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"

Comments

Hardcover and awesome video graphics

[jhoegl]

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.

1997

[BigBadBus]

A little bit later than the video, but I tried RedHat (5.1 or 5.2? I can't remember) in the summer of 1997. From my Uni days, I had the impression that Linux was hard to install, but although it was simple enough, getting XFree86 to install and run was a nightmare. I decided to try Redhat since we were promised xxx number of days of support. What they didn't tell you was that it would take a couple of weeks for them to get back in touch with you and then it was simply to go over what you'd done. I think I managed about 3 support tickets before my time was up. I abandoned Redhat and it was a couple of years before I tried Linux again. I was a SuSE distro and it was a doddle to install. SInce then I've moved onto Mandriva and then Ubuntu and have been using this ever since.

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.

Re:1997

[Lumpy]

No it is a nightmare....

Why? because most people had 14" or 15" monitors and most X software was written for 1024X768 or larger screens, which only started at 17" monitors that cost an arm and 12 legs.

Netrek on anything smaller than a 17" was impossible.

Re:1997

[marcosdumay]

Just because autoconfiguration worked for you doesn't mean it was reliable. By that time, it wasn't. And the config wizards were lacking.

Re:1997

[suso]

Nobody should doubt your own story since your Slashdot ID dates from 1997. Obviously you were there. But no doubt getting X working on the wide variety of video chipsets at the time (probably 10 times the selection we have now) and CRT monitors which really could be damaged with the wrong config was a royal pain in the butt. Count yourself one of the lucky ones that didn't spend weeks in the console wondering when you'd be able to use Netscrape and hear audio from x11amp.

Re:1997

[djp928]

No, he's right, it was often a nightmare right up through the early 2000s. It all depended on how well the auto-detect worked--which, unfortunately, was often not well at all. I can recall banging my head against X config files trying to figure out the magic strings to put in that would make my display work.

20th anniversary of...

[cheeks5965]

The Year of the Linux Desktop!

Fond Memories

[Dude_here]

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.

Re:Fond Memories

[jedidiah]

> After someone told me I'd have to repeat this process after each update

Don't be so gullible. There was no good reason really to subject yourself to this unless there was some particular bleeding edge (or broken) feature you were interested in. This was true even with Linux 2.2 in 2000.

2.0.0 might have been the last time I actually needed to build a kernel. Although defecting to another distribution solved the problem.

Re:At this time

[marcosdumay]

Wrong, by that time I was already looking ahead into buying a computer with 2 astonishing MB of RAM!

Ignore them

[sourcerror]

They used a non-free codec.
RMS

.. And that's why I never installed Linux

[Wowsers]

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.

Re:.. And that's why I never installed Linux

[ajo_arctus]

And it's exactly the reason I did try Linux!

My first exposure to Linux was Slackware on a PC Pro cover disk in 1995. The magazine just bundled all of these disk images and packages on the CD, and in the magazine contents had a tiny entry for it that simply said "Slackware Linux version x.y." Then, in capital letters: "We recommend you do not install this. You will probably break your PC!". Well, of course, what could I do? With a warning like that I had to install it!

I re-partitioned the drive (600MB Windows, 200MB Linux) and spent a huge amount of time trying to figure out how to not permanently kill my monitor with the settings in xf86config (another dire warning message) and getting my modem to dial out by editing the networking config files.

The annoying thing is, once I did get it all working, I had nothing to do with it. All the packaged software was academic -- no word processors or any of the stuff I liked doing on computers back then (drawing, music, etc). I played reversi I think, used pine or elm of whatever, compiled a really simple c programme, and went back to Windows. I could see it was awesome, but as a 16 year old with no Linux using friends I couldn'y really make use of it back then. Looking back, I wish I'd learned C at that time. Learning C on Windows was impossible for me because compilers were too expensive. Ah well.

It has been really interesting to watch Linux grow and evolve over the years. I use it today mostly for serving Rails and Python apps.

@Randy Hootman

[RL78]

Who needs ambien when you got this video.

Alpha and mklinux on public access

[nester]

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.