‘high performance’:

“High-quality multimedia performance will dazzle you” – who wrote this stuff?

Who remembers dial-up MSN?

And then it fails ‘insufficient memory’ when booting up which is odd because I set the VM up with 1GB:

From post here and others, this seems this might be to do with having too much RAM configured for the VM, and in particular 1GB or more.

I decreased it to 512MB, then got:

This error on booting Windows 95 under VirtualBox seems related to VT-x virtualization. I can’t find the option to turn off VT-x support on my VirtualBox install, and other posts seem like this is to do with host CPUs faster than 2.1GHz, and my Mac Pro has dual 2.8 Xeons. Maybe this is as far as I’m going to get with 95. Next up, trying 98 :-0

Posted on

Installing Docker in an AWS EC2 instance

AWS offers their own EC2 Container Service (ECS) which simplifies deploying Docker containers to EC2 instances (and clusters of instances) and management of your containers. If you want to do-it-yourself though, you can easily install docker yourself in your own instance.

For example, in an Ubuntu EC2 instance,

sudo apt-get install docker.io

Start the docker service with:

sudo service docker start

If you want to manage you own Docker install on EC2, AWS have a guide walking you what you need to know – for further details see here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/docker-basics.html

(Latest Ubuntu apt packages are docker-ce and docker-ee – see the Docker docs here for more info)

Posted on

Creating an AWS EC2 instance with a Public IP

The first couple of times you create a new EC2 instance on AWS this is an easy option to miss, and it defaults to private IP only.

If you want to create an EC2 instance with a public IP, when you create your instance from the dashboard ensure this option is set to ‘Enable’ :

Posted on

When computers had lights, buttons, switches and miles of cabling (@ the Computer History Museum)

Enjoyed a fascinating visit to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View today for the Vintage Computer Festival West. There was plenty to see, and plenty of old computers to check out on show in the festival exhibit.

Downstairs in the main museum, there is an incredible display of anything and everything to do with computer history, all the way from mechanical counting devices, all the way through to current technology.

I find the human interface design of some of these old systems particular fascinating. You just don’t see current technology with such a bewildering array of lights, buttons and switches anymore, and the miles of cabling wiring these machines together is completely insane. Here’s a few pics from my visit:

Proudly powered by WordPress