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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.'"
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}$/