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Reminiscing Old School Linux
t14m4t writes "While the Linux experience has improved dramatically over the years (remember the days of Kernel version 2.0? or even 1.2?), Tech Republic revisits some of the more-fondly-remembered artifacts of the Linux of years past. From the article: 'Of all the admin tools I have used on Linux, the one I thought was the best of the best was linuxconf. From this single interface, you could administer everything — and I mean EVERYTHING — on your Linux box. From the kernel on up, you could take care of anything you needed. With the dumbing down of the Linux operating system (which was actually a necessity for average user acceptance), tools like this have disappeared. It’s too bad. An admin tool like this was ideal for serious administrators and users.'"
When anyone thought of the operating system, they thought of Linus.
As a casual linux user, I believe it to still be the case, regardless of what your fluff might say.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
the best of the best was linuxconf
What's that? Something to replace vi with a GUI?
(15 years experience as an admin, never came across it)
...dialing into the University of Helsinki BBS line to download early Linux disk images. Horrendous international calling fees.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
I must agree - that was a fantastic tool. I remember being upset when it disappeared (Red Hat 8 dropped it I believe?).
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
On behalf of the many gentoo, arch, and slackware users, I'd like to point out that "old school Linux" is alive and well and more capable than ever, thanks.
Caveat Utilitor
I absolutely abhor the phrase "dumbing down" when used in this context.
Linux used to be something used by a tiny minority of people who were primarily interested in hard-core computer science testing and research. It was their playground in which they could work their art. By making it more user-friendly, it has gotten it into the hands of people who are brilliant in other ways so that they can work their art. Are you a graphics guru? A UI wiz? A scripting genius? A music prodigy? A 3D design master? A business star? A poet laureate? If so, then Linux is now for you, too!
It hasn't been "dumbing down" anything. If anything, it has been dumbing up--more and more people using it in smarter and smarter ways.
And the beauty of the situation? If you're a hard-core computer scientist wanting to do testing and research with new stuff, it's still there for you, too.
I don't miss the "challenge" one bit. If you're up for a challenge there are plenty of barebones and expert-friendly distros out there to cut your teeth over. However, things have progressed enough that if you're not prepared to use up what little free time you have tinkering around with shit to get it to work, we now have a lot more friendly options for people who want to actually USE their computers to do something useful.
Horrendous international calling fees.
I fondly remember a $1700 bill. And the shit I went through to pay it. Working double shifts and shit.
I downloaded the boot & root FLOPPIES and that's how I got online with Linux back in 1992
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux/browse_thread/thread/3e0f1f1f1e33e1fe/a4f297acaa54597e?hl=en&q=dzubin+linux#a4f297acaa54597e
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
V0.12 was the first version of Linux that I had played with... a full installation with all kinds of stuff fit on something like 6 3.5" floppy disks.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Doesn't rhyme with Linus and has a million flavors.
I remember having to type "make config && make zImage && make install" just to get a kernel to work. Everything was done from the command line, nothing was ever done in a GUI.
Wanted to install a package, you had to search for all the dependencies and their dependencies whilst praying that there would be no Exit error at the end of the compilation.
Linux users now have it far too easy, just hook into a repository for your distro and let it do the work for you.
I gotta agree -- Linux can be as simple or flexible as you want it to be. It's just a matter of your choice of distribution. This guy's post seems to be more a lament of how simple is life used to be. As in, he used to have time to screw around with linux all the time -- now he has to spend his time actually producing, rather than having an excuse to tinker...
Linuxconf was cool, but it had some major holes. I'm here to tell you that Yast by the nature of having far more modules, is a _MUCH_ better solution.
No matter which distro I use, I can rely on the fact that all Linices are POSIX compliant.
It is important that most users can rely on 'pointy-clickey' methods. That creates a bigger user community. OTOH, there will also be those who need more; even though they will always be the minority.
While I haven't done a cluster yet, I have done everything else from embedded up. Old school Linux lives because it is useful/necessary once you leave the bounds of your favorite distro.
The tree of life
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
linuxconf broke more than it fixed. I had only tried it a handful of times at the urgings of other enthusiasts. I hated having to undue all of the errors it would make on my machine. The idea was great but I still think its just not possible to make a one-size be-all-to-beat-all admin tool for every distro without messing something up somewhere.
I see selecting a linux distro to be kind of like getting married. Sure there are plenty of general rules of thumb that can help you achieve a successful marriage. But those alone aren't enough. You have to get to know your own spouse and their unique needs.
__________________________________
Free your mind - Flush your toilet
I'm probably the person on slashdot who has used linux the longest... yes, redhat goes all the way back to 5.2. I remember learning about NAT when splitting the ethernet with a Y jack didnt get me two internets (i expected a little fade, was all.) Radioshack didnt sell Ethernet signal boosters at the time.
I always get a little upset when someone tells me they are "an expert" at linux, and then tell me they use an old distro full of security holes. A modern ubuntu is going to have way better security because it's new. Further, older linux kernels actually cause damage to the internet with trace levels of malignant packets, from protocols days gone by. http 1.0 is a common example of this, consider the fleets of cloud servers running web 2.0 that have to strain with a hefty http 1.0 connection from a netscrape 4.0 web browser on linux 5.0.
I am glad that threads like this raise awareness ... I just hope that some people reading this post realize that, even though they have been a linux user for 25, 30 years, that maybe just maybe they missed a few boats on the way. Most experts are not even running 2.6 kernels yet, which support IPv6 router advertisements. These RAs, as they are called, will configure the new Internet rapidly and I pray linux experts are not left in the dust when they dont get their autoconf info.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
In the 1.2 kernel days, there was a really irritating bug that took forever to get fixed. The problem was that it would often not let you shut the system down or reboot until you deleted a file: /etc/shutdownpid
Very strange, but knowing that little factoid certainly impressed some people who actually knew a lot more about Linux than I did. :)
Seriously?
So what does that make me? I switched to FreeBSD from Linux before linuxconf even existed.
I'm pretty sure they guy writing it has no clue what 'old school' Linux actually was, he just seems to want something obscure and hard to use. Sounds more like a recently added fanboy than a long term user.
Do you remember Linux BEFORE X worked on it, let alone anything like GTK/KDE was a glimmer in someones eye.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
pppd -d -detach /dev/modem & :)
You're the guy that says that Rock and Roll stopped in the 70s. Give it a rest. Linux in 1997 is old-school, believe it or not. If you really think that Linux -- or FreeBSD -- for that matter is the same as it was in 1997, you're not paying attention.
I miss not having 42 daemons running in the background to do stuff that could simply be a library or utility loaded/run when needed.
I miss having the init system being a robust, straight-forward process of calling shell scripts in sequence.
I miss only needing to reboot for kernel updates.
I miss having one sound subsystem that never worked, rather than countless sound daemons which never work.
I miss having my immediately-after-logon process list fit in a single 80x25 terminal window.
I miss not having everything complain that DBUS isn't running.
I miss the Unix philosophy.
It seems like Linux is just as good as MS Windows these days. Too bad. I liked it when Linux was an improvement over MS Windows.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Did anyone else get a sense of nostalgia when watching the 2003-era gnome-based system that Mark used in the Social Network (gasp, Ubuntu wasn't around yet -- or if it was, nobody knew about it)
Hehe I remember starting a blog about the Gore-Bush elections on mandrake-based system which had some old version of Mozilla installed, like 0.6. But even that was using the 2.2 kernel, I'm afraid.
I think I'll have to hand in my geek card, for never having used a Linux 2.0-based system.
Should have used ZMODEM.
I stand by Vi. I still use E16 on all my desktops. I still use WM Dockapps. Hell, I still use BitchX, even. This will probably never change for me, as long as these tools still compile and run! I really miss hearing Linus' "pronunciation of Linux" sound-byte when setting up sound cards. However, I do NOT miss making boot floppies. I don't miss Linuxconf either, as it (in my eyes) started the trend towards huge, nasty config files. As for the "dumbing down" of Linux, I went the other way and started using things distros like Gentoo that keep the "old school" Linux feel..
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
Command-line tools usually have very well-documented configuration files, and even when they break, debugging is relatively easy.
Now we often have configuration files (e.g. font configuration and internal stuff used by many GUI applications) spread over many poorly-documented locations. If the GUI is not enough or is buggy, which is often the case, it is quite hard to diagnose the issue even for an experienced user like me.
After all, it usually takes much more work to design and program an acceptable GUI than a CLI with similar usability, at least for frequently-used software and users who can either type fast or do simple scripting. Developer time is scarce, so GUI tools are bound to lag behind in features, stability, usability, etc., and the world is complicated enough that a lot of effort is still needed to make things work at all.
Hey, believe me: nostalgia is my friend. I recently bought a new computer and dual-boot windows and FreeBSD on it. Frankly, I have no reason to have FreeBSD. I'm not a developer or system administrator and I find web browsing in the Unix environment to be a pain in the neck -- flash crashes the browser, etc.
The only reason that I ever installed Linux in the first place was because I had a computer without a license and could not afford to buy Windows 95. If that computer had a working OS installed, I never would have installed Linux.
Anyway, I installed FreeBSD for the hell-of-it, and not without some degree of frustration. My wife noted this and said "You just love to screw up your computer and fix it, don't you?" The answer: Yeah, basically I do.
there, I said it
See: http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2005/10/06.html
As for me, I do not miss the old days, where getting a Voodoo Banshee to work required dirty text editing in xf86config, mucking around with DRI and Mesa and whatnot.
Damn. You could have FLOWN to Helsinki....
Reminiscent of seeing Mandrake Linux on the shelves of bookstores and Walmart. ... and when KDE worked.
Uh. My ~/.xsessionrc file, in its entirety: wmaker. And no, I wasn't given GNOME or KDE or anything at install time, because I didn't ask for it. No one is stopping you from doing this, people are just using sissy configurations and distributions where the default is idiot mode.
I like reminiscing old school Linux, but I'm more interested in protesting people accidentally a couple things.
I for one, don't really miss the 'good old days' of downloading 28 or so floppies of SLS over a 14k modem, only to find that disk 7 has a error when you're attempting an install. Or working days on writing and tweaking an xconfig file. I admit, the excitement of running this 'cool new OS' is gone, but it is infinitely more usable so now I can actually get my work done.
In the days before broadband and cheap CD-R drives Linux updates used to come from Infomagic on CDs.
I would eagerly await when the local computer store would get this quarterly update of "shovel-ware" CDs, and hidden in it would be a gem, the six-CDs-in-a-box of Linux, and maybe a Slackware distro too.
I was sort of like having a geek Christmas every season, heading home and reading the package list, trying everything out, seeing what new drivers were now in the Kernel so I could get a better VGA card. And then one had DOOM on Linux!
All that pent up anticipation has now disappeared - I hate you yum!
I cut my teeth on Slackware .9 something that I had to download on an OS/2 box I had built.. yes.... OS/2... I had to download the floppies.. no ISO image at the time... I think eventually they allowed a generic TFTP or FTP session to download all the dependencies but that wasn't until years later and even on Dialup, it took hours... God, I can remember having to know ABSOLUTELY what hardware was inside the system I built.. I mean EVERYTHING in order to compile the kernel proper... and then after hours of work and Q&A with the config, you'd get the dreaded kernel panic.... Then back to the drawing board... Yeah, it was an effing nightmare, but man did I learn a lot... and I don't recall getting much sleep. Once Lynx was installed and vi and pine (do they still make pine?) I was set... But don't get me started on X-windows and Trident video drivers... I will start swinging....
I also remember (fondly) at some point in the compilation process (in verbose) I think I saw a mention of killing Kenny.. and the term, My God, they killed Kenny! You Bastards!
Gravity!... It's not just a good idea... It's the Law!
My favorite part was recompiling the kernel to get mouse support.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I have to chuckle at this:
I know this is counterintuitive, but there are days I really miss the challenge (and the ensuing celebration) of old-school Linux. Back in the day, getting Linux installed gave many users reason to shout their own variation of “Hoorah” to the clouds.
The challenge is there, if you venture out of in-kernel drivers and supported install scenarios. Yesterday I spent three hours trying to get Linux set up on my new HP Pavilion dm1z -- and I consider myself a competent Linux user.
It took me a little while to set up LVM with the root filesystem managed by LVM. Documentation for configuring GRUB for LVM isn't great, and in some places on the web is outright wrong. Fine, got that. Next, the wireless card is unsupported. To get it to work, you must get the driver from the manufacturer (who fortunately advertises Linux support), then apply patches to it from other sources to get the driver to compile with my kernel version. None of this is documented in one place -- different forums have various snippets that inch me forward. Believe me, I shouted "Hoorah" once I finally spilled enough sweat to get it to work. (After I got this to work, I wrote my own step-by-step instructions to save others the pain.)
Once I got past the wireless issues, I started X and determined that the Synaptics touchpad is misconfigured -- the hardware is touch-sensitive on the physical buttons, so pressing a touchpad button also moves the mouse. The issue appears to be fixed, but it hasn't made it into the version of xf86-input-synaptics that Gentoo has. I had to clone the git repo of that driver, build it myself, and manually set up the rule that masks that area of the touchpad. And even now, it still doesn't work correctly. Now I don't move the mouse when I click, but I also cannot click and drag -- once I click, the cursor is fixed. Now this Linux user is stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Challenges still abound, even on the most modern Linux kernel and distributions... just dare to venture out of the entrenched and supported hardware.
I don't miss the "challenge" one bit. If you're up for a challenge there are plenty of barebones and expert-friendly distros out there to cut your teeth over. However, things have progressed enough that if you're not prepared to use up what little free time you have tinkering around with shit to get it to work, we now have a lot more friendly options for people who want to actually USE their computers to do something useful.
Actually Yggdrasil plug and play linux (early to mid 90s) just worked, no tinkering. Graphics, sound, etc just came up working like Windows on my 486 DX2-66. I didn't understand all the bitching and moaning until I tried other distributions. Sadly it was many years before other distros achieved a comparable installation and setup experience.
my early linux days are full of required kernel builds and installing using make install, etc.
I miss the dudes who hadn't even hit 20 yet but had receding hairlines, used to say a bunch of stuff that you could quite tell was either crazy or genius, that wanted to convince you that this crazy Linux thing was awesome because it was in color (i.e. as opposed to black-and-white DOS or the VAX/VMS we dialed in to), and that thought it was totally reasonable to trust something that was *gasp* free (there's no way that something that was free was reliable enough to bother with).
...but no "serious administrator" would be caught dead using linuxconf.
In fact, the only GUI/TUI admin tool a "serious administrator" would ever use was smit/smitty on AIX, and that's only because the F6 key taught you how to do everything the right way (command line) faster than getting up and walking over to the bookshelf to find the appropriate Redbook.
SAM, admintool, linuxconf, YaST...all anathema to a truly "serious" administrator.
PS: And if you read the above and asked yourself, "What's AIX?" the only thing serious about you is your acne. Now pipe down, and get off my lawn.
Michael Jennings | HPC Systems Engineer, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab | Author, Eterm (eterm.org)
It was due to copyright reasons, from wikipedia:
"From version 3.9.2, the holder of the copyright, the University of Washington, changed the license so that even if the source code was still available, they did not allow modifications and changes to Pine to be distributed by anyone other than themselves. They also claimed that even the old license never allowed distribution of modified versions.[3]"
So there is now alpine.
... that kinda bugs me about the article is.. "Back in the early days, new, obscure distributions were popping up daily. Oh sure, most of them were spinoffs of Red Hat, Mandriva, SuSE, or Debian." Isn't Mandriva based on RedHat? And SuSE Based on Slackware, and Slackware missing all together? At least as far as actual original distributions the others were built upon?
Yggdrasil.
That is all.
i found Redhat 5.1 - it was on a magazine cover disc, kernel 2.0.35 or something i had moved to Windows from my old BBC Acorn machine,
i was liking the GUI on Windows, but quickly tired of its flakiness, even back then i moved to NT, trying to escape, but found the CD on a mag cover,
and inserted it and here i still am, 13 or 14 years later..
Linuxconf was good, i remember the X version, but preferred the console. i look back fondly and see how Linux has grown and matured,
as indeed most tech has, and i didn't think, (and still dont) think that Linux was much more difficult than any other OS, if you've made a
decision to use anything, even a OS, you need to learn to use it to get done either what you need, or want, i am interested in OS's so i found
Linux's open approach to information to tasks on the OS refreshing, and, interesting. yes you could do occasional similar things on Win then,
but i felt as though i was chipping away at a large unmoveable brittle block, just in fear that this block shattering into a zillion useless pieces.
i remember those dreadful winmodems too, and reading (probably on FidoNET) that my new fancy modem, er, wasnt.
- but in those pre-google days it was a cinch to find the firmware and stuff for the damn thing and make it into a modem
and resume my online adventures. happy days. Fvwm was my desktop, then found KDE 1.0 it was, then Gnome later on,
i remember the thrill hearing Linus pronouncing his name and 'Linux' as 'Linux' after running sndconfig.
nice now that i can now just give my friends Linux CDs in case their Win breaks, and some have completely switched, some
are still on the fence, some are still scared, one bought a Mac. well, its his money. so a few years on and i'm really pleased
where most desktop linux is right now, with the exception of certain 'technologies' like pulseaudio and some real dumbing down like Ubuntu's
auto-run fail, ironically just as Microsoft has disabled the same 'feature'
Message to Ubuntu. you can dilute anything down until its tasteless.
-Randy-
Good times. I came home from the local computer swap meet with two CDs. FreeBSD and Yggdrasil plug and play Linux. As a UC grad I naturally started to install FreeBSD but it crashed. So I tried Yggdrasil. It installed, was pretty straight forward, no surprising questions for a person who had installed MS Windows a few times. It restarted, graphics (ATI) worked, sound (SoundBlaster) worked, networking (3Com) worked - all were automatically configured. I started using it and had a great time. I wished I had it when I was still in school. It would have been so much better than calling into the VAX from home to work on UNIX based projects.
Later I tried other distros and was introduced to the non-joy of having to enter timing parameters for my video monitor, and similar nonsense, during setup. Linux had seemed to have taken a few steps backwards.
Heh. I actually tagged this story "getoffmylawn".
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I got your admin tool right here
#_
I bought the book 'The Internet CD' on a whim, and because it claimed to have a version of Linux on it. This was the same day I finished a marathon support sesson with SCO because an app vendor decided to remap the entire print subsystem on a SCO 4.2 server, and made it virtually impossible to install a new printer for ANY OTHER PURPOSE without paying them for a call. Not that SCO was cheap, but we had a contract. Only took 6 hours to rebuild that, ugh.
But the book had a CD that included Slackware 0.9, if I remember correctly. It was a mess, but it did survive, and I had Lynx running in two days... Hehe... Good times...
I miss a distro that fit on a CD. I miss being able to do EVERYTHING at command-line, by default. I miss Linuxconf too. I miss predictable file locations, 'service' working, and joe. I miss running my mail and web server on an old Athlon 1.3GHz board with 512MB RAM and a 40GB HD. For three years. Without a reboot.
Of course, to be fair, I miss the open proxy serving the needs of anonymous perv browsers all over the world. I miss being completely pwned by one of them when I shut it off. I miss trying to keep a 6-day Usenet feed via satellite. I miss dialing into the modem to resurrenct the old Cisco 2514 router, damn, that thing lasted forever. I miss the first realization that someone was trying to break into my hosts. I miss the first time I wrote a hosts.deny to stop them, and it lasted for 6 months. I miss calls in the night asking me why my server was sending 3 million emails through someone else's mail server.
Good times.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I found the actual article quite dull - nothing to reminisce on there, really (except linuxconf - that what where I couldn't get anything configured properly). However, the comments here have made an interesting read. Perhaps we could do this now and then without having to wait for an actual story?
Friends that are newcomers to Linux, complain to me all the time about their wireless cards not working, right out of the box. Then I share my first experiences with Linux to put things into perspective.
A friend had bought a copy of Slackware 3.4 from Walnut Creek CDROM (cdrom.com). We also had to buy a box of 100 floppy disks from the local office-supply Big Box store. You see, there wasn't a lot of manufacturers with BIOS support for booting CDROM disks. In those days you couldn't just hop onto an OEM's website and download the latest BIOS flash image direct from the manufacturer, to get support for CDROM booting.
Even if you could have downloaded BIOS images from the manufacturer, I don't recall any OS installers to bootstrap directly from CDROM, that was still a fairly new idea at the time. Both Windows 95, and Linux distribution installers had to have a floppy bootstrap first, then load an ATAPI driver to read the rest of the installation files from CD.
In those days, if you hadn't bought the CD from Walnut Creek you had to stay up late, downloading floppy images and checksumming the downloaded images on your 14.4 modem. Even if you had bought the CD, you would have to take the time to image that big box of floppy disks. Then you would have to check the disks for consistency (so you wouldn't get interrupted by a bad floppy half-way through the install). So we would trudge on through the night, making floppy sets. The floppy sets break down like this:
So a full install would require you to image 99 floppy disks, not even counting boot and root install disks. So to get a Linux system capable of compiling the Kernel source, and networking with other machines, that would take at least 45 floppy disks individually imaged.
If you want a GUI and some windowed applications, that would be 37 additional floppies. That is 82 floppy disks in all. The first time I installed Linux, I didn't know what to do with it. It was comparable to DOS, or even the OS on my old Commodore. It was just a basic shell, blinking cursor, and the DOS commands I knew, besides "DIR" did not work. It was a proud moment to get the damned thing, installed and booted up. Even if you didn't know what the hell to do with it, once you got to that point.
A year, or two, later at University I could network install RedHat from a local NFS mirror in less than a few hours. Modern day, you can do a full network install in a few minutes. DVD images can be downloaded through bittorrent in less than an hour, and installed. You can even install Linux from a bootable USB flash drive that fits in your pocket.
Most everything works out of the box, from desktop to enterprise-grade server hardware. Most of the wireless cards will work, with a little bit of tweaking and hunting down external firmware. Those new to Linux may not realize, or may simply forget, how far the technology has come in just a few years. Anyone that complains about how "hard" it is to install and use Linux, should try installing from floppy sets to get a little perspective.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
Linuxconf was *horrid*. It violated every single one of Eric Raymond's guidelines on open source interfaces, at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html, and even violated the guidelines others contributed. It was also hideously unstable in managing kernels and network interfaces, many of which configurations it would erase and destroy without warning. (RedHat still has never gotten pair bonding or DHCP credentials right!!!!) It tried to do too many things, and got most of them wrong in one way or another. The only open source tool I've seen of similarly poor standards compliance and abuse of software setups was the similarly conceived YaST from SuSE, which was slightly worse. RedHat dumped Linuxconf for good reasons.
If you want a *good* interface for overally management, I highly recommend WebMin. It handles distinct modules with distinct privileges for distinct users, it does a *much* better job of handling NIS and even MySQL, and it's overall a vastly superior tool.
Remember when you had to recompile your kernel to get sound to work and how long that took on a 486? Ahh... the good old days.
Been using Unix since before Windows was pre-emptive. Learned Windows in '95 and learned IP admin same time. Then got into crypto for obvious reasons. Recently 2011 using/learning Ubuntu/Debian since required for project (see below).. Also requires WinOS and JVM, but that's another matter. Very nice, guys. I like proc and sys. Seen predecessors in BSD flavors, but this is nice. Love the apt-get advice. Much nicer than man -k. Run under Sun's VM manager Box, very cool. Nice that all the *nix tools are there. Developing for TI's DaVinci platform. Thanks for keeping the dialect alive. Was much amused a few years ago when I had to deal with an Apple box and found it was *nix below. And they had emacs! Score.
Maybe grad school.
Old school linux sucked.
Man, I'm one of the young ones around here. I don't even remember Linux 2.4!
(I believe I started using GNU/Linux around Linux 2.6.22, or whatever was available for Ubuntu Dapper, in 2006.)
But I can remember waiting weeks for a Free BSD manual and discs that suggested installing NT for all of your IRQ settings. I can't say I miss that very much.
Speaker Doom was a distribution of Doom for Linux, with Linux that'd been equipped with a PC Speaker driver, so you could get Sound Blaster-like sound effects without an actual sound card.
Basically you got it as a zipfile and extracted it (UMSDOS filesystem), then ran a batch file to boot Linux from DOS, and /then/ Doom would launch. I think this came with v2.0.32 of the kernel. Don't know which distro it was derived from; Slackware maybe.
This would have been 1998, and it's still available:
http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?id=9704
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
lolwhut
Living at home wasting time on a hobby OS, which was mostly unusable but now provides me with a career.
Anyone who installed Slackware from froppies or went through the libc5 -> libc6 upgrade nightmare doesn't miss it much. At least I don't. The fundamental tools are not specific to Linux and are much, much older than silliness like linuxconf.
0.12 was about the time I became aware of it. But at the time I had a 286 and was in college. It took a while, but luckily I had enough saved up from my Co-Op job that I put together a 486DX/33 system with 4M, and 120M HD for about $1000. Don't remember the first version I used, but I definitely remember the SLS Linux (SLS stood for Soft Landing Software, if I remember correctly). I partition the harddrive 60M for DOS/Windows and 50M for Linux and 10M for /home. I would bring packs of floppies into the computer lab and use the Sun workstations to download the each new version of SLS Linux. I remember waiting for a LONG time before support for X was added to Linux.
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
I will go over the points of the article:
1. Linuxconf
Sure you could do anything but it was also buggy! Why would you want that back? And why call it dumbing down? That's insulting and a leetist attitude that linux does not need.
2. The Challenge
Why would anyone miss this? The challenge? I like things easy that work right away. I don't want to fiddle.
3. WordPerfect
Well now we got open office which I find way better and it's free too.
4. Install Fests
I don't particularly care about community and whenever I think of LUG, I think of a sausage fest and that just makes me nauseous.
5. Linus sound byte
This goes back to point 2, I don't care. This means it was actually harder to get your sound working even more then it is today and it's still not there.
6. Windows Managers
This one just annoys the hell out of me. Why would you give someone this much choice when its something a programmer should have made for them. That is why KDE and Gnome came about because end users didn't want this decision made for them.
7. Linus Torvald
Yeah he created linux, but end users don't care about that anymore. They care if it works and if they can get their email and surf the internet. This is mostly a fanboi rant here who thinks he should be recognized by most people. This is like mac fanboi's who get mad if you ask them "steve who?".
8. Loki Games
Way to go linux community. Show you want something but don't pay for it. This is ultimately what is holding back linux. Not being friendly to companies who want to deliver proprietary solutions. Making it harder for them to do that.
9. Vi/Emac wars
Oh this still happens. You know what surpassed that? Nano. It's a much better text file editor and yet they will never admit to that.
10. Thousands of distributions
Oh yes, let's have lots of choice so I can pick more to choose from when they're all the same, just so I can be confused. What is so useful about wanting this back? You know why windows and mac os x are used? Because there is only ONE version of it for end users. And if you bring up the 4 versions of windows or that there is also windows servers, end users don't need the server version. And end users dont need ultimate or professional and starter is useless, so you only got home premium. And if you got 3 gb or less of ram, you get 32-bit. If you got 4 gb or more of ram, you get the 64-bit version. But the oem's end up making that decision for them anyways.
What a useless article. That's like asking why would someone want to live in the past instead of the present? There's no reason to want to when it comes to technology.
Downloading the 20-some-odd installation floppies in Slakware... I think that was 2. And forgetting to run FTP in binary mode for the first 2, so having to redownload them again the next day. And then running ircii+epic in text mode on a 386 SX/16 that didn't have enough oomph to manage X11. Or running around South Florida looking for terminating resistors for two 10baseT Ethernet adapters so I could set up a little 2 machine network in my house...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Once Slackware got to to many floppies, I started buying them from Infomagic and Cheapbytes. Boot, root, extras, too much to download...
Why was the linuxconf disappeared?
I've been a linux user too, but have not experience the linuxconf-era before. I wonder why they removed that.
This article Reminiscing-Old-School-Linux is very much related to what I've read about "How I Survive Using Old Technology in Today’s High-Tech World" in:
http://codedincantation.com/blog/2011/01/12/using-good-old-pentium-3-how-i-survive/
Did anyone else start reading the summary in the voice of Dwight Schrute after the pompous "dumbing down" statement?
Linuxconf was such crap. It *WAS* dumbing down Linux, making it far to easy for "admins" (and I do use the term loosely) to configure a system. In general it led to insecure systems, systems that were just plain badly configured and barely worked, or file corruption (especially if you ever hand edited a file after linuxconf was done and went in to edit some other thing with linuxconf).
Having been on the tech support end of people using linuxconf, I can't believe anyone would remember it fondly. I can see wanting a simple interface that can configure *everything*, but I don't prefer admins that have some clue what the options do.
I put on my robe and wizard hat..
It complains about various things which haven't changed: 1: No linuxconf? Try webmin... 7: Linus Torvalds still rocks. Git for the win... 9: The vi/emacs wars never ended... 10: There are still hundreds of distros...
Managed to destroy a monitor by adding the wrong modline or whatever it was called, in xf86config
Anyone else remember the pain of getting 0.9 up and running on an Amiga with the watchtower filesystem? Utterly pointless, but fun.
The modern linux is wonderful. There are lots more options and lots of them suck, but some don't. In the old days, there were no options. The one way sucked (sometimes). Todays linux still has everything intact and if you dont want all the Walmart Linux applications, you dont have to run them. Try Gentoo if you still really like to create the universe. But even there you have MUCH more stability and MUCH more supported hardware then in the bad old days.
Haha, yes: when Slackware was the new kid in town, and Minix was The Enemy. Good times, good times.
Actually leaves bash in the dust. More consistent, more composable, more robust. Extensibility which reaches beyond creating new text-parsing or text-producing commands to allows the very same command patterns to be re-used from within program logic. My sig is a one-line (121 chars IIRC) improved slashdot reader (see if you can tell how it is improved).
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
Makes me feel old!!!!
There was a better alternative back in the nineties called SMODEM. It had a bidirectional transfer of one file into each direction, and a real-time chat at the same time. For example, the Finnish BBS called MBnet used this to connect users into a group chat whenever they were downloading with SMODEM.
I doubt it was available for the first Linux images though.
Note: I made an account to say this.
I think it was a two-floppy SLS demo set that I came across at Berkeley, that put me on the path... I do remember downloading Slackware floppy images from Walnut Creek CDROM's massive mirror site, a combination of a telnet account and zmodem. Linux on my various scraped together PCs got me through my CS degree, much more useful than the over-crowded workstation labs on campus (those were for socializing, not getting programming done).
It's remembering my hopped-up 386 w/ 20 MB of RAM and 40 MB HDD that makes me sad regarding today's smart phones and embedded routers etc. I had Linux, an X-Windows environment, full compiler tool chain, and was able to do all my coursework on that little thing, and now systems with much more resources are ubiquitous and mostly crippled, turned into consumption-driven media devices.
If you want ricer, look for Ultimate Edition 2.8 based on Ubuntu. See if you make it past the firefox animated skin
The Linux kernel is the operating system because it is monolithic kernel, not a microkernel as many likes to think and it has stayd as difficult and hard to use since first few years when it was released.
The other software in the software system has in other hand changed a lot for the mainstream and especially the software what are responsible for the Graphica User Interface (GUI) and in this case mostly KDE SC (then KDE) and GNOME. And all those changes has been come up since 98 times.
First they were in the Mandrake (today Mandriva and the fork Mageia) and S.U.S.E (today openSUSE and SLED) because they had the greatest GUI tools to manage system and those were MCC (Mandrake Control Center) and YAST.
And even today those distributions are easiest distributions for desktops. Dont take it bad but Ubuntu and others what just use GNOME (or KDE SC) tools are just so far behind MCC and Yast config tools.
And actually the software system configuration were never so difficult, you only needed to know how to use a text editor (okay, if you were forced to use EMACS or VI you were in problems) and then you could just go around text files what just toke time. It was not difficult, just time consuming task.
Today it is still time consuming task and actually even more difficult because avarage users still does not know anything about what belongs to what. Good if they know what difference is directory and text file. Or what is the internet browser.
So the real gameplay changer has been that the systems are more and more pre-configured for the avarage user. That they do not need to start learning but just using and it is all about pre-configuration. Even pro users finds it more difficult to build and config their desktops system from scratch after HD failure. It is much easier just to pull system image from latest backup and continue working. And that it is all about.
"Reminiscing Old School Linux" - This reads like someone accidentally a word.
when I moved out of home-home, my new rent was cheaper than the isdn bills whilst living at home(and that apartment had ethernet to internet, in 2000).
but one of the things I remember from linux early days was that it was easier to set up the isdn in the linux with howtos than with official manuals in windows 95(the isdn card came with sw that was used to call up a call center in germany to get the proper windows tcp/ip drivers). and that applied to all hardware drivers, if you had a recent(less than 9 months old) cd set then the chances were pretty good that it had drivers for all even crazy hardware you had included. even 3dfx glide worked super in linux back then, and so did support for obscure sound cards and a large bunch of printers too. the hw support has detoriated since then considerably!
the time I installed nt4, I used it only for couple of days, long enough to download redhat(since then I turned to debian). because well, if you have 16mb of memory you want to play mp3's from command line.
but nowadays I use windows 7, for various reasons, like commercial and non-commercial entertainment. and it just works.
of course, linux has still a place in my life but mostly as machines that I only see through ssh.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
'You must be new here.'
Welcome aboard!
*whispers ominously* Psssst! Guard your sanity well!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
TCL
Perl
Python
Ruby
Whatever
Take your pick.
CLI or If I am writing a simple script, I use bash or actually Bourne shell scripting (because bash is also missing the point) because the output is for *me* or for simple parsing. Anything beyond that and I use a language(above) which supports what I need to do.
My (114 characters better than yours) Bourne shell based slashdot reader works like this:
firefox[lf]
1 line 7 characters, 8 if you include the linefeed.
Deleted
As happy as I am not to have anything to do with Windows any more, I would _love_ to have proper data types on the shell.
And more than STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR.
I fear that a STDOBJ is in the long, long distant future, though.
On the other hand, keeping everything text-based allowed programs with absolutely no regard for old techniques. The objects of any STDOBJ would need to be very very very well thought out.
Linuxconf is what introduced me to the 'immutable' attribute of ext2fs. After being bitten a couple of time with a reset of my soundcard parameters (specific ones at that, it was an IBM laptop with strange all-in-one video+sound chip), I sought a solution, and I finally chattr'ed the config file to +i. End of the problem.
So in a way, I'm grateful to linuxconf for enticing me into learning more deeper and arcane knowledge of linux. But that's about all I found it useful for.
a full installation with all kinds of stuff fit on something like 6 3.5" floppy disks.
You lucky bastard! My first download of Linux came on 600' of paper tape.
(And your 6 floppies must have been without X-windows.)
If "good enough" means running the whole damn internet, then I guess you have a point. If "good enough" means powering the majority of smart phones, then you're spot on. If "good enough" means dominating the supercomputer market, then you're golden.
"...the one I thought was the best of the best was sh. From this single interface, you could administer everything - and I mean EVERYTHING - on your Linux box. From the kernel on up, you could take care of anything you needed.'"
Reads about the same.
Or beige boxed...
You can still roll your own distribution: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
> I miss RHL 6.2. That was as stable and clean an OS as I've used.
Oh, you... ;)
www.ppshopping.us/
I suspect I got to Linux a year or two before the original author. In '95-6 getting X running working right was the real challenge. There was a VGA mode which was reliable but if you wanted better graphics that was based on your graphics card chip set. There wasn't quite as much sharing then. The commercial X servers which ran about $100 were a dream in terms of getting stuff working. Some of the distributions like OpenLinux even included a commercial X server, though I tended to use RedHat, 4.1, 4.2 because their documentation was so good on so many other things.
It was a point where XFree86 had an easy target. They could see exactly what the difference was between the free version and something that people liked a lot more.
One of the things the author misses is the early distributions were more different than one another. I think because he started at a point where Mandrake... already existed. When I started Debian, RedHat and Caldera were the leaders taking over from distributions like Slackware, yggdrasil, LST. They were starting to envision Linux as more than just a better Minix and instead have it start to move into the space of commercial Unixes. What sort of system would Linux be? Those were heady days.
I'd say that RedHat more so than they are given credit for since they've done a 180 on this, was a huge proponent of end user Linux. They really were in my opinion the ones that saw Linux as an operating system for the masses. Caldera was excellent at ease of use, but they wanted to be SCO not Windows (be careful what you wish for). Debian really wanted to be BSD with lots of GPL software. Then '98-9: Mandrake, Corel, Lindows, the Linux for end philosophy became key. There was nothing else in the UNIX world like it, a real vision of a desktop UNIX running on cheap hardware for millions of people. RedHat's vision became the universal vision and what was distinctive about Linux.
At the same time Rhapsody which people weren't talking about as much had the same vision.
I was a young kid, but I think Redhat 5.1 was the shit. Back when you had to be pretty specific with hardware, what was supported and what wasn't. Often times it was a nightmare. Was a ton of work getting my hands on free hardware and to find out it wouldn't work, then I'd have to beg my dad for something I knew would work. With today's work being done on the kernel, it's been a long time since I've come across unsupported hardware.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Anybody want to comment on how good (or bad) Webmin is for that kind of stuff?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Funny, I don't remember Linux being hard to install. Setting up X windows was a bit of a challenge, and it came with the risk of frying your monitor if you got it very wrong. In 1996 I put together a junker computer using an old 386 motherboard with 8mb of ram and a 100mb hard disk. This machine served as a test bed to try out Linux. I installed Slackware from it's gazillion floppies (downloaded painfully one at a time over a dialup modem connection). Later I got a CD rom drive onto the machine and with the Walnut Creek CD rom collection I tested out Debian and Redhat. Debian was the hardest to install, the problem being dselect. Deselect was NEVER very user friendly, and once you made a mistake it took a lot of hair pulling to fix it. I finally did figure it out on my third or fourth attempt and of all the distros I tried Debian ended up as the winner. The 386 has been replaced several times, with K6, Pentium, Pentium III, Athlon, and Athlon64 CPU machines. I did switch to Gentoo for a while hoping to get more performance out of it's custom compiled kernel and applications. Gentoo though is very bleeding edge and every time you did even a minor upgrade the risk of breaking things was great. The worst problem was all the configuration files, one for EVERY bit of software installed. Finally, after my system got itself hosed beyond repair after an upgrade I simply reformatted the disk (except for my user partition) and went back to Debian. I'm still using Debian today (sorta kinda. I'm actually running Linux Mint which is a variant of Ubuntu, which is a variant of Debian).
When I started using linux, maybe around 8 years ago, you still had to manually mount / unmount volumes, which never bothered me although I understand it had to be changed for Joe User. This is back when KDE was the Kool Desktop Environment, at the time I used WMaker and absolutely loved it. In WMaker, there was a small widget to mount / unmount volumes, and it always worked flawlessly - one click to mount, one to unmount, never any trouble. But then as time went by auto-mount appeared, I started to use KDE / Gnome, and for years it was horrible. CDs would fail to be mounted, the CLI command wouldn't work, or unmounting would fail and the CD couldn't be ejected - it was terrible. So personally that was the tool I really missed.
(I'm assuming automount works fine nowadays, I haven't used linux in years)
Supporting hardware was easier in those days because hardware was hardware, you couldn't emulate hardware functions at the driver layer... Plus many people still used DOS...
Most soundcards were soundblaster compatible...
Most video cards were VGA or VESA compatible...
There was a standard for early non DMA IDE controllers...
Most ethernet cards were NE2000 compatible...
Most printers at the very least supported generic text mode, and there weren't that many different graphics modes, higher end printers just did postscript...
Modems were straight serial devices supporting the standard hayes command set...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
"even though they have been a linux user for 25, 30 years,"
Anyone who claims to have been using Linux for longer than 20 years is a big BS artist. Linus released Linux in 1991 ya know!
Yes, I liked the tool as well.
The the dumbing down of linux system administration did not begin with the disappearance of tools like this, it began with the appearance of tools like this.
You can't tout your system administration skills by moaning about the disappearance of all-in-one do-it-all utilities like this that do everything for you.
I don't know I just notice the hypocrisy of it all."Hey look at me using linuxconf for everything, I'm elite. But that tool your using now, it's easier than the all-in-one easy sysadmin-in-a-box tool that I used to use, oh I miss the old days".
I've never used these silly tools.
vi - my sysadmint tool
For Love Of Pete, Please Inspect Every Sector
Horrendous international calling fees.
I fondly remember a $1700 bill. And the shit I went through to pay it. Working double shifts and shit.
Yeah, but I bet having the latest distro really impressed the chicks, huh?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
...the funnest stuff of all! Having to build practically everything from source, including the IIRC 3 complete build process to bootstrap gcc. Took hours on a 386 w/4MB of RAM!
Of course I didn't have to download over POTS but ftped over x.25 network one of the last things before we had the first T1. What a difference that T1 was after that then going T3.
I joined the Linux kernel mailing list in January 1992 - well before something as advanced as 0.12!
Considering 0.12 came out in February of '92, I think you have a different notion of "well before" than most people.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I'm sure that FreeBSD is good for allowing you to feel smug about loving Unix
Wow...jump to conclusions much? Did you read the part about where I used to use FreeBSD years ago...y'know, before Flash capability was a critical to viewing mainstream websites and multimedia content as it is today?
I use FreeBSD because it's the last thing Unix I used 7 or 8 years ago. I know how to update it (cvsup, buildworld, KERNCONF, ports, etc) and I know how to configure it (rc.conf).
Spent hours myself back in the 90s in college downloading all of the slackware disks to install it on my crappy packard bell during college. X did not want to work on that machine....
i am so very tired....
Of all the admin tools I have used on Linux, the one I thought was the best of the best was vi. From this single interface, you could administer everything — and I mean EVERYTHING — on your Linux box
I remember, back in 90, maybe 91, sending a guy 3 boxes of 3.5" floppies for him to put slackware on for me to play with.
Next to that was the "Printer on fire" error message i'd get every time i took my dot matrix printer offline to put in paper :)
and it still is. Here's list of the real Unixes I've used in college, grad school, and professionally:
I've also used Linux (mostly Fedora), but since (re-)discovering MacOS, I've come to realise that Apple is the last great Unix.
Man. Memories for sure. I got my start with Linux as a freshman in college in 1992. I happened to be living in the same dorm building as Matt Welsh, a major contributor to the early Linux documentation efforts. He hooked me up with a box of 3.5" floppies holding SLS Linux with the 0.98 kernel on it. Good times.
Well, for some value of "Good times" :) I think being extremely young and naive helped me keep up the energy to play around and be adventurous with Linux, as unstable and fluid as it was in those days. I probably would not have the patience anymore. I guess that's why I'm perfectly happy with Ubuntu now. Too many memories of recompiling the kernel to get the newest (and hopefully less buggy) ethernet or Tseng Labs ET4000 X11 drivers!
A trip down old school lane is always full of romanticism ... I remember my first encounter with Linux as a visiting student in Finland ... I got hooked immediately by the immense possibilities, the fact that you had full control of your system ... provided that you spent hours and hours finding out how to actually get things done ... in the beginning at least. I remember vividly the hours I used to spend just to be able to install something from source ... long live tarballs (?)
Luckily, linux is still open and time is still the limit, so I have nothing to really miss, but the free time that I had. Now, in lack of time ... I chose the easy way out ... linux for human beings they called it ... and as a human being I thought it was very appropriate and well behaved :-) ... sure it's a little unstable every now and then, but nothing to write home about.
As someone mentioned earlier it's all about personal choice and I think that's what really makes linux stand out, ie the fact that you still have a choice and now I feel there are more choices than ever. In the past you had to be some sort of computer techie to use linux, whereas now both experts and non experts can use it, with my mother being a bright example of a non-expert user happily using ubuntu.
we have a saying in Greece, every last year 'is' better ... (at least in our heads)
regards
He could have bought Windows.
(*Runs for cover.*)
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Well, I don't miss the version of KDE that came with Debian Slink. Three triangles and nothing else except me, confused as hell, going swiftly back to a virtual console. Sort of like my first look at Gnome-shell, last night.
I was lucky to purchase the nice 4 cd pack of Slackware at my local computer back in 1997. Right along with my first two 10baseT nics and a horrid 4 port hub. Learned the ins and outs of the famous ipfwadm (pre ipchains and iptables) for some sweet ip masquerading. And who could forget minicom and those lovely pap and chap scripts? And dare I say it, BitchX + prevail?
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
oh so, thank you for the information.
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Grammar Nazi alert:
"Reminiscing" is an intransitive verb, you can't "Reminisce Old School Linux", you "Reminisce ABOUT Old School Linux"