NoMad Linux from 1997

This distro used an interesting package management system called encap.

The nomadlinux.com site and their FTP are actually still functional.

Everything for a package is contained within its own directory and then files are symlinked into the usual places. In this version you run encap after installing something to populate the symlinks automatically. It doesn't have epkg.

Packages are very simple, you just have to get the files into the right place. I don't think this version had any post install scripts or much in the way of metadata.

In this case I downloaded the xgames.tgz package from Slackware, extracted the files to /usr/local/encap/xgames-1.0 and then ran encap. To remove it just delete the xgames-1.0 directory and re-run encap.

Tried to create a wallpaper in GIMP 1.0.0 using the logo from the site. A lot of functions are very slow or cause hangs. I couldn't get it to save as anything but .xcf until I flattened the image, it would just hang. After getting it to save xsetroot tells me "bad bitmap format" if I try to set it.

It comes with a Quake 1 package, but it refuses to run after adding the pak files. Tried 3 different binaries and both known pak0 files. It won't run the SVGAlib squake from console either.

It has Lincity, the open source SimCity clone. It also has X-Mame, complete with ROMs. It has Burger Time, Centipede and PacMan.

There is also the classic XBill where you stop Bill from installing the Wingdows virus.

It came with a Motif GUI build of Vim, but didn't have the Motif libraries as they weren't free. Since vim and gvim are the same binary it wouldn't even start the terminal version without those libraries. I suspect they were Emacs users, since it was part of the default install.

Unfortunately NoMad 2.0 was never finished. This is as close to functional as I could manage after a bit of manual installation. It has the epkg manager that can populate symlinks for one package at a time rather than just batch processing all of them every time. It can also support having multiple versions of the same package.

They did intend to have Gnome 1.0, but a lot was left to be done.

Further evidence of their favoritism for XEmacs, it made it into 2.0, but not vi or vim.