Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Linux Distributions of 1992

lunduke.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–127 of 127 posts

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#121

Post by krylon »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #95
nobleach wrote: post #5

I recall being in a B. Dalton Bookstore in the mid-90's. I picked up a book that had "Linux" on the cover. In the cover it had a floppy disk or two. Something felt very wrong to me. You can't give away an entire operation system! Perhaps this was just some "free for educational purposes" thing? I went home and fired up WebCrawler on AOL and came across Yggdrasil. I had experienced Unix on an SGI system. And I was ver…

I knew about Linux before trying it, so the free part was no surprise. My uncanny valley was being able to recompile the kernel with any options I wanted to; that felt both cool and unnatural, like "why aren't protecting their source code?".

Ah, that brings back memories.

Compiling your own kernel was kind of a rite of passage back in the day. Now I cannot remember when I last did that. Must have been 14 years or so, when I was still using Gentoo.

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#122

Post by krylon »

heurisko wrote: post #27

In my eyes, it was the introduction of WiFi and home routers that made Linux-based systems accessible to home users. Prior to that, I remember having a lot of issues with "soft modems" that required Windows drivers to work. WiFi allowed me to move to RedHat, then Ubuntu, full time.

Back when I started using Linux, I had an ISDN card, getting that to work was an adventure back then, except on SuSE which provided a GUI for that. Fun times... ;-)

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#123

Post by watersb »

My first moments with BSD Unix as a college freshman were helped along by a group of four or five upperclassmen (juniors or seniors) who were at the computer center at the same odd hours as my friends and I.

One of them created the Yggdrasil Linux distribution a couple of years later.

Ironically, none of us had PCs to try it out. Those of us who had been able to afford a computer in college generally got a Macintosh. I couldn’t afford one, so I got a job instead.

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#124

Post by anthk »

krylon wrote: post #121
ASalazarMX wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew about Linux before trying it, so the free part was no surprise. My uncanny valley was being able to recompile the kernel with any options I wanted to; that felt both cool and unnatural, like "why aren't protecting their source code?".

Ah, that brings back memories. Compiling your own kernel was kind of a rite of passage back in the day. Now I cannot remember when I last did that. Must have been 14 years or so, when I was still using Gentoo.

I did that a few years ago for a semi-bricked WM8850 netbook which I can't reflash with Uberoid, a custom Android for these ARM machines. So I set up a VFAT partition with the kernel, a boot image file, and maybe I'll add some Void Linux root filesystem on an ext3 partition tomorrow. It's worse because booting from an SD card is not very realiable, but it's better than nothing.

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#125

Post by minitoar »

martin1975 wrote: post #107
minitoar wrote: post #78

Bit off topic, but Lunduke is a racism denier. It's hard for me take anything he says seriously when he just completely denies the existence of systemic racism.

Systemic - to me at least - means it's a matter of law, thus it affects everyone. I prefer to think of today's instances of racism as an individual/collective (by collective, I don't mean LARGE numbers necessarily) occurrences, rather than systemic. Assuming you aren't looking for perfection - which means no racist thought/word/deed in anyone in the USA - including non-whites who can also be very racist, fyi - then I…

The War on Drugs is a well known example of systemic racism. Many police departments are known to target non-whites as a matter of policy.

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#126

Post by nobleach »

techrat wrote: post #98
allenu wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, in those days I remember friends referred to Microsoft as The Evil Empire. I think there was also a little bit of "friendly" debate over the superior OS at the time. (I ran OS/2 Warp for a number of years myself.)

Oh the days of being on Slashdot and getting downmodded to -1 Troll because you dare to suggest that Windows is a usable operating system and not type Micro$uck or some other variant. I was actually quite fond of WinNT4. Lean and stable. Microsoft being the Evil Empire and facing antitrust for bundling Internet Explorer was, of course, cheered on... meanwhile very similar groups of geeks these days see no problem wit…

Oh my gosh... that Bill Gates Borg avatar....

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#127

Post by nobleach »

earksiinni wrote: post #61
nobleach wrote: post #5

I recall being in a B. Dalton Bookstore in the mid-90's. I picked up a book that had "Linux" on the cover. In the cover it had a floppy disk or two. Something felt very wrong to me. You can't give away an entire operation system! Perhaps this was just some "free for educational purposes" thing? I went home and fired up WebCrawler on AOL and came across Yggdrasil. I had experienced Unix on an SGI system. And I was ver…

> A friend of mine bought the RedHat 5.2 distro from Best Buy Ahh wow, this brings me back. I bought, or rather had my parents buy, this exact same package from Best Buy when I was in high school or maybe the end of middle school. I remember thinking in the store that it was impossible for there to be something that wasn't Windows or Mac, and the packaging was so cool. These were also the "10,000 Best Windows Games"…

Vertical Horizon's "Everything You Want" specifically spoke to me here because that was the EXACT era!!! I know I ripped that song using a connection of Perl scripts, then used LAME encoder in connection with some lyrics fetching script to encode the lyrics into the mp3 metadata.
Post reply on HN