How many of us have written a post like this about a personal project ("I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in X, as my project resembles it somewhat", "just a hobby, won't be big and professional")? You never know :)
Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux
41–50 of 96 posts
Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux
#42I remember installing Ubuntu 4.10 and then discussing it on a forum and someone was like "no mp3 support ? what stupid distro is that lol".
My first experience was Ubuntu 8 and it just looks and feels so much better than what it is now: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Ubuntu-d...
Default install Gnome2 Ubuntus, pre-PulseAudio, were the only desktop Linux distros I've used, before or after, from the "it just works" end of the spectrum and with a full-featured DE, that didn't leave me wishing I'd started with something minimalist and built it up to where I needed it instead. Some time around when they got GUI wifi tools to mostly not suck, near the end of that time period, was their peak.
Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux
#43I 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…
Funny to see FreeBSD promoted, and Linux taken down a notch in the top comment on a thread for an article celebrating 30 years of Linux...well, funny, if a bit unexpected...
Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux
#44I remember installing Ubuntu 4.10 and then discussing it on a forum and someone was like "no mp3 support ? what stupid distro is that lol".
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)
Hmm, a bit hazy on the details and of course entirely possible that I misunderstood something fundamental at the time, but...
I donated a "Frankenstein" PC to our high school classroom (or added random parts that were missing to an existing one -- can't remember) and had a regular CD drive and a SCSI harddisk attached to a SCSI controller. The motherboard's BIOS didn't know how to boot from the SCSI harddisk so I put a bootloader and kernel on a CD and used that to boot from the harddisk.
Worked like a charm. Ran enlightenment for the looks and played a lot of clanbomber with a classmate!
Edit: Aw, looks like clanbomber isn't in the Debian repositories anymore. Shame :(
Edit2: I think I slept on the couch at the local hackerspace (with fast internets) after getting that system to run (and brought the computer to school on the next day). Nostalgia~
Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux
#45Earlier 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)
I recall getting a shipment of about 50 CDs simply by asking for some online. I handed them out to just about anyone, mostly peers at school, however I remember having some left over and tossing some out during Halloween amongst some candy to some young kids too. I like to think at least a few of them got used and hopefully introduced a couple to a lifelong addiction to Linux. Those dark, dark hours/days/weeks with X…
> Those dark, dark hours/days/weeks with Xorg really made me into the hacker I am today. If the forums weren't there, read the docs, if the docs weren't helpful you could read the source. Not being stonewalled while discovering how to work with one's computer is a wonderful experience.
Same thing here. I distinctly recall having a stack of different linux distros that I would install and switch between, then spend hours configuring the os, tweaking xorg, etc.
Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux
#46I remember installing Ubuntu 4.10 and then discussing it on a forum and someone was like "no mp3 support ? what stupid distro is that lol".
My first experience was Ubuntu 8 and it just looks and feels so much better than what it is now: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Ubuntu-d...
I've been trying to chase this high for a while. Unfortunately, using Ubuntu MATE with my current computer and HiDPI screen just feels _wrong_.
Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux
#47The early days were tough on some of us PC power users who were itching to try Linux.
I won a copy of Red Hat at a Unix User Group meeting, felt positively drunk with power all the way home...and never got it to start X. A few friends tried getting it to work, no go. Then I bought Mandrake at CompUSA. Same result.
I tried installing again, and it was infuriating watching all those icon files getting copied over, with a gut feeling that the result would be the same.
(Have you ever felt that eagerness, watching hundreds of icon names scroll by, and imagining how cool they would look on YOUR (hacker) screen? Holy smokes.)
So that sucked--nothing worked, no X, just a command line and I didn't feel I had the preparation to work with it, nor did I really understand that I could do most of my work on the command line if I wanted to.
Eventually, about a year later, I tried the Knoppix Live CD and somehow it shipped with the right modelines for things to just work. Why didn't anyone know to check my modelines?! I could have had X working for years. Stupid modelines...
After that, Ubuntu came out, and it also Just Worked for me, and Shuttleworth had rendered POV-Ray code in space, with even the resulting art showing this unique community effort. I started an online community for my favorite FOSS project, and it all felt like some kind of amazing global village. Depending on where you go, the same community vibe is still there in various places...
Pretty soon Textpattern and WordPress and Joomla also made it worthwhile to move away from Flash for the web, and boom--my media & web business could be built and maintained using Linux server and desktop platforms.
Congrats to the Linux community.
Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux
#48I 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…
> 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.
Linus has always been blunt about which things he cares about and which things he doesn't and I can certainly see him not caring about NFS. I'm sure he would say it really has no business being in the kernel in the first place, but ultimately I assume he's fine with it as long as that part of the tree is somebody else's responsibility and it doesn't interfere with the rest of the kernel. That's really how Linux kernel development works: people work on what they care about and Linus' only real job for decades now is to veto the bad stuff.
I'd love to be using FreeBSD more, but I have to stick with Linux because things like docker, wireguard, and hardware support always hit Linux first and I'm more of an end-user than a hacker.
Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux
#49If it wasnt because of Linux, I would have not studied Informatics...
Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux
#50The early days were tough on some of us PC power users who were itching to try Linux. I won a copy of Red Hat at a Unix User Group meeting, felt positively drunk with power all the way home...and never got it to start X. A few friends tried getting it to work, no go. Then I bought Mandrake at CompUSA. Same result. I tried installing again, and it was infuriating watching all those icon files getting copied over, with…
> Then I bought Mandrake at CompUSA.
Ha! Me too! I thought I was the only one. I remember that whatever release it was had a bunch of problems because it was the first version not based entirely on Red Hat and that they rushed the release of the next version to fix all the issues. So my purchased boxed copy ended up being both buggy and only relevant for like 6 months.
I think I switched to FreeBSD for a while after that.