this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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My father made me figure out how to compile Linux drivers for a modem card before I could have internet.
How that make you feel? I intend to do the same to my kids tbh. Starting with problem solving exercises they're learning at school and make it more advanced as it goes just to unblock the OS. I'm sure eventually I'll need to take matters to a kernel level to be able to keep it going, but I'm fine with that as long as we're all learning.
It was a fun project and we actually did compile everything starting with a boot floppy and RHEL source. Dad did most of the work to start and gradually handed it off to me to get different things working. I had a big binder of documentation to read through, but hese days there are a ton of Linux from scratch tutorials out there to follow.
Forgot the /s?
Why? My parents couldn't teach me how to get a modem working, so when we bought a 14k4 modem, I had to install that thing at age 12. Granted, I didn't have to compile them, they came on a floppy, but it wasn't exactly userfriendly
Not necessarily. For those who grew up with winmodems it was the reality. Fortunately where I grew up, dsl and more importantly coaxial broadband took off veey early on. Though there were dsl softmodems, these were rare. The difficult part was a windows logon software provided in isp cds. For macos users the isps usually sent IT guys with 'drivers' initially and for linux users they sent IT guys to help install windows. The 'dialing' program did nothing but few http requests but in those days packet capturing was not so easy.
A friend of mine 'hacked' the isp (weak telnet or ftp) to steal the debug version of said software to figure out the requests in logs. Unfortunately the local isp discovered the 'hack' somehow and found the 'proof' by seeing linux cds on their desk. Isp guys issued a pretty serious warning for their parents that the kid is becoming a hacker/criminal by using linux. This reminds of that famous text.
Perhaps they were provided the driver source on cd. So they had to figure the cd ROM drivers first, which were provided on a floppy disk.
The dad just dropped this one day and refused to elaborate further