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Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux

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Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux

#31

Post by cozzyd »

techrat wrote: post #25
bdz wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in high school and that was the first time I've ever seen a live CD. A full functioning OS running on a CD? School PCs were running XP and most things were locked down. But lo and behold the magic live CD made you do a lot of things otherwise were not allowed. Good times. I always had a live CD with me for years (and it was actually really useful)

Coming from someone who grew up during the floppy diskette booting and installing era of computing... what Knoppix managed to do by giving us the LiveCD just still seems like pure black magic fuckery to me. Install an OS from CD? Fine. USING an OS only booting from CD? HOLY SHIT. I'm glad it became an option on the majority of distributions. IMHO it still remains the killer feature over Windows if you want to show so…

I recall a dormmate of mine, probably circa 2008, had a broken Windows installation and just ran off a live Ubuntu CD for a while. He didn't see the point in installing, I guess.

Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux

#32

Post by drewg123 »

I remember installing it in 92 or 93 when I was in grad school via a big pile of floppies. It was liberating to turn an otherwise useless PC into something more or less equivalent to a sparcstation. I was a huge linux fan and evangelized for it everywhere.

A few years later, I was acting as a sysadmin, and wanted to replace some aging DECstations with PCs running Linux. The prototype machine was great, except for how terrible NFS performance was. The kicker was xdvi would take minutes to render a page of a document. The DECstations would take seconds, even though they were ~10% as fast as the PC running Linux. I realized the problem was that Linux NFS didn't do any client side caching, and xdvi walked around byte-by-byte in the font files.

I met Linus at the '94 Boston USENIX and asked about NFS file caching. He told me he didn't care about NFS, and didn't think it would ever get fixed. The interaction was unpleasant and left a very bad taste in my mouth.

I then went to the FreeBSD BOF, where they were professional (Justin Gibbs was wearing a button down shirt and giving a power-point presentation). They assured me that FreeBSD cached NFS just like any other filesystem.

When I returned from the conference, I installed FreeBSD on the test PC and sure enough, it rendered the xdvi pages instantly.

Its amazing how that one experience shaped my life. I used and hacked on FreeBSD for years later when I worked on OS research. I helped port FreeBSD to the DEC Alpha and became a committer in the late 90s, and have contributed ever since. These days I get paid by my employer to make FreeBSD as fast as possible for our workloads, and get to do cool stuff like building what I suspect is the world's fastest web server in terms of absolute bandwidth.

Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux

#36

Post by int_19h »

techrat wrote: post #25
bdz wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in high school and that was the first time I've ever seen a live CD. A full functioning OS running on a CD? School PCs were running XP and most things were locked down. But lo and behold the magic live CD made you do a lot of things otherwise were not allowed. Good times. I always had a live CD with me for years (and it was actually really useful)

Coming from someone who grew up during the floppy diskette booting and installing era of computing... what Knoppix managed to do by giving us the LiveCD just still seems like pure black magic fuckery to me. Install an OS from CD? Fine. USING an OS only booting from CD? HOLY SHIT. I'm glad it became an option on the majority of distributions. IMHO it still remains the killer feature over Windows if you want to show so…

If I remember correctly, QNX 4 demo was the first graphical OS that I've seen booting and running from a floppy. That was somewhere in late 90s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_VlI6IBEJ0

https://web.archive.org/web/19991128112050/http://www.qnx.co...

Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux

#37

Post by II2II »

cozzyd wrote: post #31
techrat wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coming from someone who grew up during the floppy diskette booting and installing era of computing... what Knoppix managed to do by giving us the LiveCD just still seems like pure black magic fuckery to me. Install an OS from CD? Fine. USING an OS only booting from CD? HOLY SHIT. I'm glad it became an option on the majority of distributions. IMHO it still remains the killer feature over Windows if you want to show so…

I recall a dormmate of mine, probably circa 2008, had a broken Windows installation and just ran off a live Ubuntu CD for a while. He didn't see the point in installing, I guess.

There were Linux distributions which were intended to run from Live CDs. I remember one that offered the core Gnome desktop with OpenOffice. It was created for people who needed a distraction free working environment.

Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux

#38

Post by soniman »

I was looking at buying a new computer recently and dreaded another ugly Windows machine at $500. Some Chromebooks were going for almost nothing and with crouton for loading Linux it was the perfect solution. Later on I found out Linus also uses Chromebook/crouton as his Linux setup.

Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux

#40

Post by bogwog »

Wow, I had no idea that Linux and the SNES were released so close together (SNES came out 2 days earlier, at least in North America).

Coincidentally, they're both things I love! I wonder if you can install Linux on a SNES?

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