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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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. 😅
“Please insert Slackware disk Set A disk 3”
I got a very early version of Debian from a friend when I was in college. I had a very old computer gifted to me but couldn’t get Windows to install. I ran that badboy with no window manager, just text. I used elinks for my web browser and pine for email. VI was where I wrote my papers. Drivers were a problem, so I had to save papers on a disk to print from a computer at a library.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Remember the slow internet jad 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.
Nope, i had 10Mb fiber in 1995.
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
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!
Alrighty, old Linux user from the earliest of days.
It was fun, really great to have one-on-one with Linus when Lilo gave issues with the graphic card and the screen kept blank during booting.
It was new, few fellow students where interested, but the few that did, all have serious jobs in IT right know.
Probably the mindset and the drive to test out new stuff, combined with the power Linux gave.
OMG… BOFH! I need to go find those stories now :-)
The BOFH and his PFY are still helping their users…
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.
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 🤤
BeOS and NetBSD was were it was at for sure!!
Imagine a pile of floppy disks, with stuffs inscribed on it that you never heard of…
… will you insert one into your computer and reboot it?
friend told me “ah you like hacking at DOS and stuffs, you may be interested in that, it’s called ‘linouqse’ i guess…” so i gave it a shot.
“Slackware”… it was something like kernel 1.3.12 or 1.3.13 i am not sure… it came on 6 or 7 floppy disks.
from the boot already it seemed like nothing i had seen before: all (!) hardware seemed to be methodically enumerated, a bunch of esoteric commands and processed started their bizarre dance before my very eyes. looked already like i was accessing so much more information about the insides of my -then beloved- machine than ever?! this flashes very fast though and is a bit frustrating… then a rudimentary install menu, in text mode, asking a lot of questions.
… trying all of this and failing many times, getting an old hard disk in a secondary bay to dedicate to the exercise… getting to it again and again (there was no Internet, where i was, then)… until finally, the thing boots up. a login prompt. i had remembered the password chosen upon install, that was it!
… a shell? i had never heard of Unix before, 100% of my previous practice before was with micro-computing, from 8bit to 16bit to DOS PC and its laughable Windows 3.1 ™…
… what am i gonna do with all this, now?!
[fiddling…]
[months passed]
… “xf86something”…? what? some more configuration? some more esoteric? Where does that lead me? wait.
… a graphical environment just popped out of my console?! with windows and shits??? this was there since the very beginning, like it was already there this whole time?!?!
🤯
Later on erring back on the side of Win3.1 because its “trumpet winsock” was the obvious, “easy” way to get connected to this new eldorado that opened up around (the year was 1995)… reading more about it on this new “online” helped me figure how to get back on that cool and hacky side, to finally (after months?) get the modem to connect, through PPP, to my ISP…
This is when I decided it would be cool, someday, to make this my primary OS, and that i’ll work towards this end from now on. at the same time i heard for the first time of “free(libre) software” and that thing resonated within me as something i didn’t know was possible: a way to organize society, based on virtuous principles of sharing knowledge and helping one’s neighbor, through the same playful excitement of hacking that had kept me on my toes since i was a child? where do I sign?!
3 years later i decided to never boot a Windows OS again, and here I am, ranting on lemmy like i am 275 years old…
oh yeah that, and compiling your kernel! Felt like opening an old spell book or something…
