I really wish that I was born early so I’ve could witness the early years of Linux. What was it like being there when a kernel was released that would power multiple OSes and, best of all, for free?
I want know about everything: software, hardware, games, early community, etc.
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You spent a few evenings downloading a hundred or so 1.44MB floppy imges over a 56kbps modem. You then booted the installer off one of those floppies, selected what software you wanted installed and started feeding your machine the stack of floppies one by one.
Once that was complete you needed to install the Linux boot loader “LiLo” to allow you the boot it (or your other OS) at power on.
All of that would get you to the point where you had a text mode login prompt. To get anything more you needed to gather together a lot of detailed information about your hardware and start configuring software to tell it about it. For example, to get XFree86 running you needed to know
- what graphics chip you had
- how much memory it had
- which clock generator it used
- which RAMDAC was on the board
- what video timings your monitor supported
- the polarity of the sync signals for each graphics mode
This level of detail was needed with every little thing
- how many heads and cylinders do your hard drives have
- which ports and irqs did your soundcard use
- was it sound blaster compatible or some other protocol
- what speeds did your modem support
- does it need any special setup codes
- what protocol did your ISP use over the phone line
- what was the procedure to setup an tear down a network link over it
The advent of PCI and USB made things a lot better. Now things were discoverable, and software could auto-configure itself a lot of the time because there were standard ways to ask for information about what was connected.
You brought back traumatic memories I had successfully repressed.
Jesus Christ. Glad I got to ride of the backs of the giants before me. Live CD’s were so much fun back around 2001.
I’ve put on a bit of weight since then, but I wouldn’t say that I’m giant.
Spent a week getting the audio driver to work so I could finally figure out how to properly pronounce “Linux…” and I still couldn’t.
Spent like $50 on floppy disks and like 2 days labeling them by hand before printing out the 20 pages of instructions, formatting my hard drive and installing Slackware. Realized I didn’t actually know any unix commands. Paged a friend.
You got it from a friend on a pile of slackware and floppies labeled various letters. It felt amazing and fresh, everything you could need was just a floppy away.
Then we got Gentoo and suddenly it was fun to wait 4 days to compile your kernel.
I remember I had over one hundred floppies to install it all. And those were just for the stuff I was interested in. This was circa 1996. I bought Red Hat 5.0 a year or so later. It came on 4 CD-ROM’s and was cheaper than that pile of floppies had been.
I tried compiling gentoo a bit later, upgraded from windows 95. Could never get to a login screen, I quit, and started using Linux later when it was easier to install
Is Slackware just pirated software?
No, it’s one of the first Linux distributions
Thanks! The Wikipedia was an interesting read. It seems it was closed source? That’s an interesting Linux method
Slackware is still around, no past tense. What makes you think it was closed source?
There is no formal issue tracking system and no official procedure to become a code contributor or developer. The project does not maintain a public code repository. Bug reports and contributions, while being essential to the project, are managed in an informal way. All the final decisions about what is going to be included in a Slackware release strictly remain with Slackware’s benevolent dictator for life, Patrick Volkerding.
Looks pretty open source to me https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware-current/source/
That’s just the way things were done back then. Slack has been around long enough that that’s just the way it is.
That doesn’t make the source code proprietary or non-open, it just means it isn’t a community driven project.
It is a community-driven project, but there is no structured way to join.
You can become a member of the community when Patrick Volkerding or one of the lead devs ask you.
I’ve been in contact with them for a while and ultimately decided against contributing.
They acted too much like old men when you step on their lawn, and I don’t see the point in this distro anymore, apart from it being a blast from the past.
Literally everything it does is done better by others now.
I remember my first Slackware installation from a pile of floppy disks!
I also remember that nothing worked after the installation, I had to figure out how to roll my own kernel and compile all the drivers. Kids today have it too easy.
shakes fist Now get offa ma lawn!
All my homies who were into it were like “everything is free you just have to compile it yourself”
And I was like “sounds good but I cannot”
Then all the cool distros got mature and feature laden.
If you were a competent computer scientist it was rad.
If you were a dummy like me who just wanted to play star craft and doom you wasted a lot of time and ended up reinstalling windows.
I learned how to make a dual boot machine first.
My friend wanted to get me to install it, but he had a 2nd machine to run Windows on. So we figured out how to dual boot.
And then we learned how to fix windows boot issues 😮💨
We mostly did it for the challenge. Those Linux Magazine CDs with new distros and software were a monthly challenge of “How can I install this and also not destroy my ability to play Diablo?”
I definitely have lost at least one install to getting stuck in vim, flailing the keyboard and writing garbage data into a critical config file before rebooting.
Modern Linux is amazing in comparison, you can use it for essentially any task and it still has a capacity for customization that is astonishing.
The early days were interesting if you like getting lost in the terminal and figuring things out without a search engine. Lots of trial and error, finding documentation, reading documentation, etc.
It was interesting, but be glad you have access to modern Linux. There’s more to explore, better documentation, and the capabilities that you can pull in are still astonishing.
I love modern cli Linux distros.
I am about to plunge into desktop Linux this year.
Linux phone, pc and tablets only for me from now on
Death to oligarch business!
Linux phone
What do you use? Is it your daily driver?
I have not chosen yet.
I am between purism Librem 5 (expensive) and pinephone (cheap)
I am leaning to pinephone since it’s so cheap if I hate it it won’t ruin me
Have you considered SailfishOS?
Personally I recommend getting a Sony Xperia and installing it yourself.
SFOS has been my daily driver for 5 years now.
I paid €49 for the license, so it’s a bargain right now at 24.90, and my latest device, an xperia x10ii, cost just €60.
Let me know if you get your Pinephone working well enough to daily-drive, 'cause I’ve got one sitting around collecting dust.
Which linux phone is practical?
Almost all of them lack good hardware and feel overpriced.
Which iPhone isn’t overpriced lol
I like librem 5 for the features but it is expensive.
I like pinephone for the price.
I use SailfishOS on a Sony Xperia. 50€ for the SFOS license, 60€ for the phone.
I definitely have lost at least one install to getting stuck in vim, flailing the keyboard and writing garbage data into a critical config file before rebooting.
Clumsy. Manual. No multimedia support really. Compiling everything on 486 machines took hours.
Can’t say I look back fondly on it.
BeOS community was fucking awesome though. That felt like the cutting edge at the time.
I can’t remember much about it now, but I remember really wanting BeOS. I managed to get it installed once, but couldn’t get the internet working, so ended up uninstalling it.
BeOS and NetBSD was were it was at for sure!!
I’m sure most are aware of this but, just incase anyone passing through is not… Haiku OS
Works great in a VM… fun to play with, have not tried bare metal / daily driving it though.
Yeah, I’ve tried it out. It’s just years behind any Linux desktop right now though. The entire point of BeOS was to be a multimedia powerhouse, and it was. Everything else has surpassed it at this point though.
I desperately wanted one of those first BeBoxes or whatever they were called. And one of those little SGI toasters… I even tried to compile SGI’s 3D file manager (demo) from Jurassic Park.
Herp derp… where can I download an OpenGL from… it keeps saying I can’t build it without one 🤤
LI
Honestly, it sucked. Like most computing at the time. Everything came on a ton of floppy disks, it was impossible to update online unless you had a good connection (which nobody did), and you had to do everything by hand, including compiling a lot of stuff which took forever. I mean, I’m glad I got the experience, but I would never wanna go back to that. It sucked.
Remember the slow internet had to wait overnight for 40 megabyte game and finally finding out it didn’t work.
Up all night, and all you got to see was a boob
Half of it because random disconnect happened in the middle and download did not resume.
In glorious 256 colors !
Remember the Internet at these speeds, Moss? Up all night and you’d see three women.
Up all night, and all you got to see was a boob
Sometimes a boob who spent the previous night compiling a custom webcam driver. :(
jad
Nope, i had 10Mb fiber in 1995.
Remember when packages like RPM were first introduced, and it was like, “cool, I don’t have to compile everything!” Then you were introduced to Red Hat’s version of DLL-Hell when the RPM couldn’t find some obsure library! Before YUM, rpmfind.net was sooo useful!
I still use pkgs.org pretty frequently when I need to find versions of packages and their dependencies across different distros and versions of distros. I had to use that to sneakernet something to fix a system just this past week.
Oh sites like that are absolutely still useful! Especially for older distros or when you need a specific version that you can’t find for whatever reason.
Shit like that was the last straw for me and I ended up bailing on Linux for, like, 10 years until I got back into it around 2006.
Poor Annie.
It wasn’t too early, maybe 1997.
I was like 12 or so and I had just installed Linux.
I figured out, from the book I was working with, how to get my windows partition to automaticallyount at boot. Awesome!
I had not been able to figure out how to start “x” though.
So I rebooted into Windows, for on EFnet #linux, and asked around.
Got a command, wrote it down on a slip of paper, and rebooted into Linux.
I should mention, I also hadn’t figured out about privileges, or at least why you wouldn’t want to run around as root.
Anyway, I started typing in the command that I wrote down:
rm -rf /.I don’t have to tell you all, that is not the correct command. The correct command was
startx.After I figured it was taking way too long, I decided to look up what the command does, and then immediately shut down the system.
It was far too late.
My pranks were less destructive …
/ctcp nick +++ath0+++… it was amazing how often that worked. 🤣PRESS ALT+F4 for ops! 😂
OMG… the showmanship…
Someone-being-bratty-on-IRC: […] Me: We’re going to take away your internet access if you don’t behave. Bratty: Fuck you! You can’t do tha 5 minutes later… Bratty: How did you do that???Thats a new one on me. What did that do if I may ask? Best I have been able to figure out is that it’s probably IRC related but that’s it.
+++ath0is a command that tells a dial up modem to disconnect. I’ve never seen it used in IRC this way, but my guess is that the modem would see this coming from the computer and disconnect.This was back in the days when everything was unencrypted.
Yes, and encryption had nothing to do with it (though I suppose it would have prevented it in this case).
A properly configured modem would ignore this coming from the Internet side, or escape the characters so that they didn’t form that string.
Encryption would prevent it - that’s what I meant :)
I think the trick is to convince someone to send that string, so the modem sees it coming from the computer. Similar to tricking someone into pressing Alt+F4, or Ctrl+Alt+Del twice on Windows 9x (instantly reboots without prompting).
encryption would prevent the modem from seeing it when someone sends it, but such a short string will inevitably appear once in a while in ciphertext too. so, it would actually make it disconnect at random times instead :)
(edit: actually at seven bytes i guess it would only occur once in every 72PB on average…)
Explained nicely here: https://everything2.com/title/%252B%252B%252BATH0
Wow, a post from 2001 that’s still online today. You don’t see that often any more!
That’s terrible! They helped me fix my system when I decided I was fancy enough to try building a new version of gcc and go off-script a bit.
IIRC I deleted library.so rather that overwriting it. If I hadn’t been running IRC on another terminal already I would have been done for.
Well, I was an Amiga user. That was already unix-like, preemptive multitasking, etc. It was fading fast in the early nineties, and while i was already working in I.T., I was not interrsted in using Windows 3.11 and 95, so I began playing with Slackware Linux. I figured it was a good way to get comfortable with “real” I.T…
I learned Bash and had to compile most of the software i wanted to try. Since, like all programmers, I’m lazy, I wrote some simple scripts to build the code and make them into packages (tgz) for Slackware. This took tedium out of the work, and i could use the packkage manager to install and remove them.
Those were rough days for desktop users, though. I really had to use windows when i needed to pass output to “normies”. I tried several window manager and desktops, and eventually landed on Ubuntu.
Well, I was an Amiga user.
Based. But on a serious note, what machine did you have/use? Could you install Linux on the classic Amiga machines? I’ve always thought about buying an Amiga 1200.
I had the 500 and 3000. I finally got rid of the 3000 3 years ago. I saw no reason to install linux at the time because it was already almost the same from my perspective, except the Amiga also had sterio sound 4096 color output, and pull-down screens. The console commands were substantially similar and several enthusiasts ported linux comands to AmigaOS.
Plus, we now can run more modern versions of AmigaOS on Linux though I have never done it myself.
Amiga still exists as a reasonably modern OS and hardware as of a few years ago. It was bought by small businesses and updated a few times.
Before modularized kernels became the standard I was constantly rerunning “make menuconfig” and recompiling to try different options, or more likely adding something critical back in :-D
I totally forgot about the shift to modules. What an upgrade!
The danger of poorly configuring your XF86Config in a way that could irreparably damage your giant CRT monitor was thrilling.
XFree86 was such a tacky name
No audio, no WiFi, no well-established communities, sparse software selection, but total freedom on an alternate OS. I tried it out in the late 90s with Red Hat, left, came back about 5 years later in the early 2000s and stayed forever. SuSE 9.2 was amazing.
stacks of diskettes, for every operating system.
would routinely spend hours doing an install only to hit a block and have to reinstall DOS to have modem access to get help on usenet. Then hours of reinstalling to move forward and repeat on another issue.
I really loved it though, it was a massive upgrade over DOS and windows on a 286.
First time I format the whole disk, all msdos data (games) lost. I managed to install it then I opened vim to edit a file and I couldn’t get out of vim I know it’s a cliche, but there is real. To get out I have to call a friend, using the landline, the one who lends me the floppy disks (or maybe it was magazine cd) and ask he how to get out, he says, just press Shift and Z twice.
There was a similar question a while ago with some nice reads in the answers :)
