Installing an old version

Marionnet versions 0.90, 0.94 and 0.98 can still be installed, with the kernels and guest systems of their time. You only need them to get an old environment back exactly. The current version already opens old projects: when a project names a kernel or a guest distribution that no longer exists, it substitutes its successor. The Debian lenny, Mandriva and pinocchio distributions, for instance, now exist only in the 0.90 series.

These versions are no longer maintained, and installing them has not been tried on the distributions of 2026. It builds, from source, tools that are ten or fifteen years old (OCaml 3.11 and 3.12 for the 0.90 and 0.94 series). For ordinary use, install the current version.

The marionnet_from_scratch script

It downloads, compiles and installs a version of Marionnet and its dependencies, then the kernels and guest systems of its series. Everything it downloads from this site is stored, by series, under /download/marionnet_from_scratch/: the archive of Marionnet and of its dependencies (mirror/), the kernels, the images.

The script comes in two versions, each for its own series.

Using it

For the 0.98 series, the last one before the current version, with script 0.98.3:

chmod +x marionnet_from_scratch
mkdir -p "$HOME/marionnet-0.98"
./marionnet_from_scratch -p "$HOME/marionnet-0.98"

Script 0.94.2 is used the same way; it installs the 0.94 series by default, and the 0.90 series with -s 0.90.x.

The script asks for the sudo password and offers to install the missing Debian packages: it works on a Debian-like distribution only, since it installs them with apt. The -p option chooses the installation directory. The default is /usr/local, where the precompiled archive of the current version is also installed, so give it a separate directory instead. The -F option skips downloading the large guest images, and --help lists the other options.