I really wish that I was born early so I’ve could witness the early years of Linux. What was it like being there when a kernel was released that would power multiple OSes and, best of all, for free?
I want know about everything: software, hardware, games, early community, etc.
I cut my teeth with DOS and Netware, used Windows until the day 98 was released (had been using the GM for a month), and cut over to Slackware as my daily driver. Dabbled with Redhat before stabilising on Debian, which I’ve never found a need to change from for my headless boxes.
One thing I specifically remember was hand tuning my X11 config to drive my 15” Trinitron at 1024x768 @ ~68Hz.
I started using Slackware in the late 90s - say 1998. I used it for most of my desktop applications pretty much right away.
I don’t game much so that wasn’t an issue for me.
It was definitely harder to configure. I recompiled so many kernels and told myself the speed boost from getting exactly what I needed and nothing else was impressive. It wasn’t.
I dunno. It wasn’t as polished as it is now, and was harder to configure, but it was still very good, and once you got it configured, it kept working, unlike the more popular os of the day.
Linux was exciting but time consuming and not all that useful.
I used to bike into University, spend half the night downloading disk images of SLS, spend hours more installing, and spend hours more getting the X config timings working for my monitor. But when I was finally able to use the same window manager config as the Sun workstations at school I felt like King of the World! But what was I actually doing with it? Xterm and an ancient version of GCC.
That said, I created my own basic Shell in the early days and a few little utilities. So I learned a lot. I do not think I would even have attempted many things without the technical confidence that just being a Linux user brought. There was the feeling that you could do anything even though you were hardly doing anything. And new capabilities were constantly arriving so that feeling lasted years.
I mean, you could recreate it. Just burn some old distros on a cd and get one of tgese old white pc
In the late 90s you could get CDROMs from the nerds at university with everything you need on them. If you got your sound card working and could play an mp3, you felt like a master hacker who had beat the game.
You spent a few evenings downloading a hundred or so 1.44MB floppy imges over a 56kbps modem. You then booted the installer off one of those floppies, selected what software you wanted installed and started feeding your machine the stack of floppies one by one.
Once that was complete you needed to install the Linux boot loader “LiLo” to allow you the boot it (or your other OS) at power on.
All of that would get you to the point where you had a text mode login prompt. To get anything more you needed to gather together a lot of detailed information about your hardware and start configuring software to tell it about it. For example, to get XFree86 running you needed to know
- what graphics chip you had
- how much memory it had
- which clock generator it used
- which RAMDAC was on the board
- what video timings your monitor supported
- the polarity of the sync signals for each graphics mode
This level of detail was needed with every little thing
- how many heads and cylinders do your hard drives have
- which ports and irqs did your soundcard use
- was it sound blaster compatible or some other protocol
- what speeds did your modem support
- does it need any special setup codes
- what protocol did your ISP use over the phone line
- what was the procedure to setup an tear down a network link over it
The advent of PCI and USB made things a lot better. Now things were discoverable, and software could auto-configure itself a lot of the time because there were standard ways to ask for information about what was connected.
You brought back traumatic memories I had successfully repressed.
I had an old laptop, and my WiFi required some kind of cutter driver that wrapped broadcom, my Intel graphics didn’t work on newer kernels. It booted in 7 seconds on a 5400rpm disk though while XP took over a minute.
Wifi? imagine trying to get pci modems working and basically compiling your kernel each time you’d need an obscure driver. usb didn’t even exist and external ones were both expensive af and running on serial ports.
good times honestly. I learned so much about linux.
NDIS wrapper. I hated that so much, I bought a natively supported PCMCIA card.
It was real real rough
Imagine gnome but instead of deciding your settings for you, they had a dialog where you had to pick the settings yourself.
And you needed to find out the scanlines of your monitor before X would even display anything, and then that was a black and white grid. Then you needed to spent another day or two getting a window manager working.
Oh god, was there even a maximize button so you could maximize your windows?
What did maximum even mean when you have a “virtual desktop” that was 4x times the size of your actual display. Because that is the kind of nonsense we used to do on Linux (because you you could and the other guys could not).
There was but noone knew what to do with it. We were all universally confused for like a solid 25 years.
Relevant xkcd’s
Do you have support for smooth full-screen Flash video yet?
I don’t remember if that ever got fixed. Even if it did, Flash was already on its way out by that point.
Some technologies are better skipped, ignored until they collapse under their own annoyance.
I don’t think this paints a bleak enough picture of Linux before 2010 or so tbh, but it’s a good start.
The first time I ever used Linux was in high school around 2001-2002. I don’t remember what the distro was but it had drawing issues, clearly some kind of driver issue that I couldn’t figure out, on my PC so I switched back to Windows 98SE.
Not what op asked for, but it kept away from Linux at home until 2007. I started using Linux regularly in university around 2004.
I had the same issue with Red Hat 6.1 on a cheap PC. One of the reasons I love using Arch is it gives me the nostral of those days.
I didn’t have a Pentium processor in my computer, the internet was young, information wasn’t as ready or available, and the mindset wasn’t that you could check everything. I don’t remember how many floppy disks it took to install Slackware, but at least one read error was definitely on the way. I had a 56k modem at home, so I had printed out the installation instructions from work. Compiling everything wasn’t a problem, because I learned to code back in 1983. When I tried to figure out the refresh rate of my screen, I was afraid I would blow it up and go blind. The feeling of freedom was when you were the one who could choose everything for the first time in your virtual life.
On the topic, did AOL work on linux? They were the google of their time, i can’t imagine the FOSS world thought very highly of them
It did not, and it had the nickname AOLosers for people using the service.
Yeah, AOL was so obviously lame that I invested in Compuserve… oops.
Contrary to other OSes, the information about it was mainly on the internet, no books or magazines. With only one computer at most homes, and no other internet-connected devices, that posed a problem when something didn’t work.
It took me weeks to write a working X11 config on my computer, finding all the hsync/vsync values that worked by rebooting back and forth. And the result was very underwhelming, just a terminal in an immovable window. I think I figured out how to install a window manager but lost all patience before getting to a working DE. Days and days of fiddling and learning.
Speaking of books, my only experience with Linux in the 90s was seeing the Red Hat books. I don’t know anyone who actually made it work.
Lol! 'Member Afterstep?
The desktop stretched across 4 screens was enough to hook me for life.
Xeyes… so many terminals… the artwork was artwork… wtf is transparency?! 😁 It was an amazing time to be a geek.
I didn’t get that far. And I only had an Amiga at that time, which made things more difficult to set up. I wonder how fluent transparency would be with AGA, haha. My next attempt was woth a PC around 2003 with KDE3 and it got me hooked.
I got tired of compiling the kernel taking a day on my Pentium pc. So I got a pile of 486s the uni was throwing out, built a Beowulf cluster out of them and soon I was able to compile the kernel in two and half days.
Hmm my first linux distro was Suse 5.x that came on 5 CDs (i think it was 1998) … can’t say I used it much, I had weird German ISDN Internet at the time and the PPPoverWhatever (forgot the exact name) just didn’t wanna work. Making music wasn’t really feasible at the time. It mostly lay dormant. I slowly climbed the learning curve and switched to Linux full-time in the mid-2000s, when a lot more things were possible …
