Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
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'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 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.
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.
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}$/
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
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.
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*
Small primes are even better.