As I have some days off, I have time to play with rather historic things - thanks to Sun's VirtualBox application. In the last days I created a little Microsoft OS zoo on my Notebook:
As a side effect, I have got Firefox 2.0.0.20 working on Windows 95, even if the installer does not like it.
- a small Linux machine acting as a router between real network and a virtual one
- a windows for workgroups 3.11 box including network, sound and internet explorer 3 (!) (9 diskettes)
- a windows 95a box including 16,7 million colour graphics and Firefox 2.0.0.20 (!) (15 diskettes)
- a windows 98 box including 16,7 million colour graphics (a CD)
- a windows NT 3.51 box (a CD)
- an OpenSolaris 2008.11 box to test Samba interaction :)
As a side effect, I have got Firefox 2.0.0.20 working on Windows 95, even if the installer does not like it.
It will break with the message "Insufficient disk storage", which is nonsense.
To install Firefox 2 on Windows 95, you'll have to do:
To install Firefox 2 on Windows 95, you'll have to do:
- Add RAM to your machine. 64 MB is minimum otherwise you'll hear constant hard disk trashing sound.
- Install Microsoft DCOM for Windows 95:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=D7A4DE78-81A9-4DB7-BEB6-84FF99342172&displaylang=en - Start the .exe, click on "Extract". It will extract the files into \windows\temp\x86.
- Start the file "DCom95.EXE" in this directory.
- After installation, reboot.
- Start Firefox 2.0.0.20 installer, wait until files have been extracted and the Setup Welcome screen appears, don't stop the installer, leave it in this state.
- Look into \windows\temp, there will be two directories with cryptical names. In one of these directories, you will see a "localized" and a "nonlocalized" directory. Copy ALL of the files and directories in this cryptically named directory to c:\program files\mozilla.
- Move all directories and files in \program files\mozilla\localized to \program files\mozilla\nonlocalized
- Rename \program files\mozilla\nonlocalized to c:\program files\mozilla\firefox
- Start \program files\mozilla\firefox\firefox.exe
- Wait some minutes, until Firefox has finished creating all needed directories (which normally the installer does)
- When the Firefox main screen appears, all things went well. You're ready. Create program menu entries and - as you wish - a shortcut icon on the desktop. The icon format is not compatible to windows95 so you'll only have a bad 16 colour-icon, but that is cosmetical.
It's possible to get high-color icons on Windows 95 by either installing the Microsoft Plus! pack, or the following program whose only purpose is to add high-color icons (use at your own risk, of course, scan for viruses, make a VM snapshot, etc): http://philipjfry.ath.cx/win95-icons-color.zip
Installing
- Microsoft Plus! Pack
- Internet Explorer 4
- Microsoft Active Desktop
will result in a beast acting like Windows 98... For many people Windows 98 only was a facelift to windows 95...
Java won't run, it needs WININET.DLL and URLMON.DLL - Internet Explorer!
Thank you!!!!!!!!!!!! ive been looking for a way to install ff 2 of nt 3.51 for a while- it has same no disk space error that w 95 has. This worked perfectly- only had to get oleaut32.dll from dcom95 update and put it in the winnt/system32 and restart. Also had to delete nssearchservice.js and nssafebrowsingapplication.js in the components directory of installation. I could have used the zip builds but for some reason, they would show up as having all short 8.3 file names and be unusable- unless i had the time to rename everything.
Firefox in Win95 ?
Does that mean that we could in principle run a contemporary os as host and set a 64MB memory allocation for old office applications ? Could the product developers who churn the modern ones set up slider to set their consumption of memory and cpu within reasonable bounds?
I had a go at installing Win98 from a spare old installer CD and got stuck at unrecognized graphics drivers. Not much chance there for getting my favourite old games running again. Ended up fixing that with XP home upgrade edition, which seems to have prohibited many Win95 games.
Windows 95 and 98 will run in Oracle VirtualBox, but the scheduler performance from Win95/98 is not the best.
And I never got more than 256 colours to work.
But yes, with VirtualBox you may use your old OSes :-)