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.
A real pain in the ass. It was still worth it to use for the experience, especially if you had an actual reason to use it. Other than that it was just an exercise in futility most of the time…and I think that’s why we loved it. It was still kinda new. Interesting. And it didn’t spoon feed you. Was quite exhilarating.
Constantly trying to remember obscure bullshit fucking commands
What a lot of people forget is that in the early days of Linux there was no software that targeted it. Everything you would want to run on Linux was intended to run on something else like Solaris, BSD, AT&T Sytem V, SCO, AIX or something else. As a result, Linux APIs were the most generic flavor of Unix possible. Almost every thing meant for a Unix would compile and run on it and there was rarely a dependency problem.
I still miss that.
I think it really depends what you were doing. Some of us wanted to run web servers, and it was really neat that we could easily do so using very old hardware. One thing that is hard to imagine now is that, back in the day, there were not nearly as many configuration files. It was a lot easier to see what was going on, because less was going on.
These days there’s just so much more happening on your system, but at the same time advanced web search has made it possible for us to find better documentation or forums when we need to figure out how to tweak everything.
I remember kernel panic and dependency hell. But it was also wonderful to get away from win95.
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.
I started using Slackware in the late 90s - say 1998. I used it for most of my desktop applications pretty much right away.
I don’t game much so that wasn’t an issue for me.
It was definitely harder to configure. I recompiled so many kernels and told myself the speed boost from getting exactly what I needed and nothing else was impressive. It wasn’t.
I dunno. It wasn’t as polished as it is now, and was harder to configure, but it was still very good, and once you got it configured, it kept working, unlike the more popular os of the day.
Linux was exciting but time consuming and not all that useful.
I used to bike into University, spend half the night downloading disk images of SLS, spend hours more installing, and spend hours more getting the X config timings working for my monitor. But when I was finally able to use the same window manager config as the Sun workstations at school I felt like King of the World! But what was I actually doing with it? Xterm and an ancient version of GCC.
That said, I created my own basic Shell in the early days and a few little utilities. So I learned a lot. I do not think I would even have attempted many things without the technical confidence that just being a Linux user brought. There was the feeling that you could do anything even though you were hardly doing anything. And new capabilities were constantly arriving so that feeling lasted years.
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.
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.
You brought back traumatic memories I had successfully repressed.
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.
It was real real rough
Imagine gnome but instead of deciding your settings for you, they had a dialog where you had to pick the settings yourself.
And you needed to find out the scanlines of your monitor before X would even display anything, and then that was a black and white grid. Then you needed to spent another day or two getting a window manager working.
Oh god, was there even a maximize button so you could maximize your windows?
What did maximum even mean when you have a “virtual desktop” that was 4x times the size of your actual display. Because that is the kind of nonsense we used to do on Linux (because you you could and the other guys could not).
There was but noone knew what to do with it. We were all universally confused for like a solid 25 years.
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.
Relevant xkcd’s
Do you have support for smooth full-screen Flash video yet?
I don’t remember if that ever got fixed. Even if it did, Flash was already on its way out by that point.
Some technologies are better skipped, ignored until they collapse under their own annoyance.
I don’t think this paints a bleak enough picture of Linux before 2010 or so tbh, but it’s a good start.
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
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. :(
Remember the Internet at these speeds, Moss? Up all night and you’d see three women.
Half of it because random disconnect happened in the middle and download did not resume.
In glorious 256 colors !
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
