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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
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
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).
It was bought by the Xandros corp. about 2001. So for most practical purposes Corel linux is still around.
Know thyself. -- Delphic Oracle, 8th century BC
I have in my hand, a CDROM marked "December 1993" from Infomagic, I also have Infomagic's 2-CD Linux Developer's Resource from June 1994, with (it says here):
- complete snapshots of TSX-11.MIT.EDU and sunsite.unc.edu Linux archives
- SLS 1.05 with kernel 1.0
- Debian 0.91 beta
- Preliminary versions of the WINE code
and a "complete live filesystem!" ...and lots more. Wow. Hard to believe, huh?
(now, get off my lawn...and here, take this Ubuntu disk and try it out at home)
...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.
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