Very Finnish humour: "I recommend this method of installing Linux: napping, while Linus does the hard work." Kippis, folks!
I wonder if Linus can install Arch without using the Arch Wiki.
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The early days of Linux
181–190 of 302 posts
Re: The early days of Linux
#182Interesting stories, thanks for sharing. I'm wondering, is there any tutorial to guide one from a bootloader to a very early version of Linux (but already have the barebone programs)? I guess any serious OS Dev course will do that, but would be interesting to find one specifically focused on Linux.
Get an old iso of Slackware and do it from scratch. For the authentic experience do it without internet access and using only the included install instructions. I once attempted this as an exercise on a very old thinkpad having only DOS+mscdex on the hard drive and a Slackware 2.1 CD-ROM. Bootstrapping that system is a feat that I’m still proud of. Though it was sort of a pointless exercise for my own gratification.
Re: The early days of Linux
#183Tangential, but it's kind of pleasing that Lars WirzeNius is writing an article for lwn.net.
Indeed when I first saw the link I misinterpreted it as a link to Lars’ personal blog.
Re: The early days of Linux
#184> At one point, Linux would send some broken packets that took down all of the Sun machines on the network. As it was difficult to get the Sun kernel fixed, Linux was banned from the university network until its bug was fixed.
Well well well, who's running on the university network now?
Re: The early days of Linux
#185Re: The early days of Linux
#186Interesting stories, thanks for sharing. I'm wondering, is there any tutorial to guide one from a bootloader to a very early version of Linux (but already have the barebone programs)? I guess any serious OS Dev course will do that, but would be interesting to find one specifically focused on Linux.
Get an old iso of Slackware and do it from scratch. For the authentic experience do it without internet access and using only the included install instructions. I once attempted this as an exercise on a very old thinkpad having only DOS+mscdex on the hard drive and a Slackware 2.1 CD-ROM. Bootstrapping that system is a feat that I’m still proud of. Though it was sort of a pointless exercise for my own gratification.
That's how I did it in 1995. I printed a few howto's, downloaded 27 or so Slackware floppy disk images, copied those onto actual disks, and biked home and booted from the first disk to start the installation process. At some point I had an issue with a corrupted disk so I had to bike back to the university to create a replacement. Following the howto, I got a booting system on my PC (dual booting with MS Dos/windows 3.x). And then using the bundled documentation, I was able to get X up and running, figured out how to rebuild the kernel with the sound drivers I needed, etc. Fun times.
Re: The early days of Linux
#187If you're interested in Linux history, check out Just For Fun by Linus Torvalds himself. It's written in 1999 if I recall, which is so much closer to Linux's inception than it is to today, so it's so interesting to hear thoughts and predictions about Linux at the time. Super cheap book. I think I got my copy for $4 on ebay.
Linus signed my copy!
Very jealous! If I every get the chance to go to a conference where he'll be, I'll absolutely bring by copy!
Re: The early days of Linux
#188I miss the days when Slack didn’t mean a chat app.
A Subgenius needs slack
Re: The early days of Linux
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> One day, Linus accidentally attempted to use his hard drive to dial the university, resulting in his master boot sector starting with "ATDT" and the university modem-pool phone number. After recovering from this, he implemented file permissions in his kernel. Now this nugget made my day. I love Finnish deadpan humor.
Reminds me of how I nuked my first Linux drive. I was using the cthugha[1] music visualizer app. You had to pass in a CD-ROM device as well as a DSP device (long before ALSA existed). Instead of the DSP I probably passed in my hard drive. Whoops. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthugha_(software)
I miss OSS and /dev/dsp, being able to write to the audio output like it was a file was great fun. I spent many hours back in the day just using bash scripting to make sound, I never got things good enough to make any worthwhile music but I did enjoy myself. Never accidentally specified /dev/hda instead of dsp but I did once do rm -r /usr instead of ./usr, switched to always using absolute paths for such things after that.
Re: The early days of Linux
#190The Linux kernel took off after Linus receive the MINIX book, a.k.a Operating System Design and Implementation by Tanenbaum, which include the source code of MINIX. Until the arrival of the book Linus was playing "Prince Of Persia" on his new 386AT desktop.
If only if Linus actually listened to Tanenbaum.
We could have a nice microkernel, multiserver design, instead of what we have.
And we wouldn't have to deprecate Linux (soon now) to replace it with something better architected.