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A Trip Down Distro Memory Lane

Posted by timothy on from the early-nostalgia-is-the-best-kind dept.

M-Saunders writes "What did the Linux world look like back in 2000? TuxRadar has republished a distro roundup from Linux Format issue 1, May 2000. Many distros such as SUSE, Mandrake and Red Hat are still around in various incarnations, but a few such as Corel and Definite have fallen by the wayside."

14 of 238 comments (clear)

  1. Mandrake Mandriva by fyoder · · Score: 5, Funny

    Many distros such as SUSE, Mandrake and Red Hat are still around in various incarnations

    Mandrake started out well, but then suffered some sort of identity crisis, had a sex change, and become the totally flakey bitch named Mandriva. Some say she's been to rehab and is much nicer now, but she is ancient history as far as I'm concerned.

    --
    Loose lips lose spit.
  2. Re:I've got your 2000 right here... ;) by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Funny

    None of the silly pissing matches about which distro was the best.

    Now I know you're lying!

    --
    My blog
  3. Re:Slackware rules! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Disk...sets....
    The ancient bane of my shelving.
    Well thanks, i thought i had those sets of memories decently blanked out of my mind.

  4. Re:Slackware rules! by Kozz · · Score: 2, Funny

    I also have a P233MMX on which Slackware ran in year 2000. Maybe the two of them could get together for a play date?

    --
    I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
  5. Re:SuSE Ruled... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 5, Funny

    The first SuSE version released from Novell broke on my system, wasn't worth the time to fix, and I went back to the previous version. If that was the best Novell could do with SuSE, then I would try another distro. When it came time to rebuild my file server, I went with Ubuntu since it just work when I installed it. These days I prize working out the box over calling forth my grandmother's spirit to recompile the kernel to run on ordinary PC hardware.

  6. Anyone Remember the Four Yorkshiremen Distro? by Dogtanian · · Score: 5, Funny

    I started out with Slackware in late 1994 on a 486DX33 with 8MB of RAM. It was amazing. 40 floppies to install it since I had no CDROM drive.

    That's nothing. I ran Linux 0.03 on my Sinclair ZX81 in early 1982. It were stored on 300 C90 cassettes, took 18 days to load and I had to hold the RAM pack to stop it wobbling.

    And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you.

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    "Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
    1. Re:Anyone Remember the Four Yorkshiremen Distro? by ebh · · Score: 4, Funny

      Cassettes? Luxury.

      I read Linus's mind in 1974, keyed what would later become Linux 0.0.01 into the front panel of an IMSAI 8080 with 1K of RAM, and once I got it running, backed it up using the paper tape punch of the ASR-33 I used for the console.

      The first application I wrote for it was an ESP transmitter which I used to beam the Apple II monitor ROM bits into Steve Wozniak's brain.

    2. Re:Anyone Remember the Four Yorkshiremen Distro? by Sique · · Score: 2, Funny

      I preferred the C=64-Version...

      LOAD "VMLINUZ",8,1

      Fond memories...

      --
      .sig: Sique *sigh*
    3. Re:Anyone Remember the Four Yorkshiremen Distro? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Press Play on Tape.

      fun times...

    4. Re:Anyone Remember the Four Yorkshiremen Distro? by harry666t · · Score: 2, Funny

      Hmpf.

      In one of my previous lives I used to run simulations of an universe on an early prototype of an abacus, running a REAL Unix. One of the simulations went uncontrolled, became Singularity, created Earth and shit in six days, it was like 6000 years ago, AFAIR. That singularity used to run until 1882, with the only major upgrade around 1 A.D. Now, that's also a pretty nice uptime.

  7. Re:A 'get off my lawn' moment by kwabbles · · Score: 3, Funny

    ...or even when the kernel wouldn't even self host and you still needed a running minix system...Kids these days don't know how good they have it.

    Whippersnappers sans bootstrappers. Shameful.

    Why... in my day my old man would smack me with an oak limb if I forgot to sync the filesystem three times before shutting down.

    --
    Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
  8. I'm no windoze n00b now, I run Ubuntu! by kwabbles · · Score: 1, Funny

    None of the sissy GUI installs.

    You mean you had to learn how your computer worked to make it work?

    Come on - you gotta admit it's so much easier to pop a shiny disc thing into the box, hit the button, and have it do its thing so that you can get right to posting on the Ubuntu forums to complain about having to type "sudo" before you want to do something in that annoying little "terminal" window that they should work on getting rid of asap.

    --
    Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
  9. Re:SuSE Ruled... by citizenr · · Score: 2, Funny

    Yast is still pretty amazing.

    you clearly never seen Yast infection

    --
    Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
  10. Re:*terrible* icons by Randle_Revar · · Score: 3, Funny

    Personally, I thank Linuxconf for screwing up my config often enough to convince me that gui configurators are a terrible idea

    --
    Climate Progress - Hell and High Water