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A Trip Down Distro Memory Lane
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."
...until Novell bought them out. When it became apparent that Novell wasn't going to uphold the SuSE quality, I switched over to Ubuntu. Haven't looked back since.
In 2000 I was a seasoned Slackware user, and had been so for several years. I did my Master's thesis in LaTeX on a Pentium 233MMX box (which I still have), complete with diagrams done in xfig.
I did a lot of course work on that box: Viterbi decoding, polyspectral analysis, lots more.
...laura
2000, heh? I've got a release 4 of Trans-Ameritech "For UNIX users...Linux plus BSD" distribution on CD right in front of me, it its original shrinkwrap (bought two, kept one as a souvenir all these years). Those were the days. None of the sissy GUI installs. None of the silly pissing matches about which distro was the best. Just having Linux on CD was something. Web? Heh. Anybody still remember UUCP?
Ah, good ol' days.
End anonymous moderation and posting on
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.
and look how far it has come. Seriously, despite some remaining imperfections Linux has turned into a really pleasant desktop experience. I remember when installing Linux was a nightmare, with dozens of configurations, tons of unsupported hardware, and the need for highly advanced skills just to make it usable. Now it is rare to have to mess with the details- for the most part it just works. I'm primarily a Mac user, but I do a lot of stuff on my Ubuntu install as well, I am just shocked at how far Linux has come and quite interested in what is to come.
You'll find my name in the contributors for documentation in Mandrake 7.0, and it was an excellent distro in 2000 and remains so today. They would likely be a more significant distro today had they not experienced near-fatal management problems (mostly a re-focus of resources on computer-aided learning). Corporate bankruptcy did not help even though they emerged from it, a rare occurrence in France. But their biggest failure was to develop admin tools for their Red Hat-clone in Perl rather than what Red Hat used, Python, probably the combination of developer preference and a desire to be "NOT" Red Hat. They also introduced a number of incompatibilities just because they thought their way was better (and it may have been). Their style/icon/theme choices were not the best either (plain and cartoon-ish) and failed to appeal to younger Linux enthusiasts. They had a good concept with "Red Hat done better" and should have stuck with that. It is still my distro of choice, even with my familiarity of Red Hat (I've been a Red Hat Fedora Unleashed co-author). But it's sad to remember the opportunities squandered at Mandrake/Mandriva. I would suggest that anybody give it a try, especially if you have not yet selected a favorite distro. It now does have a nice feel and polish and "just works".
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
How about a few years before that? SLS ( the first 'real' distro ), Yggdrasil ( paved the way for GUI installers ), or the classic root/boot (with its hex-editing to boot off of IDE ), 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.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Infomagic developers kits were the shit! I got my first set in 1997 (Elvis) and started fiddling with redhat and debian and slackware. I ended up liking slackware the most. Linux comes with a shit tonne of development tools. I don't really care for ubuntu or fedora anymore and have gone back to slackware for my desktop. Because linux is more powerful from the command line! You should write your own scripts if you need and design your own systems...
At http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Main_Page , they are also attempting to convert the PDF stories into WIKI format. This could be a a valuable repository of technical and historical information.
I support their efforts and release to LFX and an all rights I may hold in any contribution I may have made to LFX. (I was an early contributor and some of my work was not done under their standard contract.)
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
...last I heard of it, it had the friendliest installation process of all the Linuxes (which wasn't saying much at the time, I guess...), but then it kinda.. disappeared...
Yeah, I still have an ancient Yggdrasil CD around here somewhere. I wonder if it is still readable by now though. I keep it in the same drawer as my old OS/2 install floppies...
... how much gnome sucked (was it ver 1.4?) and kde ruled. KDE was under an evil license back then, though.
Gnome was about to "take over the world" with their ingenious CORBA based "Bonobo", which is still around (though very little noise is made of it these days, c.f. Mono).
Now that I look at these pics in retrospect, I can recall the huge UI discrepancy Linux had with windows. Windows these days does not look much better than back in 2000, but boy, has Linux caught up.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Ohh, memories :)
Those screenshots and mentioned features really shows very rapid progress free desktop (GNOME, KDE and standalone apps) have achieved these 8 years (from KDE 2/GNOME 1.4 ugly-as-butt-but-functional to KDE 4.2/GNOME 2.2x ohh-shiny-and-my-tv-card-is-working). Yes, there are still issues, there are problems, but progress is deniable and imho only Mac OS X can fight with feature set offered by free desktop.
Ok, yes, apps does matter and market share and knowhow too, but still...this is indication that free desktop is here to stay and won't go anywhere but forward.
And btw, yes. Mandrake ruled the day back then. First distro which took users (no matter expierenced or newbies) *seriously* (nice looking themes, icons, serious localization, superb packaging - you name it). And it is still very hugely used in Europe and they are profitable company (escaped from bankrupt once), as far as I have heard. Shuttleworth definitely would say that Mandrake was inspiration for Ubuntu.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
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.
..... they won't believe you.
And you try and tell the young people of today that
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
WinLinux 2000's main selling point is that it can be installed onto a Windows drive without the need for tricky partitioning. It's based on Slackware and claims to be "the easiest to install Linux system in the Windows world". By working with the UMSDOS filesystem, WinLinux uses a Windows directory to hold the Linux files, although it's slower than a proper, dedicated partition. We booted Windows 95 and ran the SETUP.EXE program. A typical installation utility appeared, and after choosing the 'Typical' choice for packages, the installer started copying files onto our C: drive. So far, so good.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
was Ubuntu when it first came out. It was nice, user friendly, faster than Windows, and didn't crash. Heaven on a hard drive. I no longer had to worry about what I could and couldn't do (like modifying the shell outside of Microsoft's set boundaries). Deleted Windows and never looked back. Since then I've tried various distros and the one I currently like is Arch. Think of it like slackware, but with an amazing package manager. It starts very minimalist, but that's the beauty of it; you can change it into whatever kind of distro you want and nothing is hidden from you (in regards to text and configuration files) unless you want GUIs. But hey, choices exist for a reason...
"The best way to accelerate a Macintosh is at 9.8m/sec^2" -Marcus Dolengo
The biggest difference from Linux of 2000 and Linux of 2009, is that you didn't have go buy a new video card just to run the latest desktop.
Just as Mandrake became Mandriva, so to is Corel Linux still around. It simply changed owners and goes by the name Xandros.
If you need to switch a SMB over to Linux, or need to use Linux in a mixed Linux/Windows environment Xandros works great. Their desktop is close enough to XP that even the most tech phobic secretary doesn't have a problem with it, the business edition has built in Crossover Office so they can run their MS Office without difficulty, and their XMC which is now available for RH as well as Xandros server, makes switching a Windows server admin over to Linux a whole lot easier. While it isn't for everyone, for SMBs and mixed environments it really does great and play nice with Windows.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
They wrote really good and simple reviews then, that's for sure. Not like the blatant and stereotypical ones that you get to see these days.
I bought Caldera OpenLinux in 1997.
It was actually fairly decent, with a much better installer than other distros and GUI system management tools. In these features, it presaged what many other distros have done since then. If they had kept working at it, it might have been a real contender...
Of course, Caldera morphed hideously into SCOg after 2000, lashing out at the Linux community, abandoning technology for litigation, and creating their own private pit of Hades to which they are now consigned.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Arora
In 1994 I had Slackware running on my inherited 386 and I managed to install Doom (although I am not sure how) and it ran beautifully.
I didn't see this mentioned in comments before this, apologies in advance if it was.
Give http://toastytech.com/guis/index.html a try. It's got a lot of various screenshots of GUIs, some pretty obscure.
Corel Linux was my first foray into the world of Linux, back in 1999. I remember having to switch to another graphics card just to get the graphical installation to work. I didn't seriously start using Linux until later in 2000, this time with Slackware. Alot of work, but no switch between graphics cards (it didn't have a graphical insallation and I was able to fix the graphics problem from the terminal once it was installed.
Linux has come a long way since...
Slackware in 1996 for me was my first experience. Tried dual-booting with Windows 95, but managed to nuke the DOS partition with some careless use of fdisk whilst in Slack. No more Linux for me...
...until I started using Ubuntu in Sep 2007. Installed it after I backed up and wiped my XP installation; I'm quite happy with it and have no regrets.
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.
...I cannot figure out exactly what pulse audio is really for, but I "fixed" my fedora 10 system sounds by totally removing PA, going to sound prefs and checking alsa everything, rebooting, going to terminal and doing alsaunmute. Bam, all my sound works fine now. And I fixed my vid by downloading system-config-display and using that. Why they don't include that in the default install like they used to I do not know.
I wish there was something along the lines of a more stable RH/RPM desktop system between bleeding edge and always something broken fedora and expensive "enterprise" redhat.* I'd actually pay RH for a consumer desktop system that would do all media and etc even if it was only 99% "pure if they made one with long term support, just not what they are asking for some business model server hybrid "workstation" system. They used to charge 60 bucks, then dumped that for free broken or expensive mostly not broken, I want a sweet spot in the middle there someplace. Twice a year fedora releases is too much, by the time you have everything all tweaked and running smooth, its back to broken stuff, and on dialup, forget it, about impossible to stay updated. I understand and that's fine for devs and tinkerers, but not for just a user who isn't a dev (that would be me and I bet a few million other people).
*The CentOS guys are adamant they are enterprise/server and don't care too much for the desktop, I've checked them out and don't like that attitude on their forums too much, and I don't run servers anyway, just want a bit more of a better and longer running desktop. I think the market is there especially if they (they being redhat) did an apple and sold hardware with it preinstalled so everything "just worked", a desktop system, a lappie, and a netbook.. And not the Dell example either, they play act at support for ubuntu (top of Dell's linux pages they recommend vista-that's play acting at support IMO)
My first Linux was downloaded with a 9600Baud modem.. There were newer modems at the time, but I saw no need for it :D. I got most of the floppies working and created, but for some reason, the installation wouldn't quite complete. I posted a message and within a few hours, someone offered to send me a known working set of disks. He did. Within a week I was booting into my first Linux prompt.
That's what I remember most about Linux. Some random stranger spent his time and money to send me disks. That was just unbelievable.
Tinkering with that Linux installation reminded me of the first computers I'd owned.. The TI99/4A, the 800XL, C64... They were so wonderful to tinker with...
It never ends. Before it was a wonder to get dialup access to a shell account working.. then tcp... then the first X session.. Now I'm using Linux to tinker with HDR images, create music, ray trace, re-create experiments that once took million dollar equipment, map Martian images...
I spent a day downloading Slackware on a 2400b modem. I set up a dual-boot system & everything (at least on the linux side) worked great.
In 1997 I received SuSe (5.x I think) on cd. That was the most stable operating system I have ever run. It was up and running continuously almost 2 years until I started screwing around with samba and it crashed (I'm sure there's a moral in there.)
I got SuSe 6.x in 1999. What a Piece Of Shit. It was so bad I got clear out of linux and went to FreeBSD, which I used until I got my mac w/osx 10.4. In the meantime I installed a few machines with Ubuntu, which is what I will be using when I get my next intel box.
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.
On a 486/33. It was awesome, so once I acquired a CDROM I got a RedHat CD. Ultimately I stopped using linux due to the lack of support for devices. I'd get a new computer to initially be greeted by VESA 640x480 in X, no sound, and no USB devices. Bafflingly, I had one on-board sound card that, in linux, the sound output would come out the mic in. In Windows it worked as normal.
Wow, that review sent me - like a drunk bum thrown into an alley from the back of a squad car - down memory lane!
Ah, anyone remember linuxconf? What a piece of junk! It mostly worked, when it worked. But I remember it interfering with any manual configuration changes made (without telling you). Very irritating. I ended up ignoring it, I think.
I can't believe Linux got any sort of foothold on the desktop with releases like the the early KDE and GNOME, to be honest. I remember constantly, constantly fighting with the two (and their respective toolkits) to make them a) look half decent, b) behave half decently, and c) work in a fashion which did not interfere. Part of that
I remember when I started out, more or less with RedHat 5.2. GUI options? What GUI options? You had (from my recollection) fvwm, fvwm95, afterstep, and -maybe- icewm. I don't remember for certain if icewm was available in 5.2, but it was in 6.0, as I used it in 6.0 when I moved to it. I dabbled for a while with 5.2 but never permanently, as my hardware was not yet supported. I also tried DOSLinux and the HappyHacker guides before I determined that yes, I needed a real linux distro. After a botched upgrade from RH6.1 to 6.2, I moved over to (IIRC) Mandrake 6 or 7 (whichever came out around the time of RH6.2).
It's funny, but when I decided to go with RH (largely because I could order the CDs - I ended up grabbing them from Best Buy, IIRC), Slackware was already considered to be a hodgepodge of crap thrown together, largely targeted at/used by the "h@x0r" community. It's only become more of the case, of course, but Slackware refuses to die.
It wasn't long after Mandrake that I went to debian (maybe late '99), and stuck with that until just this past April, when I gave Ubuntu a try. Stormix 2000 was a major catalyst in me moving to Debian, if I'm recalling things correctly. I still use Debian as much as possible, but Ubuntu goes on my primary workstation/laptop.
As this thread is about Linux in the year 2000: does anyone else remember Stormix 2000? It was an incredible, incredible distro for it's day (consistent look/feel, debian based, intelligent installer), and I'm sad to see that Progeny didn't make it as a company. They didn't get half the credit that was due them, IMO, as they were a major force behind the current way in which distros are packaged, IIRC. They stuck around for a while and provided some good additional packages, and an alternative installer for Debian 3, which was very nice (in terms of hardware support, which was lacking in Debian at the time).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
It may have been a wonderous time, but it's also the time when Windows was starting to offer a stable platform that competed in some respects. Back in '94 or so... now THAT was a good time. A full 32-bit, fully multitasking OS, with server apps, programming tools, music players, virtual desktops, decent package management, good internet, tried and tested security, choice of window system and widgets (not just X and KDE or GNOME, but Openlook, MGR, etc.) all while Windows was still deciding whether to include a browser by default.
I remember trying to set up text mode's Disk Druid to partition my HDD and I got stuck with it. I didn't know what to do for a long time. :D
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I am anxiously awaiting the latest updates to my Yggdrasil system.
Oh yeah, loved that. BTW the GP is incorrect, Corel Linux did not die, it became... Xandros. Corel was great in a Windows environment, I even had it logging into and NT4 Domain... I even used Caldera, their install allowed you to play Tetris while it ran, oh the memories.... And the horrors... DeadRat 5 - I still hate gnome for that.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
Remember these?
I had *no* idea what 'miscellaneous services' icon was until a buddy told me that it was a paper coming out of a folder. Who in the hell drew that thing? Who in the hell thought it was a good idea to put in the operating system?
And WTF is that 'change root password' icon, now that I see it? A hallucinating snake?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
It took me a week to get to work with my hardware (which is ironic saying that it described itself as plug and play), and nothing would compile without pulling my hair out. But man, nothing beat it!
I've been using Debian full-time as my desktop since around 2001 (which admittedly doesn't make me one of the oldest-school users). I started noticing a big decrease in the amount of HOWTO-googling and config-editing I had to do somewhere around 2005. While presumably many improvements were made between 2000 and 2005, there were still a lot of things I had to do in 2004-2005 that I recall thinking would make it 100% impossible to get my non-tech-savvy friends and relatives to switch.
For example, when I bought a widescreen LCD in early 2005, I had to edit XFree86.conf to manually add a modeline to get it to work at the right resolution. And wireless around 2004-05 was a mess requiring a bunch of futzing with modules and utility scripts on the command line (I actually had a PCI wireless card get permanently borked by some sort of mishap with loading firmware at runtime). Since then I haven't noticed a whole lot of issues.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I wanted to download a slackware 1.0 (hence 1993), the first distribution I ever used, to try it on an emulator. After 15min of google, nothing. Is there a canonical place to find old distributions ?
many good times back in those days.. there was a serious feeling of accomplishment any time you successfully compiled a program even.. After looking through some of those screenshots, I shuddered when I saw the old GNOME foot menu.. so happy the decided to go with a new look.. I was definitely a wmaker and eventually an enlightenment fan back then.. going back a couple more years, 1998 in particular, it's hard to think that Slackware was actually a DECENT distro back then! nice article..
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
Actually, I like none of the above at this time, but Fedora has an interesting project going now where updates will be distributed as just the diff, not an entire redownload of the package and/or the dependencies. *That* project I admit has me interested and will make me stay with them until I can see if it has legs or not, if not, then ya, I'll go elsewhere, Mepis maybe, not sure at this time, maybe even try slack. I always keep a knoppix disk handy as my backup, so there's debian for ya (and it sure has come in handy at times). I tried ubuntu and didn't like it. I've been using rpm based since redhat 7, so I am more comfortable in it, but offered a suggestion (now a few times here) that perhaps the fedora devs and redhat (any of whom might have a good chance of reading such discussions) might reconsider the twice a year release and go to once a year and really concentrate on bug fixing what's been released (that and picking some audio standard and staying with it). Or actually come out with a real home user desktop release with support, charge some dollars for it. Here is the link to this ipdates project, which will be just the shitznit for folks like me on diaolup if they get the kinks out of it. You see that is the major problem, the sheer size of maintaining updates is very hard on dialup, no matter which distro you use at this time. I can milk out a release and not update every six months, but you still have to constantly update even if you are one or two releases behind, respins don't help with security bugfixes in a timely manner, so that point is moot and I get my distros for a coupla bucks snail mail anyway, so that isn't that important.
Here is the link Presto
Yes but. an External Modem back then cost about $140 while a Win Modem cast $40. A Poststript printer back then cost $600+ while a Win Printer cost $300+ A Windows 98 License cost about $90.00.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I'd forgotten about linuxconf. I think I was blocking out those memories. It was horrible -- especially the Gnome version, but just linuxconf in general, really. I don't remember all the details, because it's been a while, but ISTR that it was a real pain to use and furthermore screwed up configuration files sometimes beyond repair. It was actually significantly less hassle to just read the man pages and edit the config files by hand.
I also have some really bad memories of what happened when you ran out of swap space, before the memory management improvements in the kernel landed (somewhere around 2.0 or 2.2 IIRC). Simple actions like closing a window (in order to free up some memory and get the system back into a working state) could take *HOURS*, if you even had the patience to wait (rather than, say, giving up and power cycling, although given what I know now I suspect ctrl-alt-backspace might have been an available intermediate solution; you'd still lose unsaved data in applications, but at least you probably wouldn't get filesystem corruption).
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Yeah, I agree. I used SuSE for quite a while, and I've found APT to beat the pants off of the RPM system. Without fail every RPM based system I used for a long time would eventually get a corrupted RPM database, that was real pain in the ass. Never had that problem with APT.
(I partially blame SuSE for having such a crappy database with built in incompatibilities)
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