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The Linux Distributions of 1992

lunduke.substack.com

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Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#111

Post by terrywang »

solmich wrote: post #105
anezch wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Indonesia and have a very similar experience and situation (99.99% pirated Windows) with you. From Mandrake 8 to Fedora to Ubuntu 6. I remembered the time when I got my Ubuntu and Kubuntu CDs posted. The experience of using apt to download and update packages were a mindblowing experience at that time. That and the simplicity of Ubuntu was the main reason that I managed to persuade the management in the com…

I got Mandrake 8 from InfoLinux magazine during their roadshows among universities in early 2000s, along with Rusmanto and Onno Purbo. Good old days.

I dug out the 3 CDs and box Mandrake Linux 8.1 came with (2 are Mandrake 8.1 and 1 for fonts + input method framework) in the attic last time I visited my parents house ;-)

For those who are interested to see how properly copyrighted Linux were sold in the 2000s in China -> [https://twitter.com/terrywang/status/1108847424498331648]

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#112

Post by terrywang »

anezch wrote: post #52
terrywang wrote: post #12

Grew up in China, the first Linux distro, in fact non-Windows OS was Red Bar Linux 6.3 (I form of CDs sold in those pirated software shops, never saw Linux on floppy), no one else around me use anything other than Windows (99.99% pirated). It opened up a door for me, later on I bought Mandrake Linux 8.1 (with Chinese input method and fonts - displaying CJK was pain back then). Fedora Core 1 was my main desktop and th…

I live in Indonesia and have a very similar experience and situation (99.99% pirated Windows) with you. From Mandrake 8 to Fedora to Ubuntu 6. I remembered the time when I got my Ubuntu and Kubuntu CDs posted. The experience of using apt to download and update packages were a mindblowing experience at that time. That and the simplicity of Ubuntu was the main reason that I managed to persuade the management in the com…

Good to know, it was enlightening to have the opportunity to see, think and experience different than the majority (others). I didn't realise back then it would have such an impact on me and the journey forward.

I wrote this at Linux's 30th birthday: Building a skill tree around Linux has been the best investment I've ever made for the past 18 years. I believe it is likewise for you ;-)

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#113

Post by terrywang »

unmole wrote: post #41
hef19898 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember discussions back the day between Linux and Windows proponents. I was clearly in the Windows camp, seeing Linux fans as, well, bizarre sometimes arrogant pseudo programmers. That changed, now that Linux is probably the last OS I can run without a cloud account easily. Heck, I'd even pay for it! Back the day I was a gamer, the main reason why Linux never really was an option. Later for work, it was Windows a…

> Linux fans as, well, bizarre sometimes arrogant pseudo programmers. To be fair, some of us were smug as hell. I once picked an argument with a guy simply because he was wearing a Microsoft t-shirt.

Almost everyone has been through that "mine is better than yours" distro war phase, adopting Linux (distros) as a religion is just stupid ;-)

Some of the gold I've accumulated over the years when converting Windows users and/or giving talks

  - All Linux distributions are the same: the Linux kernel, glibc and a bunch of GNU utils.
  - "Adopting Linux like a religion is stupid." - Thomas Cameron
  - "We've all been through my distro is better than yours" thing.
  - "The best Linux distro is the one that does what you need at the best cost."
  - Linux is NOT about the distribution but the kernel, it's about what the kernel can do.
  - Distribution is a way to wrap up what the kernel can do into a more manageable way.

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#114

Post by amyjess »

bityard wrote: post #66
rel2thr wrote: post #47

Crazy how much old software had ties to universities ( tamu Linux, BSD, wuftpd ). Are there any modern examples of this or have universities gotten out of the software game

My guess is that university culture changed a lot over the last couple of decades, as well as the mainstream perception of computing technology and the Internet shifting from a neat science fiction type thing that some of us dreamed about to being completely ubiquitous. Most of the technology that powered the Internet in some form or another came out of the Universities prior to the dot-com boom. If you wanted to do…

> I also feel like we can "blame" Github here, since it (and a few other sites/projects like it) have become the de facto place to host source code and collaboration tools. (Whereas in the past it would have been an FTP/HTTP site and a mailing list.)

Honestly, SourceForge did it first. GitHub just picked off where SF left off.

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#115

Post by jim02672 »

Great. Another article on old Linux distributions that's just the same crap as in all the others.

FYI the first picture, the one with the 0.12 boot & root floppies that is in every old Linux distro article, is the original distribution made by Linus Torvalds himself. Two releases later, 0.95a (3/17/1992), Jim Winstead started doing the root floppy. H.J. Lu's "bootable root disk" came shortly afterwards. (9/23/1992)

When you see an article with that picture labeled as H.J. Lu's boot/root floppies, just stop reading.

http://mirror.cs.msu.ru/oldlinux.org/Linux.old/docs/Linuxdoc... http://grumbeer.dyndns.org/ftp/mail/www.kclug.org/1992/sep/3...

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#116

Post by 3dbrows »

6581 wrote: post #93
3dbrows wrote: post #65

When I was about 12 or 13 I ran a website called freelin.org. This was around 2001. Its goal was to provide Linux on CD to anyone who asked, globally, without cost. My hope was that donations would cover costs. They didn’t. I tried my best to supply everyone based on pocket money (allowance) at the time. To my shame, a few people who donated £1 didn’t get a CD. If this was you, please let me know and I will make it u…

I remember stumbling upon freelin.org back then. I didn't donate (I already had enough bandwidth at that time to acquire the distros I wanted), but I admired being dedicated to Linux that much to provide a service like that.

Delighted someone remembers it! Thanks.

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#117

Post by pjmlp »

orangepurple wrote: post #40
hef19898 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if that's ever gonna happen. I could imagine, now that Steam tool care of a huge junk of gaming, Office is the main thing keeping a sizable number of people on Windows. Imagine if MS was reduced to MS Excel...

Microsoft is mostly reduced to the Office and Cloud teams. It's likely why the Windows UI is an inconsistent disaster.

It was always like that since the Windows days, Office drove the next UI improvements which would later appear as Windows common controls.

The current UI chaos is because the Windows team has become mostly the Cloud team, while the UI frameworks seem to keep rotating new people every couple of years.

They had to literally restaff WinForms and WPF teams from scratch, and then merged them with WinUI/UWP!

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#118

Post by pjmlp »

fmakunbound wrote: post #28

Around that time, I vaguely recall Linux switching from DWARF to ELF, some kind of libc5 (libc4 ??) to libc6 migration in the the ecosystem and a Sanyo CDROM driver that needed some source code edits to work for my model causing me endless grief as a kid exploring beyond DOS. Great times!

Slackware 2.0 major milestone was having ELF instead of classical a.out.

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#119

Post by pjmlp »

VLM wrote: post #67

"Because of the general bugginess of SLS" I was there, and I don't recall that. It all "just worked" in the summer of 93 which was mere months after this article. On a 40 mhz 386dx, a kernel recompile took about an hour with 4 megs of ram so I upgraded to 5 megs using 4 256K sticks (back then simms were 8 bits wide and the 386 had a 32 bit bus, so ...) and then compile times dropped to 15 minutes. X window system wor…

My Western Digital IDE CD-ROM and Trident graphics card weren't so happy with Slackware 2.0.
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