Linux

There was a similar question a while ago with some nice reads in the answers :)

https://lemmy.ml/post/17575792

I was just looking through old books and noticing my Yggdrasil manual the other day. That was one of the earliest plug and go cd-rom distributions. Before that was e.g. Slackware and the early Debian, both of which involved big piles of floppies. I also remember sending Linus an email and getting an answer. I'm sure he is too much of a busy celebrity for that now.

Stuff needed tweaking more wine worked almost never even for basically window's programs. Configuring Xfree86 was black magic. Running Startx at the terminal prompt was like rolling the dice. Distro choice was smaller and it was really a choice. Since the child distros were less of a thing. You had Debian , Redhat, Slackware, and SUSE. All were very different at a fundamental level with packaging and philosophy. Also it was way more common to buy boxed copies of Linux distros with big thick manuals that helped you get it installed and take your first steps with Linux. It reminded me of when I first got my TI 83 calculator an it had that massive manual with it.

Also Lugs and spending a lot of time on IRC getting and helping people on freenode (don't go there now) was a must.

I mean, you could recreate it. Just burn some old distros on a cd and get one of tgese old white pc

What a lot of people forget is that in the early days of Linux there was no software that targeted it. Everything you would want to run on Linux was intended to run on something else like Solaris, BSD, AT&T Sytem V, SCO, AIX or something else. As a result, Linux APIs were the most generic flavor of Unix possible. Almost every thing meant for a Unix would compile and run on it and there was rarely a dependency problem.

I still miss that.

LI

My first time trying out Linux was with a bootable CD from a PC gaming magazine. It was Corel Linux. If I recall correctly it booted into KDE.

Unfortunately on my system the mouse cursor was invisible. The mouse worked, I just couldn't see where the cursor was. My brother who was using Linux full time couldn't help me fix it.

Well, in the 90's I managed to essentially brick two NIC's by tinkering with the tulip driver on command line. In the distro I used it had to be done manually and I still have no idea as to what happened inside those NIC's, but they sure didn't work ever again. Yes, I made the same mistake twice.

First time I format the whole disk, all msdos data (games) lost. I managed to install it then I opened vim to edit a file and I couldn't get out of vim I know it's a cliche, but there is real. To get out I have to call a friend, using the landline, the one who lends me the floppy disks (or maybe it was magazine cd) and ask he how to get out, he says, just press Shift and Z twice.

Reading how-tos(may be the source code too) are all you needed. No need to listen random stuff from some random YouTubers. Ppl can read that time. Books and magazines did exist.

LUGs were very important back then especially when you were new.

I remember building the kernel with the NE2000 drivers and having a network card for just installation and getting the 3com or RTL driver source over to the new install, then compiling those drivers, installing them, and downing the system to put the proper card in. There was a very small subset of sound cards and video cards that worked reliably. The notion that Linux was the OS where hardware just worked out of the box was ludicrous.

The DEs were pretty horrible and the software to use on them was scant. So desktop Linux was a pipe dream. I used Linux entirely as a security/server appliance. I built a couple hundred iptable/ipchains firewalls for businesses out of recycled pentium type desktops until hardware firewalls became a thing, it was fairly lucrative for a while there.