Nathan's KB - comp

8-inch-chinese-laptop

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-05-02T07:26:01+00:00

8" Chinese Laptop

A tiny 8“ Intel-based laptop from China that comes in a box with no description and can be bought for very cheap on Amazon and AliExpress. It's the pinnacle of modern computing, the successor to the VAIO P-series, the closest thing that we can have to a modern HPC.

Fixing the keyboard

Upon closer inspection you will notice that, due to it's tiny size, the keyboard layout is absolutely insane. Not only that, but some decisions regarding the button placement are absolutely maddening. To fix these issues under X11, the following can be added to the ~/.xmodmap file:

clear lock
keycode 66 = Tab
keycode 23 = Caps_Lock
keycode 22 = Delete
keycode 119 = BackSpace

If you're on Wayland, use Input Remapper to easily remap the keys listed above.

Fixing rotated console

Upon first boot you will notice that the boot logs are rotated to the vertical position, since the firmware of this laptop is most likely based on a tablet form-factor. This makes no sense, so change the following in the /etc/defaults/grub to make the boot console landscape:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="fbcon=rotate:1"

Don't forget to run update-grub for the changes to actually take effect.

macos

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2024-07-17T19:31:38+00:00

Mac OS X

A collection of things I tend to run into when working with Mac OS X, or macOS as Apple likes to call it these days.

MacPorts

MacPorts is by far the most important thing you should have installed on any Mac, be it brand new or PowerPC-based. It's the first bit of software that will always get installed whenever Mac OS X boots up for the first time. It's an impressive package manager for macOS that allows you to conveniently install packages into your system as in any BSD or Linux distribution.

gcc cannot be built

Having to build clang or gcc is almost unavoidable if you're running MacPorts, but I've recently come across an issue on some of my systems that whenever I got to perform a port upgrade outdated the upgrade process is halted due to an issue while building gcc:

Error: gcc7 cannot be built while libunwind-headers is active.
Error: Please forcibly deactivate libunwind-headers, e.g. by running:
Error:
Error:     sudo port -f deactivate libunwind-headers
Error:
Error: Then try again. You can reactivate libunwind-headers again later.
Error: Failed to configure gcc7: libunwind-headers is active

This is a known issue and is related to some quirks when initially setting up the system. In order to get past this without breaking your system simply uninstall the libunwind-headers package and resume the last operation.

Version specific

Some quirks that are only important if you are running a specific version of the operating system or a specific architecture.

OS X 10.5 Leopard

The proper version of Mac OS X to run if you have a G5 Mac. It can run on G4s, but it's not suited for it, although Sorbet Leopard is now an option.

InterWebPPC

Since the demise of TenFourFox the InterWebPPC project was created, aiming to continue the work of the amazing TenFourFox effort. It's the browser of choice for having an “enjoyable” experience, although it's impossible to have an enjoyable experience in the modern web, even if you're using the latest version of Chrome. Don't forget to install NoScript to keep the CPU usage low.

iTerm color profiles

Having a proper terminal is a must for me. The terminal that comes with Mac OS X, to this day, is useless, so iTerm comes to the rescue. The problem is that every cool theme out there (specially my favorite Tomorrow Night) is made for newer versions of iTerm2, not the version we have available for Leopard. In order to convert the new color profiles to use in the old version I've created a Perl script:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
 
### fix-itermcolors.pl
### Converts an iTerm2 color profile made for newer versions of iTerm to work
### in iTerm2 version 2.0 for OS X Leopard.
###
### Author: Nathan Campos <nathan@innoveworkshop.com>
 
use strict;
use warnings;
use autodie;
 
# Slurps the file.
sub slurp {
	my ($fname) = @_;
 
	open my $fh, '<', $fname;
	local $/ = undef;
	my $data = <$fh>;
	close $fh;
 
	return $data;
}
 
# Read the iTerm color profile.
my $plist = slurp($ARGV[0]);
 
# Strip out invalid keys.
$plist =~ s/\s+<key>Alpha Component<\/key>[^\/]+.+//g;
$plist =~ s/\s+<key>Color Space<\/key>[^\/]+.+//g;
 
# Remove invalid dictionaries.
$plist =~ s/\s+<key>Badge Color<\/key>((?!<\/dict>)[\s\S])*<\/dict>\s?//gs;
$plist =~ s/\s+<key>Cursor Guide Color<\/key>((?!<\/dict>)[\s\S])*<\/dict>\s?//gs;
$plist =~ s/\s+<key>Link Color<\/key>((?!<\/dict>)[\s\S])*<\/dict>\s?//gs;
$plist =~ s/\s+<key>Tab Color<\/key>((?!<\/dict>)[\s\S])*<\/dict>\s?//gs;
 
# Print it out.
print $plist;

To use this script, for example to convert the awesome Nord color profile:

./fix-itermcolors.pl Downloads/Nord.itermcolors > Nord.itermcolor

Now you should have a color profile ready to import into iTerm.

PowerPC

The good old days of Apple, when things ran hot, felt like bricks, and were amazingly unique. This is the best era of Apple if you are looking to have some fun with computers while feeling quirky.

Installing vim

Vim is my preferred text editor. It's even packaged in MacPorts, although the version that is packaged there is way too new and requires Grand Central Dispatch. If you try to install it you'll get the following error when building:

:info:build /opt/local/bin/gcc-apple-4.2 -std=gnu99 -c -I. -Iproto -DHAVE_CONFIG
_H   -I/opt/local/include -DMACOS_X -DMACOS_X_DARWIN  -pipe -Os -arch ppc -D_REE
NTRANT -U_FORTIFY_SOURCE -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=1        -o objects/alloc.o alloc.c
:info:build In file included from vim.h:283,
:info:build                  from alloc.c:14:
:info:build os_mac.h:273:32: error: dispatch/dispatch.h: No such file or directo
ry
:info:build In file included from vim.h:283,
:info:build                  from alloc.c:14:
:info:build os_mac.h:295: error: expected specifier-qualifier-list before 'dispa
tch_queue_t'
:info:build In file included from vim.h:2266,
:info:build                  from alloc.c:14:
:info:build proto.h:125: warning: 'cold' attribute directive ignored
:info:build proto.h:132: warning: 'cold' attribute directive ignored
:info:build proto.h:135: warning: 'cold' attribute directive ignored
:info:build make[1]: *** [objects/alloc.o] Error 1

In order to install vim we'll need to fetch the source code and compile it manually. Ensure that you have updated the openssh, openssl, and git packages from MacPorts (it takes a very long time to compile the GNU toolchain on PowerPC, but it's worth it), you'll need them to fetch the source from vim's GitHub repository. The latest version I was able to compile was 7.4.2367:

git clone --depth 1 --branch v7.4.2367 https://github.com/vim/vim.git
cd vim
./configure \
	--disable-gui \
	--without-x \
	--without-local-dir \
	--disable-gpm \
	--with-tlib=ncurses \
	--enable-multibyte \
	--enable-fail-if-missing \
	--with-compiledby="Innove Workshop" \
	--with-features=huge
 
make
sudo make install

Now you should have a quite modern version of vim to use on your PowerPC workstation.

setup-sbs2011

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2025-03-02T12:59:55+00:00

Setting up Microsoft Small Business Server 2011 in 2025

This is a guide to everyone that wants to experience the best, and most complete, operating system and software ever produced to run a small business. I truly believe this, SBS 2011 as is was usually called online, is the best OS for a small business or homelab, it's sad that Microsoft killed it in its next iteration (no Exchange, no bueno).

Prerequisites

A couple of things that you should keep in mind before you go down this journey or that you probably need to keep in mind while you're in this amazing adventure through the golden age of server operating systems.

Acquiring the Install Media

Microsoft supported Small Business Server 2011 for 10 years, meaning it only recently went out-of-support, so you may still encounter it in the wild (I was still administering one for a client until 2024), this doesn't mean you can't treat it as abandonware, since at this point Microsoft hasn't sold it for many years and they won't supply any updates to it, no matter how severe of a security flaw is found, all of this to say that it's not a problem if you want to use it for educational purposes.

The install media has been uploaded to the Internet Archive and can be legally downloaded from there, or if you need a faster download in 2025 Microsoft still hosts the direct link to the ISO.

For the activation you can purchase a secondhand license from eBay or use Daz Loader v2.2.2. If you go down the not-so-legitimate route check the SHA-1 of the files you download from the internet against this one: 0efc35935957c25193bbe9a83ab6caa25a487ada.

Virtual machines

You're most likely to install this into a virtual machine, which means you will also be installing the appropriate hypervisor guest tools. It's important to note that the version of Server 2008 R2 that comes in the install media of SBS 2011 is the original RTM release of 2008 R2, so most likely any VM guest tools that you try to install will fail, as they expect a newer system, so you should first update to SP1 and install all the basic cumulative updates before you install any guest tools.

Post-Installation

After you've installed your brand new copy of this glorious server operating system a couple of tasks have to be taken before we can start playing around with everything else.

Time Servers

For some reason SBS 2011 doesn't get its time from an NTP time server, so we have to set this up manually. You should choose a server pool that's close to your geographic region. In this example I'll use pt.pool.ntp.org to use Portugal time servers. Open an elevated command prompt and execute the following commands to setup network time synchronization:

w32tm /config /manualpeerlist:pt.pool.ntp.org /syncfromflags:manual /reliable:yes /update
w32tm /resync /force

Installing Modern Root Certificates

To properly import the certificate open the mmc Console and add a Certificates snap-in. When asked who will the snap-in will manage the certificates for select Computer account and in the next screen select Local computer. No you should have a system level Certificate management console that will expose the certificate to all users in the server.

With the proper management console, proceed to import the certificates to the appropriate locations of “Trusted Root Certification” for WindowsRoot.sst and “Intermediate Certification” for WindowsIntermediate.sst.

Updating to the Latest Patches

This is a very old operating system, but it was supported and updated for 10 years, meaning it went through a lot of iteration and incorporated technologies that weren't even available when it was first released, all of this to say that a fully patched version of SBS 2011 may behave very differently than one that was just installed or that has had SP1 installed.

The first thing you should do right away is install the Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2. This will bring much of the system to a state that is semi-modern, allowing you to install newer applications and have a bit more compatibility in terms of drivers (specially for virtual machines).

Next up you need a couple of updates to be installed in series to enable the usage of another tool to get access to the latest Windows Updates. I know, it's a long way to get this ancient beast to a fully patched state. There is this great video covering the process, and the files needed for the updates can be found in this Internet Archive item that I've compiled.

Setting up an SSL certificate

It's important to have a proper SSL certificate since everything these days sadly requires proper encryption.

Importing the certificate

For some reason Windows Server is incapable of properly importing a private key in a way that all its applications can use it, leading to many permission issues and troubles. The correct way of importing the certificates is using the good old manual mmc method.

From here go to Personal | Certificates and import the private key using the sidebar. After selecting the *.p12 file, when asked for the password for the private key, ensure that you select the “Mark this key as exportable” checkbox, since this will allow IIS to actually use it for its SSL shenanigans.

Adding the SSL Certificate to IIS

To use the recently imported SSL certificate inside IIS all that you have to do is select the Default Web Site, click on Bindings… in the sidebar, remove the HTTPS binding that's currently there since it may produce a weird logon error if you just try to modify the certificate associated with it, add a new binding for HTTPS and select the appropriate certificate.

Now you should have all Exchange and SharePoint endpoints using your certificate. You can test this by going to the OWA portal using HTTPS on your local machine.

If you get any errors when adding the binding related to a lack of a trusted intermediate certification chain, it means that you forgot to import the public root certificate for your self-signed certification authority. To do so follow the same certificate instructions as before, except you should import your *.cer file to the Trusted Root Certification store.

Setting up Exchange Server 2010

This is the best part of SBS 2011, with it you get well setup Exchange server right out of the box, although it still needs a couple of tweaks to be useful and be brought up to speed with modern times.

Send Connector

TODO: Setup a SMTP or Send Connector to * so you can email anyone.

Accepted Domains

You want to be able to receive email from your proper domain name, not only the AD domain, so go to Organization Configuration | Hub Transport | Accepted Domains. You should see your AD domain listed, now simply add your own external/local domain to the list as an Authoritative domain.

Mailbox Addresses

By default if you try to connect to the Exchange server using Outlook it will fail and complain that “An encrypted connection to your mail services is not available”. This is most likely due to the fact that you used your nice domain name instead of the domain.local that SBS 2011 generated for you.

To fix this go into the Exchange Management Console and into Recipient Configuration | Mailbox. Double-click your username there and jump to the E-Mail Addresses tab. In this tab simply add your username@domain.tld address to the list and if your SSL certificate is properly setup in IIS everything should just work from now on.

Connecting Clients

Connecting clients to an Exchange server has always been a super simple task, since every OS expected you to connect to one there should be an automated wizard to guide you through the process, the only problem is that you are most likely to hit a bunch of errors with no proper explanation or ability to troubleshoot (all error messages are generic and provide no way to debug), although there are a couple of things to remember when you encounter any errors.

Autodiscovery Service

Exchange has a service to allow clients to automatically configure themselves, all you have to do to enable this feature is open the DNS server and add a new A Record for autodiscover.domain.tld that points to the IP address of your Exchange server and everything should work itself out from there.

Login Username

On clients you should specify your Exchange email, but the username for authentication should either be DOMAIN\username or username, different clients require different usernames, try all possible combinations until it works has been my default approach.

Updating to the Latest Version

Exchange is a massive project and needs a lot of updates to keep everything working smoothly and with modern clients, specially given that to support TLS 1.2 you need Service Pack 3, so it's extremely important to update to the last Cumulative Update that Microsoft provided if you intend on actually using the server. I was going to say updates are also important for security, but you should know that using such an older and unsupported version of a software is a security nightmare, so never expose it to the internet and you should be fine.

To get your install fully updated you should download and install the following packages:

For some bizarre reason if you try to install the Update Rollup by double-clicking it as with every update, it'll randomly fail in the middle of the installation because of some conflict with UAC (User Access Control). To work around this issue jump to an elevated command prompt (Run as administrator) and install using the following command:

msiexec.exe /update Exchange2010-KB5000978-x64-en.msp

Before installing these updates ensure that you have the latest version of the .NET frameworks and of the Visual C++ redistributables. Also, if you need a list of all the update rollups available for Exchange 2010 and other versions can be found here.

Standard Authentication for OWA

For some reason the default in Exchange 2010 of using Forms-based authentication for Outlook Web App causes authentication issues on modern web browsers outside of Windows, so it's good to disable it. To do this we need to go to the Exchange Management Console and navigate to Server Configuration | Client Access and in the Outlook Web App AND the Exchange Control Panel go to the Authentication tab and select the usage of standard authentication methods (include Digest Authentication).

Enabling Modern TLS

Sadly the world moves on and people decide that we need more sophisticated encryption algorithms for serving plain text pages with no user input or sensitive information. Even worst, these people decide that they are going to force everyone to upgrade while they are at it. This brings us to the fact that if we want to interact with our server from a modern browser, or pedantic mail client, we need at least to have TLS 1.2 enabled and working.

To enable such modern encryption algorithms for these pedantic people we could go down the manual route or we can use the amazing IISCrypto tool provided by Nartac, which is a lot better and is the proper way of doing it. Here's a link to an archive of version 3.3 that's needed for SBS 2011.

Disabling IPv6

No one needs IPv6, it's a complete mess and has never helped anyone. When you finish setting up SBS 2011 it will automatically have IPv6 enabled, meaning it will resolve IPv6 DNS addresses and possibly allow clients to get allocations via DHCP, so we must disable this abomination even Microsoft will warn you against it. Apparently full network connectivity is needed for some of the early system initialization and if you disable the protocol from the network adapter settings a lot of services, such as Exchange, will break and whenever you reboot you will be stuck in the “Applying system configuration” phase of the system boot.

Since Microsoft has already taken the page with the instructions to disable IPv6 offline, here is a copy of what you should do:

Uncheck Internet Protocol Version 6 (TCP/IPv6) on your Network Card.
In Registry Editor, locate and then click the following registry subkey: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip6\Parameters\
Double-click DisabledComponents to modify the entry, or if it's unavailable, you must create it as a “DWORD (32-bit) Value”.
Enter ffffffff (eight f’s), and then click OK.
Because of the VPN service you MUST also Export and then Delete the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\RemoteAccess\RouterManagers\Ipv6
Reboot the SBS 2011 server.

Disabling Windows Server Update Services

Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) is a really nice piece of software that Microsoft developed so that system administrators could centrally manage Windows Updates of an entire business, and it is quite a lot of fun to play around with and enables you to update older machines, since it creates a cache of Microsoft's updates, but it's a massive resource hog, and given that most of our old machines can be updated using things like WSUS Offline or Legacy Update, it's a waste of resources to keep such a service running.

The problem with disabling or removing core services like this is that it may break the amazing SBS Console, which really makes managing SBS 2011 such a joy, so we must tread carefully if we want to disable this resource hog without breaking useful functionality.

The information contained in this section is a mixture of a tutorial by Sangnak and another one by PonderWorthy, both on the same subject. My goal is to reduce resource usage while ensuring we can still revert our changes in the future if we want.

WSUS Services

The first part of the process is to disable the service itself and ensure that our change propagates to the client machines connected to our server. For this we need to do the following:

Open services.msc and locate the “Update Services” service.
Stop the service. Go into its properties and change its startup type to “Disabled” so it won't be restarted.
Open gpmc.msc
Navigate to Forest | Domains | domain.local | Group Policy Objects.
Select the Update Services Client Computers Policy policy and go into the Details tab.
Change its GPO Status to “All settings disabled”.
Repeat the same operation for the Update Services Common Settings Policy and Update Services Server Computers Policy policies.
Open a command prompt on the server and run gpupdate /force
Open the Registry Editor with regedit.
Navigate to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU key and create any necessary keys if they don't exist.
Create a new DWORD (32 bit) Value called UseWUServer and set its value to 0.
Open the Windows Update application and set its update settings according to your preferences.

IIS

Afterwards we need to disable the WSUS entries in IIS so that the service is no longer advertised:

Open the IIS Manager application.
Select Application Pools and stop the WsusPool application.
Expand the Sites folder and select the WSUS Administration site.
Stop the WSUS Administration site from the Actions panel.

SQL Server

Now it's time for the biggest resource hog of them all, SQL Server. This is a tricky one and it's the one that's consuming most of the resources in your system.

Open the SQL Server 2008 R2 SQL Server Management Studio as Administrator, with a right-click and select Run As Adminitrator.
Connect to a Database Engine with the name \\.\pipe\mssql$microsoft##ssee\sql\query
Right-click the root node \\.\pipe\mssql$microsoft##ssee\sql\query and select Properties.
Go to the Memory tab and change the maximum server memory to something more reasonable such as 512 MB.

You should now have a much lighter server and with all useful services still available. Since Windows Server is still Windows, I would advice a restart just to be sure.

ubuntu-lucid

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2024-08-04T22:45:08+00:00

Ubuntu 10.04 (LTS) Lucid Lynx

The last long-term support version of Ubuntu to ship with GNOME 2, no Unity, and support the old brown and orange official Ubuntu GTK theme. It's the one I'm most nostalgic for.

Setting up the system

It's important to keep a couple of things in mind when setting up an older Linux system in order to make it a little bit more useful, these are some of my initial setup indications.

APT repository for older releases

After a while old and unmaintained versions of Ubuntu have their APT repository moved to a different server. In order to grab some era appropriate software, or at least the minimum in order to get a usable system for bootstrapping more modern software we need to change the repositories defined in /etc/apt/sources.list. All that's needed is to change everything that references archive.ubuntu.com and security.ubuntu.com to old-releases.ubuntu.com. A user on Ask Ubuntu did supply a nice one-liner to make the change:

sudo sed -i -re 's/([a-z]{2}\.)?archive.ubuntu.com|security.ubuntu.com/old-releases.ubuntu.com/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

You should now have a system that has the latest versions ever released of every package for your system.

VMWare Guest Tools

If you're running this version of Ubuntu under a virtual machine it's important in order to get compositing and other features working to get the guest VM tools installed. For VMWare you can simply install the open-vm-tools package that's available in the official repository.

Getting the old look back

One of the most important things about this release of Ubuntu is that it supports installing all of the old GTK themes and wallpapers, making it capable of looking exactly like Ubuntu of this era should look like.

Wallpapers

Ubuntu makes their wallpapers for older releases available through APT. They are in packages with the ubuntu-wallpapers-<release> naming scheme, although older ones follow a <release>-wallpapers scheme. You can install all of them with the following command:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-wallpapers-* edgy-wallpapers feisty-wallpapers gutsy-wallpapers

GTK Theme and Icons

Ubuntu's iconic brown and orange theme was named Human. The packages responsible for everything related to them are:

human-cursors-theme  human-icon-theme     human-netbook-theme
human-gtk-theme      human-theme

Upgrading software

In order to make the system usable in the modern era it's important to have access to more modern version of the software that's available through the official repositories. One of the most effective way of doing this is to install pkgsrc. There's an amazing talk by Carsten Strotmann about using pkgsrc on older systems.

Due to incompatibilities (described in the bootstrap/README.Linux file) releases newer than 2021Q4 will fail to build on systems that ship with gcc 4.8 as is the case of Ubuntu 10.04. Due to this issue we'll first have to bootstrap an older version of the pkgsrc tree and upgrade to newer ones if needed after bootstrapping and installing the necessary compilation requirements. This can be done with the following commands:

On a modern machine download the 2021Q4 release of pkgsrc from the CVS repository, since they don't make older releases available via tarballs. The reason for this is due to the fact that you won't be able to fetch the CVS repository from the older version of Ubuntu with its ancient SSH client.

cvs -q -z2 -d anoncvs@anoncvs.NetBSD.org:/cvsroot checkout -r pkgsrc-2021Q4 -P pkgsrc-2021Q4
# On old Ubuntu system:
nc -l -q 1 12345 | sudo tar xz -C /usr/pkgsrc
# On the modern system:
tar czf - ./pkgsrc-2021Q4 | netcat old-ubuntu.lan 12345

Because of the ancient version of Ubuntu we are using you'll also need to upgrade your GCC to a newer version, in order to do this you'll have to add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpadcontent.net/ubuntu-toolchain-r/test/ubuntu lucid main
#deb-src http://ppa.launchpadcontent.net/ubuntu-toolchain-r/test/ubuntu lucid main

After adding those make sure to install the gcc-5 package with the following commands:

sudo apt-get --allow-unauthenticated update
sudo apt-get --allow-unauthenticated install gcc-5 g++-5
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gcc gcc /usr/bin/gcc-5 20
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/g++ g++ /usr/bin/g++-5 20
sudo update-alternatives --config gcc
sudo update-alternatives --config g++

With the pkgsrc ports tree in your older Ubuntu system and a “newer” version of GCC, we are now ready to start bootstrapping:

sudo apt-get install cvs libncurses5 libncurses5-dev gcc g++ zlib1g-dev \
    zlib1g libssl-dev libudev-dev build-essential
sudo mv /usr/pkgsrc-2021Q4 /usr/pkgsrc
cd /usr/pkgsrc/bootstrap
sudo ./bootstrap --cwrappers=no --varbase=/usr/pkg/var

win7

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2025-02-23T12:14:59+00:00

Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2

A collection of bits and pieces of information that may be useful if you're trying to live with an operating system that's as old as this, had this much impact, was abandoned by its creators, although is still supported by a bunch of vendors. It's a hell of a roller coaster.

The information on page can be useful to both Windows 7, its many editions, and the server edition, Windows Server 2008 R2.

Software

An operating system lives and dies on its software selection, so it's important that we can install nice things on our OS. Although many applications supported Windows 7 up until a while ago, some still do, you may need specific versions or workarounds in order to fully enjoy your experience.

PuTTY

PuTTY is great for connecting to UNIX servers using SSH and generating keys, but its color scheme for the terminal is simply horrible. To make things more homely a kind user created a bunch of color schemes for PuTTY, including the lovely Tomorrow Night, which can be applied with the following registry file:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
 
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham\PuTTY\Sessions\Default%20Settings]
"Colour0"="197,200,198"
"Colour1"="234,234,234"
"Colour2"="29,31,33"
"Colour3"="0,0,0"
"Colour4"="197,200,198"
"Colour5"="197,200,198"
"Colour6"="29,31,33"
"Colour7"="0,0,0"
"Colour8"="204,102,102"
"Colour9"="213,78,83"
"Colour10"="181,189,104"
"Colour11"="185,202,74"
"Colour12"="240,198,116"
"Colour13"="231,197,71"
"Colour14"="129,162,190"
"Colour15"="122,166,218"
"Colour16"="178,148,187"
"Colour17"="195,151,216"
"Colour18"="138,190,183"
"Colour19"="112,192,177"
"Colour20"="192,200,198"
"Colour21"="234,234,234"

Cygwin

Having a half decent set of UNIX tools is always a must, at least for me, in this era of computers, pre-WSL days, the go-to solution for having a proper command-line environment, apart from trying to use PowerShell, was to install Cygwin. If you're running a 64-bit version of Windows 7 you can install Cygwin 3.4.10, as per the official website, and use the Cygwin Time Machine.

If you're running a 32-bit version of Windows 7 as per sizeof(cat)'s amazing knowledge base you should use version 2.923 together with the Cygwin Time Machine. Since there are a couple of things that need to be done in order for the setup to work I've created the following batch file to execute the setup program properly and with a single double-click:

setup-2.923.x86.exe --no-verify --no-warn-deprecated-windows --only-site --site http://ctm.crouchingtigerhiddenfruitbat.org/pub/cygwin/circa/2022/11/23/063457

Changing default shell

Bash is cool and all, but let's be honest, these days fish makes life a lot easier. According to someone on Super User you can easily change the default shell that Cygwin starts up with by setting the Windows SHELL environment variable to the UNIX path of the shell you desire.