All entries for Thursday 03 September 2009

Pine used to be considered a fancy way to read your email

The University's off campus homepage viewed in Mosaic. Because someone recently said to me in jest 'go run Mosaic then'.

(Click for larger)

Despite looking nothing at all like it does when viewed in a modern web browser, the page is perfectly coherent and usable. Though I've scrolled down to hide the CSS that gets displayed at the top of this and every other webpage I've tried. I guess people don't bother to test their sites against browsers for which development ceased over a decade ago.

If you're the sort of person who feels the desire to give this a go then this is how I got it running:

• Take one Linux machine, preferably one you don't care if you screw it up. I used a virtual machine with the latest Ubuntu installed that I had already.
• Grab a copy of Mosaic ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Mosaic/Unix/binaries/2.7b/Mosaic-linux-static-2.7b5.gz unpack it and make it executable.
  
• Grab http://www.jwz.org/hacks/netscape-linux-libs.tar.gz and unpack it in /  (See, this is why I used a virtual machine I don't care about.)
• $ modprobe binfmt_aout
• Install the Net::Server::Fork perl module. In Ubuntu you want the libnet-server-perl package. In openSUSE it looks like the relevant package is perl-Net-Server.
• If you don't have a group called nobody, which Ubuntu doesn't, create one. I gave it gid 65533 because that's what openSUSE uses.
• Grab http://www.jwz.org/hacks/http10proxy.pl which serves as a proxy to translate the HTTP/1.0 that Mosaic speaks in to HTTP/1.1. Run it. Without it you can't access any websites with Mosaic. (I found it refused to run complaining there was no group called nobody hence why I created that group.)
• Run the Mosaic executable. Select File > Proxy List and add a proxy. Scheme is http, address is localhost, port is 8228.
  
• Visit websites!
  

This method is condensed from http://jwz.livejournal.com/856745.html which has instructions for other operating systems besides Linux.

I've found the delete and backspace keys don't work in Mosaic. I have to enter urls using File > Open URL then type without making any mistakes. There may well be a way to get backspace/delete working but I've not tried.

Having first got online during Eternal September I can just about remember when Mosaic (and usenet) was relevant, though I didn't use it much as my 'net access at the time was mostly limited to *nix systems used via telnet or kermit

Mike Willis : 03 Sep 2009 22:03 |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem