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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.
...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.
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.
Linux conf: http://tinyurl.com/4jfae7f
From wikipedia:
Linuxconf is a configurator for the Linux operating system. It features different user interfaces: a text interface, a web interface and a GTK interface. Currently, most Linux distributions consider it deprecated compared to other tools such as Webmin, the system-config-* tools on Red Hat Enterprise Linux/Fedora, drakconf on Mandriva, YaST on openSUSE and so on. Linuxconf was deprecated from Red Hat Linux in version 7.1 in April 2001.
I never had the pleasure of using it. However, making things easier in Linux isn't "dumbing down" the operating system. It's simply making things more accessible. Done properly, the fancy GUI stuff just snaps together with the existing CLI and config file stuff and then you get to choose the most appropriate way to manage and configure your system. That's a win for absolutely everyone.
And that's what will keep Linux competitive--the ability to meet novice computer users alongside having the power and the efficiency for die-hard CLI lovers.
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'
Yeah, that was weird. In some bullet point the author is missing the times when Linux was "hard" to install and in another he is missing tools like linuxconf. No UNIX admin needs configuration tools to do his/her job. All you need is vi.
I agree with that. There is a difference between making easier and dumbing down. I'm all for making things easier, but, I can't stand when something is dumbed down.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
And that's what will keep Linux competitive--the ability to meet novice computer users alongside having the power and the efficiency for die-hard CLI lovers.
Don't worry. linuxconf is every bit as capable as vi of emacs with regards to fucking up your fresh linux install. It's the user, not the interface, who makes the mistakes.
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.
I miss "make dep" and "make mrproper" from the kernel building process.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Depends on what you consider easier. IIS 6 to IIS 7 decentralized an assload of config from a handful of possible locations to dozens of different applets, advanced settings sidebars, etc, and most of it isn't the most descriptive as to what settings may be contained within. Not using Linuxconf, I can't say for sure if what replaced it was better, but changing something for the sake of changing it isn't always good.
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
I run mint now, find it easy and quick to install. I like the fact that I don't have to get into the nitty gritties. I just don't have the time to fiddle with all the little bits.
How about we all get on the bandwagon? Linux is as easy to use as Windows, and as a point of fact tends to run much better on older hardware.
Lets throw off the old way was better, and get on with the new way.
My two cents.
Used to avoid such problems by building RPM's of compiled sources. It's also great to keep track of installed from sources stuff.
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
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.
And that is the true reason behind the story.
Every thing is always better way back when. When women stayed in the kitchens, your slaves did your gardening, and you had hours and hours of free time to do nothing but smoke weed, drink, and talk about the good old days.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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.
Damn. You could have FLOWN to Helsinki....
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!
With powershell I'm not 100% certain that's true any more.
Having true OO based outputs from commands instead of having to split on tabs/pipe characters/etc is much easier, less prone to error, and more portable across upgrades (ps changing its default column order won't break all of your scripts if you're talking to a process object with well defined properties, etc).
Used to freak out people when I did # cat vmlinuz > /dev/fd0 to make a boot disk.
Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
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 consider myself an old-school Linux user, but maybe I'm just in denial, because I remember Linuxconf fondly. I came to Linux a few years before Why-Too-Kay with a little experience as a Unix user but mostly as a WinDOS tech, and Linuxconf was an invaluable set of training wheels as I learned to set up Apache and Sendmail and BIND on the first *n*x system where I had root. I mostly use vi these days (and Webmin for daemons that I'm not as familiar with), but if it weren't for Linuxconf to get me rolling with Linux, I might have suffered through Windows admin-ing for a few more years (at least until OS X Server came along).
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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).
"Linux" is a near-rhyme with "Linus" if you pronounce both "Linux" and "Linus" as Mr. Torvalds does.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Ok I wasn't going to participate in this particular flame war but... POWERSHELL?! That shitty bash knock-off duct-taped to the side of windows is your counter-example? In what sick world do you live where you need stdin/stdout to have built-in object support and you think that this is actually making things *easier* and *less* prone to error? If you sincerely believe *any* of that mad statement to be true then you're REALLY doing it wrong.
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}$/
Remember, to a Linux user different = bad. Technology hit its peak around 1978, and everything invented since then is an evil demon-seed.
I like to call them "tech-luddites". They pretend to be techy, but in reality they hate everything new.
Welcome.
Comment of the year
I cut my teeth on Slackware 3.5
What exactly is "I cut my teeth on"? Consider: is there any normal course of action in the business of mankind during which a person willingly cuts their teeth? We have these fantastical horror stories about warriors in ancient barbarian tribes filing their teeth for the purpose of rending and tearing the enemy to pieces and appearing ferocious. Do you really believe that? By the time mankind is able to fashion metal weaponry there is really no purpose for filing teeth, if ever there was.
I can't tell if you're wildly off base on purpose or not, so I'll provide a counter-example: Consider a small child. When born, it has no teeth, and when the teeth start to develop and grow in, what do they do? They cut through the gums, so to speak. So, "cutting teeth" is something that someone does when they're very young, or just starting out (as in, just starting out in life). Hence, "cutting one's teeth" has become roughly analogous to the early skills learned when starting any new endeavor.
http://crummysocks.com
Shouldn't it be "getoffmylan"?
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
Should have used ZMODEM.
The first thing I noticed when I got dial-up Internet is that TCP/IP is *dreadfully* inefficient compared to BBSs and ZMODEM.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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
Linux is as easy to use as Windows
By what metric?
By the metric which my wife constantly complains about her work Windows PC locking up or something significant breaking, but the home Ubuntu PC Just Works.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
You would'nt recognise a troll when it sat on your face and farted, right?
On behalf of the Estate of JRR Tolkein I demand you Cease and Desist your use of the Tolkein Estate's Intellectual Property of the word "troll".
The Intellectual Property "troll" is patently integral to the Tolkein Estate's Intellectual Property known as "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, and therefore, remains the property of The Estate.
You have 30 days to comply.
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?
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..
The true old-school admin tool was vi (or ed even). Linuxconf was already "dumbed down" in many veteran's eyes.
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*
On behalf of the Estate of JRR Tolkein I demand you Cease and Desist your use of the Tolkein Estate's Intellectual Property of the word "Tolkein".
The Intellectual Property "Tolkein" is patently integral to the Tolkein Estate's Intellectual Property known as "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, and therefore, remains the property of The Estate.
You have 30 days to compl-RECURSION ERROR/DIV BY ZERO
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
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.
Actually the proper spelling is "Tolkien". I wonder if he did that on purpose to avoid copyright lawsuits :)
which is totally what she said
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)