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.
Just raw dogged linux and loved it. Lot more stable than windows 95/98
In the late 90s you could get CDROMs from the nerds at university with everything you need on them. If you got your sound card working and could play an mp3, you felt like a master hacker who had beat the game.
In the 90s, it was hard :-)
It made sense to recompile the kernel to make it fit your hardware.
It was a mess to find peripherals that were working with Linux.
I built soooo many kernels. 😅
I had an old laptop, and my WiFi required some kind of cutter driver that wrapped broadcom, my Intel graphics didn’t work on newer kernels. It booted in 7 seconds on a 5400rpm disk though while XP took over a minute.
Wifi? imagine trying to get pci modems working and basically compiling your kernel each time you’d need an obscure driver. usb didn’t even exist and external ones were both expensive af and running on serial ports.
good times honestly. I learned so much about linux.
NDIS wrapper. I hated that so much, I bought a natively supported PCMCIA card.
The only OS that was solid as a desktop OS back then, with good usability, was BeOS. Both MacOS and Windows had stability problems (although NT/2000 were much better, but lacked app/game compatibility), and Linux was a nightmare to update and run (lots of compiling too). So the OS of choice back then for me, was BeOS. I could do everything I needed with it too.
I never got to run BeOS (well…when it was modern), but it’s really depressing just how insanely better it was than the competition. Ditto Amiga.
LI
Contrary to other OSes, the information about it was mainly on the internet, no books or magazines. With only one computer at most homes, and no other internet-connected devices, that posed a problem when something didn’t work.
It took me weeks to write a working X11 config on my computer, finding all the hsync/vsync values that worked by rebooting back and forth. And the result was very underwhelming, just a terminal in an immovable window. I think I figured out how to install a window manager but lost all patience before getting to a working DE. Days and days of fiddling and learning.
Speaking of books, my only experience with Linux in the 90s was seeing the Red Hat books. I don’t know anyone who actually made it work.
I haven’t seen these until much later
Lol! 'Member Afterstep?
The desktop stretched across 4 screens was enough to hook me for life.
Xeyes… so many terminals… the artwork was artwork… wtf is transparency?! 😁 It was an amazing time to be a geek.
I didn’t get that far. And I only had an Amiga at that time, which made things more difficult to set up. I wonder how fluent transparency would be with AGA, haha. My next attempt was woth a PC around 2003 with KDE3 and it got me hooked.
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.
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 🤤
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.
I cut my teeth with DOS and Netware, used Windows until the day 98 was released (had been using the GM for a month), and cut over to Slackware as my daily driver. Dabbled with Redhat before stabilising on Debian, which I’ve never found a need to change from for my headless boxes.
One thing I specifically remember was hand tuning my X11 config to drive my 15” Trinitron at 1024x768 @ ~68Hz.
X86 configs were painful and fun. Knowing a wrong setting might destroy your monitor was the right amount of adrenaline.
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 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
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!
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.
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.
Looks pretty open source to me https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware-current/source/
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
I got tired of compiling the kernel taking a day on my Pentium pc. So I got a pile of 486s the uni was throwing out, built a Beowulf cluster out of them and soon I was able to compile the kernel in two and half days.
Stuff needed tweaking more wine worked almost never even for basically window’s programs. Configuring Xfree86 was black magic. Running Startx at the terminal prompt was like rolling the dice. Distro choice was smaller and it was really a choice. Since the child distros were less of a thing. You had Debian , Redhat, Slackware, and SUSE. All were very different at a fundamental level with packaging and philosophy. Also it was way more common to buy boxed copies of Linux distros with big thick manuals that helped you get it installed and take your first steps with Linux. It reminded me of when I first got my TI 83 calculator an it had that massive manual with it.
Also Lugs and spending a lot of time on IRC getting and helping people on freenode (don’t go there now) was a must.
