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Linux Video Tutorials From 1995
An anonymous reader writes "Given that this year marks the 20th Anniversary of the Linux kernel, it is hardly surprising that anyone digging into their media collection might pull out something interesting, such as video tutorials on how to install early version of now popular distributions, like Slackware or Red Hat"
Ha! Those take me back. Back when we thought bezel smooth text with drop shadow was the best ever.
Rock on you crazy hippies, rock on.
My first HTML page had a whole bunch of line dividers. Different types, like one was a saw blade, another was a moving color animation.
It was terrible, Im glad the internet wasnt archived as much back then.
I've never used Redhat since and don't feel the need to ever go back to it after the shoddy aftercare service I got.
My web domain.
The Year of the Linux Desktop!
-- Flame me and I will happily flame you back. Bring it!
Like the machines in 1995 the videos too are slow - several minutes of soul crushing dir /w on dos prompt to navigate various directories!
Brings back memories of building the 2.2 Linux kernel on a 486 in 2000. I was a poor freshman CS major and this was my introduction to Unix. Took 8 hours to build it I remember right. After someone told me I'd have to repeat this process after each update, I quickly looked for another Unix based OS. I think OS X was released within a year. I'm very happy Linux and my hardware have made this process less painful.
"Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty, for security, will get, and deserve nether." - Benjamin Franklin
Back then many universities ditched MS-DOS for Linux, essentially getting the power of an older Sun-Workstation for the price of a high end DOS-PC... at a fraction of the price. And you didn't need to port your software, everything was already there, sed, awk, bash, grep, even larger packets like emacs were already there at a time when Windows 95 didn't even have IPv4 enabled by default or a usable telnet client.
Could someone watch these for me and give me the edited highlights? I've got better things to do with 77 minutes of my life.
This takes me back to my first linux distro that I tried (A redhat variant). Never got the bootloader to work properly then, but it was still exciting to try some windows alternatives for a change.
Video tutorials? I still have Red Hat 7, Caldera eDesktop 2.4, Caldera eServer 2.3, and Mandrake (don't recall the version but it was from 98) disk sets sitting in my desk near the computer. I actually installed eDesktop 2.4 (kernel version was 2.2.16 out of the box I believe) a year ago on an old HP Omnibook laptop that was designed for Win98. Found a mirror for updates for Caldera and updated it as much as I could...including Netscape. The experience did not feel all that slow on a P2 processor and 128MB of RAM...and I do appreciate those who keep mirrors of very old distributions on hand.
And oddy enough it works better than most distros...imagine that!
That, that really grinds my gears!
Wrong, by that time I was already looking ahead into buying a computer with 2 astonishing MB of RAM!
Rethinking email
They used a non-free codec.
RMS
I watched the videos, and say without hesitation, that they show the exact reason I never started with Linux back then. At least with Windows it was setup.exe and away you go.
Don't get me wrong, when I actually stated in Linux, you still had to mess around with configuring x and the graphics resolution on first install, but by that stage you did not have a reliance on DOS, and you had a sort of graphical representation of what is on your hard drive, so you don't install into the wrong partition.
Today Linux is MILES better than it was and is easy to install, the only problem is convincing people that it is usable instead of Windows.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Slackware was never popular, just well known.
Furries make the internet go.
I remember my first distro was Slackware, I had talked and talked about getting into linux in the mid 90's but never took the leap. A buddy of mine came over and we'd hang out go play pool etc. He knew the thought of formatting my pc and starting from scratch stopped me since I was bit lazy. Anyhow when I went to get a drink refill he formatted my hard drive, therefore forcing me haha. Anyhow long story short, I installed slackware, but never could get my modem to work. I bought 3 different modems and took them back for refunds, none would work. They all advertised as "plug and play" modems. But no matter what I tried they just wouldn't work, even spent afternoon at the library on their internet looking up solutions. I finally figured out these cheap (well I say cheap but 40 - 70 dollar) plug and play modems were "software" modems. And that is when I said screw it, I waited till next payday, took the plunge and I remember dropping $130 on a brand new external US robotics 56k, the old white with like 6 or 7 lights used serial port. So expensive for me at least at the time but dammit Slackware saw that modem and I was finally online using a simple dialup program called 'wvdial', just toss in dialup number, username and pass in /etc/wvdial.conf then type wvdial at command line and eureka! dialup internet ftw!
hehe
ah the good ol' days...
I've been a slackware nut ever since. my 2 favorite distros of all time #1 is Slackware #2 is Debian, I never use the others.
There was a video on how to install Slackware??? NOW you 're telling me?!?!?
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
1995? Already had 12M on my Amiga. 2M chip, 10M "fast".
I've still got the beta ISO from Ygg, and an image from it loaded here on the workstation.
Boots up just fine in a VM.
Support FSF: Stop thinking with your wallet, and think with your imagination. (cc/non-commercial)
ITT: Linux hardliners coming clean about how awful Linux is. /ducks
Can I light a sig ?
Yeah, ok, I'm from a third world country...
Rethinking email
Who needs ambien when you got this video.
Digging into the CD rack beside me I came up with a 2 CD set for Caldera Open Linux 2.2. I know for sure that I didn't get it working. Don't recall what machine I had in 1999.
I know that I made at least a couple of other attempts before that at getting Linux to work from bootable floppies, and I think one other boxed retail version, so I can count at least twelve or thirteen years of trying various distros at about ten or twelve month intervals. Mandrake. SUSE. A couple that I've forgotten.
Few words strike fear in the heart of people like me like "MAN PAGES."
Last year I tried Ubuntu Lucid, with the utterly painless WUBI installer, and *BANG* -- damned is if it didn't just work, wireless and all, first try. And it turned out to be much faster than the Vista install that came on my Dell.
Finally this month I upgraded to Natty, and have fallen in love with Libre Office, Scribus, and am even quite happy with GIMP - the latter two I never could have seen replacing Photoshop and InDesign, but they are up to handling what I need, and are one hell of lot cheaper.
Plus, on Natty, the out of the box WINE install runs MS Office Word and Excel flawlessly, and fast.
I am one VERY happy user!
Three Squirrels
I first saw Linux on a public access show. John Maddog Hall was on, demo'ing linux/alpha, on I believe an 21164 @ 600mhz, (64bit, but little-endian - seemed weird and exciting to me). There was also an Mklinux demo, Irix on an O2, and a Sun box (my memory of back then is hazy tho).
Having finally gotten a handed-down 7100/80, I installed mklinux. I quickly discovered a bad simm causing fs corruption (explained the random mac os 8 lockups too). Pretty white-on-blue console, just like QNX. Once it was working, it was onto dial-up. The amic serial driver was making a function call for every byte copied into the ring buf. I in-lined it and got about 2x less cpu load. That also helped when irc kiddies smurf attacked. For syn floods, I modded a firewall patch to rate limit syn's and icmp.
Later on, I was finally was able afford my dream machine: a dual 21264 @ 833mhz, on a UP2000 mobo. (Before that, I had a 600au miata tower.)
I made a minor fix to the palcode call in the reboot/shutdown switch statement, in linux (accepted by Alan Cox). Tho he rejected my patch to check for MD partitions for raid auto-detech (wanted proof that 0xfd or whatever it was, wasn't used by osf/1 already). That issue still pops up on the linux-alpha list.
I still have my old 7100/80, with a working 5v source jumped to the adb line that went bad. Maybe someday I'll reinstall DR2.1 just for fun. I still have the CD.
Video tutorials were hard to come by back then. I have no idea how I got my hands on...Red Hat I think. I don't know. Never got around to using it. When trying to install I just messed up my entire computer,had to format everything and reinstall, and hoped no one would notice. My aunt, who lost all her work documents in the process, did. It was quite painful.