Mastodawn

Nina Kalinina Sep 26, 2025

What do we have here? NEC PC-9821 laptop (non-PC compatible from Japan that can run Windows and a special MS-DOS version), running a rare variety of Linux called Plamo Linux/98. Linux 2.4.22, XFree86 4.3, and some Slackware compatibility. More screenshots - but from the screencapture device - will follow 🧵

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Nina Kalinina Sep 26, 2025

Plamo Linux comes with an unusual window manager that is definitely not copied from Windows 9x, and doesn't have any icons from Windows 3.x. Geroware Qvwm is all animated, and thus fairly slow on a non-accelerated video.

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Nina Kalinina Sep 26, 2025

You need to watch the video to appreciate how restless this window manager is! I don't think it's common for Japanese computing, by the way, just feels very hacker-y. "Hey I made these icons animated for fun! Also there's Oneko!"

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Nina Kalinina Sep 26, 2025

"Netscape" button opens Wazilla - Japanese flavour of Mozilla. It can sort of open my home page, and Google.co.jp still works in it. Of course it can show Japanese characters!

The staff with kana "Mo" on the logo hints that 和ジラ might be a multi-level pun. Gecko/20030829 hints at the build date.

Of course, no modern cryptography.

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Nina Kalinina Sep 26, 2025

Standard apps are not too strange. Emacs has a doctor that can make you feel better!

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Nina Kalinina Sep 26, 2025

There are some games on the CD; Contrib CD has NScripter port so you could play Higurashi on Linux.

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Nina Kalinina Sep 26, 2025

I want to install GNOME, which is done with a lovely script called 00INSTALL.sh. It reported that I miss a few packages.

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Nina Kalinina Sep 26, 2025

It is a Japanese computer, so it allows input in Japanese. Pressing XFER will enable Canna (or something? But I only have Canna installed) that allows entering Japanese phonetically, and convert to kanji as needed. That's how you get こんにちは　converted to 今日は!

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Nina Kalinina Sep 26, 2025

The dependencies were installed, time to try the GNOME install script again! Each package is installed by feeding tgz to the `installpkg` tool, by the way - there's no centralised package manager, or I didn't find it (I did not read the fm, and I should have)

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Nina Kalinina Sep 26, 2025

oi oi! It's ИIN o'clock?!

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Nina Kalinina Sep 26, 2025

I remind you, this is a Pentium MMX computer with 64MB of RAM. All and all, it works pretty fast. I wonder if Gnome 2 will work OK on it or not. It sure takes a lot of time to install.