61–70 of 151 posts
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I had a similar machine in 1996 running Slackware as a server for qmail. Hard not to be nostalgic over that time but things are so much better now. One command with AWS CLI and I can spin up a Linux box in 3 seconds today.
Sure, its great now if you want to get actual work done, but which is more fun?
I had a 486DX laptop that I ran Linux on from about 1995-1999, I probably tossed it around 2001 when the battery was pretty dead and the HDD was dying. In some ways that was some of the best times for Linux on the desktop in my experience. Windows and Mac were such an unreliable mess at that point that Linux seemed very competitive at the time. A lot of the advanced hardware integration in Win/Mac hadn’t happened yet…
Yep, everyone had stock-ish pc components and then came winmodems, custom-protocol printers and other oem hardware.
I remember carefully selecting modems. Most of the PCI modems in popular retail shops were winmodems so getting one that used the ISA bus was the first step. But even that was not the safest bet. Online shopping was nothing like it is today, so getting a known good model was more difficult.
By the time I got into installing Linux (1996+), I always seemed to be able to find salvageable pentium machines 166Mhz and above. But, my sister ended up returning my old AMD 486 DX4 120Mhz after they bought a new computer. I threw FreeBSD on it for a bit. It ran really well! I'll forever miss this era of computing. The internet was brand new, machines were often Frankensteins built out of spare parts. Computer Shop…
In 1995, I was stationed at an Army base about 10 miles from the DMZ in Korea, and for the first time in my life I saved up enough money to build a computer from modern parts instead of scavenging them from thrift stores and dumpsters. So I went AWOL for a day and went down to a place in Seoul called the Yongsan Electronics Market. To my young American mind, this was a place straight out of a William Gibson novel. Im…
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Yes. "e" in "eLILO" stands for "EFI". But then (U)EFI is an OS in itself, you can boot Linux directly from it, no bootloader needed: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/EFISTUB
> But then (U)EFI is an OS in itself Would it be accurate to describe (U)EFI as being like MS-DOS (i.e. single-tasking), but running in protected mode?
Technically Linux could once upon a time run on a 386, but because the kernel is a non-modular spaghetti-code mess, they had to deprecate 386 support to fix something else. It's only a matter of time before 486 is gone too.
It's pretty cool to get an up-to-date Linux working on such old hardware but I get the impression this kind of thing is going to get harder to do with the major distributions dropping support for 32 bit x86. I've been using NetBSD with older hardware.
That’s how I started out running Linux! Downloading a bunch of floppies from a BBS over a 16.8k USR HST modem. It was like a magical world when I first installed it. I also had a giant paper book that explained how to use it. For some reason the vi instructions in the book baffled me, but emacs seemed normal. Six months later I finally got the disks for X11. My mind was blown. Real multitasking - not like DESQView or…
What wasn't real about OS/2 multitasking? It was pre-emptive, at least on a 386.
i ran a bbs on os2 and it was awesome. IBM sponsored my bbs as teamos2 and mustang software sent me wildcat! and i was the first bbs in houston to offer linux for download
Remember the days back in 90‘ (Must have been 1994) when installing Slackware distribution on 486 DX from about 15 floppy disks to the internal HDD. Had running Linux as web proxy until about 2001. Interesting to see that what was quite normal at that time has become to a topic of interest again.
I also ran Slackware on a 486DX. I remember it taking hours to compile a kernel. I upgraded around 98' to a Pentium II and was blown away when I could compile a kernel in 2 minutes!
That’s how I started out running Linux! Downloading a bunch of floppies from a BBS over a 16.8k USR HST modem. It was like a magical world when I first installed it. I also had a giant paper book that explained how to use it. For some reason the vi instructions in the book baffled me, but emacs seemed normal. Six months later I finally got the disks for X11. My mind was blown. Real multitasking - not like DESQView or…