This month I found physical CDs of Red Flag Linux 2.0 and 3.0 on Chinese marketplaces (lost media cds, I posted about them earlier and I think many people already saw it). This time I went further and want to properly write everything about them

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Some notes on both versions:

Version 3.0 feels more like a server build than a desktop, most applications don't work, there's only 1 game (which corrupts the UI when launched) and Paint is broken

Version 2.0 is extremely difficult to install and boot, it took me around 1.5-2 hours to get it running and fix all errors. Without a tutorial it's going to be very painful. That's also why I didn't bother porting it to Apple TV. Its the more complete system by far, all games work (Snake, Billiards, PacMan, Tetris and more), there's a file manager, text editor, support for any screen resolution, and basically everything you'd expect from a desktop (everything that 3.0 is missing)

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I may dig deeper into both systems in the future, but one thing I can already confirm that both versions idle at around 40 MB of RAM

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The discs I have differ slightly from the ones preserved on archive.org, mine are a bit newer builds. But that felt like a boring answer so I ported version 3.0 to apple tv gen 1

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This method should now work for almost any early Linux distro built on kernel ~2.4.7 running on Apple TV hardware (e.g. old builds of Red Hat 32-bit)

This took me around 10-15 hours

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What was required:

Hybrid MBR to bridge the gap between GPT (Apple TV) and MBR-only Linux 2.4.7

Direct kernel hex patching at binary offset 0x1FC to fix hardcoded root partition paths

x86 assembly utilities to force IRQ 10 assignment for the ICH7M USB controller, since 2001-2002 drivers had no knowledge of its existence (I don't know assembly so Claude Sonnet was my copilot here)

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Because the utilities are already baked into the image you can swap in your own ISO, patch IRQ = 10 and older Linux distros should boot fine.

Both original ISOs (~1 GB each) + the Apple TV image (~5 GB) and an automated bash installer script are available for download on my preservation page: