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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
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.
None of the silly pissing matches about which distro was the best.
Now I know you're lying!
My blog
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 ----
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...
... 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).
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
...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...
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.
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