osvirtual.net: virtual images of operating systems

Origins and causes

In my free time, it is sometimes very pleasant for me to dig in some old operating system. Or relatively old, or just specific. Of course, it’s best to install these operating systems on a real computer (which I initially did), but gradually less time - and less desire to mess around with the old hardware or with another repartitioning of disks on the desktop with a parallel search for drivers for hardware that is not supported by the operating system. And at some point I had to switch to virtual machines.

The installation process, even on a standard virtual machine, is often nontrivial or just insanely long; its complexity and with the support of virtual iron. After some time, a certain number of operating system images have accumulated on the home computer, some of which are quite rare.

OSvirtual: from NextStep to aGNUla

Therefore, this collection - for myself and for those interested (probably for a few :) - posted online in the form of the OSvirtual site (there is also an English version , even if it was made according to the residual principle). The operating systems laid out here are either completely old operating systems , which can only be run as nostalgic toys (and which are not sold now, and are often freely available for downloading from the official site), or OS, which for some reason is interesting to me ( multimedia-oriented distributions of Linux, for example, or Linux 5-7 years old and older). A lot of modern mainstream Linux distributions, which are easily located on VMPlanet or Linhost, didn’t particularly interest me ...

All images are compressed 7z, they work mainly in free and cross-platform VMWare Player, part - in free Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 (OS / 2, for example, which VMWare does not officially support), part in more specialized emulators (DosBox, Mini vMac and etc.).
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Among the operating systems already laid out are OS / 2 4 warp, NextStep 3.3, SCO UnixWare, different old Windows, MacOS 7.0.1 & 7.5.3 , if possible everything is set to the maximum configuration. The collection, of course, is incomplete and will be expanded. If anyone wants to help with the content, please :)

What's next

While the site looks just like a set of images, gradually (if the hands reach) I will pick up / write and texts about the OS laid out. Although the resource is made just for the soul, I will be glad if it is useful to someone :)

UPD: thanks for the karma, moved to the blog "Operating Systems"