Thank you your activites and attention, the installation of the workstation is completed - with KL 8.12!
In the forgotten shelf in the laboratory, my friend found a dusty CD, with KL 8.12! After the installation, everything work well! I am immediately made an ISO image from this disc. (If you want a copy, email me.)
The research project that my friend involved is radio astronomy. The computer's role is positioning a smaller radio telescope remotely, and made some measurement (positioning evaluation, direction is correct to designated object on the sky) automatically, then the results store locally, and / or transfer to another server.
The unique one-off controller of the radio antenna, the control program, its driver (antenna controls through serial ports), and the data collector program was write one of his colleague, who passes five years ago. Sadly, the source code of this program is not available, only the deb binaries, so the implementation to newer system is not likely possible.
The computer that controls everything, is an absolute vintage server, an IBM EServer with dual Intel Pentium III 1.0 Ghz, 512 ECC DDR, SCSI discs, two serial ports as most important feature. Works well, even the fan's remain silent.
A.K.