S.u.S.E. 4.4.1 can still be installed using a virtual machine (KVM/QEMU). Thanks to very old standard technologies like ‘PS/2’ and ‘VGA’ even the graphical desktop can be configured. The installation was quite complicated, but there was a manual containing over 500 pages of help. Installation requirements were 8MB of RAM for text based operations and 12MB for the X-Window system.
The CDROM was not bootable, you had to use a floppy boot disk.YAST was used for installation and configuration:
Linux already supported a lot of hardware:
The graphical desktop had to be started using the command line with ‘startx’.
Conclusions
The graphical interface has not changed that much. Vim and the Midnight Commander (mc) were already preinstalled.