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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it was garbage.
servers already worked well for the time, but desktop was rough.
I spent what felt like many moons trying to compile Gentoo when I was a kid. There was only the wiki and a gritty forum for getting answers, nothing in real-time. I didn’t have very much knowledge of the kernel or messing with modules, and was certainly lost on getting a desktop environment going even after I got past the kernel part.
It was such an experience, I decided to become a janitor.
ETA: also this guy (not strictly linux, but same vibes)
It was S.u.S.E. Linux 5.3
Great manual.
I was lucky that my NIC, graphics and sound card were supported out of the box.
But everything was still much worse than on Windows.
But I could taste the freedom.
Now all my devices run on Linux (except my Nintendo Switch).
I started using Linux right in the late 90’s. The small things I recall that might be amusing.
- The installation process was easier than installing Arch (before Arch got an installer)
- I don’t recall doing any regular updates after things were working except for when a new major release came out.
- You needed to buy a modem to get online since none of the “winmodems” ever worked.
- Dependency hell was real. When you were trying to install an RPM from Fresh Meat and then it would fail with all the missing libraries.
- GNOME and KDE felt sincerely bloated. They seemed to always run painfully slow on modern computers. Moving a lot of people to Window Managers.
- it was hard to have a good web browser. Before Firefox came out you struggled along with Netscape. I recall having to use a statically compiled ancient (even for the time) version of Netscape as that was the only thing available at the time for OpenBSD.
- Configuring XFree86 (pre-cursor to X.org) was excruciating. I think I still have an old book that cautioned if you configured your refresh rates and monitor settings incorrectly your monitor could catch on fire.
- As a follow on to the last statement. I once went about 6 months without any sort of GUI because I couldn’t get X working correctly.
- Before PulseAudio you’d have to go into every application that used sound and pick from a giant drop down list of your current sound card drivers (ALSA and OSS) combined with whatever mixer you were using. You’d hope the combo you were using was supported.
- Everyone cheered when you no longer had to fight to get flash working to get a decent web browsing experience.
<I think I still have an old book that cautioned if you configured your refresh rates and monitor settings incorrectly your monitor could catch on fire.> Are you telling me that one dev for X.org could set someone’s monitor on fire by fucking with four lines of code?
Jesus Christ, thanks for that, I didn’t need to sleep tonight.
We didn’t have -R, you had to go into every subdirectory and run the command manually.
Hard
94-95 school year for me. Prior to win 95. Honestly OS2 warp was the tits then, blew windows and linux away. But the cool thing about linux was that you could pull a session from the college mainframe and then run all the software off campus. Over a modem. Pro E, maple, matlab, gopher, Netscape, ftp/fsp, irc, on and on. Once you had X going on your 486, you were good to go.
But honestly, it was nerd sh$t. Dos was king until win95. And then nobody looked back until win8 made us realize Microsoft had started sucking.
Yeah, I jumped ship right around the time Win8 came out. 14.04 was an interesting time to start learning. I was obsessed with trimming out bloat, so I used a tool to uninstall orphaned packages. Problem was, it also deleted some dependencies for GNOME.
I had, to quote the most helpful and humorous person in an Ubuntu forum post, “borked it so bad it had to be nuked from orbit.”
I have since learned my lesson and learned to be a little bit more careful with the magical responsibilities of sudo.
winmodems and modelines were problematic but it was liberating to be able to tinker.
and walnut creek was doing the Lord’s work.
Walnut Creek and infomagic saved me so much headache. Can’t beat the bandwidth of a FedEx truck, especially when you’re 28.8 at home.
It was always fun saying +++ATH in IRC to see who hadn’t configured their escapes properly
LUGs were very important back then especially when you were new.
The absolute best thing about it was that after suffering under Microsoft’s shitty operating systems for years, you were running a Unix-like on your own hardware. That part was amazing.
Having grown up with Acorn Atoms. BBC Micro, MS and DRDOS, Gem, Xerox something, Windows 1, don’t remember 2, 3.0 to 3.11, NT. I didn’t realise how nice early (2004) Linux was until I used it in a Windows server hosted VM to handle my phone calls (VoIP@home or something it was called).
I did everything I could to ditch Windows after that. The webification of QuickBooks was the final release.
Well, in the 90’s I managed to essentially brick two NIC’s by tinkering with the tulip driver on command line. In the distro I used it had to be done manually and I still have no idea as to what happened inside those NIC’s, but they sure didn’t work ever again. Yes, I made the same mistake twice.
“Please insert Slackware disk Set A disk 3”
I was just looking through old books and noticing my Yggdrasil manual the other day. That was one of the earliest plug and go cd-rom distributions. Before that was e.g. Slackware and the early Debian, both of which involved big piles of floppies. I also remember sending Linus an email and getting an answer. I’m sure he is too much of a busy celebrity for that now.
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. 😅
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 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.
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.
Remember the slow internet jad to wait overnight for 40 megabyte game and finally finding out it didn’t work.
jad
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.
Nope, i had 10Mb fiber in 1995.
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.
Explained nicely here: https://everything2.com/title/%252B%252B%252BATH0
+++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).
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.
