18 ms·

Installing Debian Linux 2.0 (1998)

82 points by voltagex_ 7y ago

jplayer01 7y ago
Somewhat disappointed this isn't about installing and using Debian Linux 2.0 on a PC now 2 decades later, and comparing it to the experience of a modern Debian. I'd even watch a video (does LGR know anything about Linux?).
- ufo 7y ago
  Another thing I am curious about is the section about system requirements. How much disk space would be necessary for a full installation of literally every possible package in Debian 10?
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    I've been installing Debian since rougly 1998, with separate partitions for most major filesystems. My last /usr partition was 20 GB, and that's no longer sufficient for a generous (though far from complete) Debian install. The last package count I made of unstable was over 70,000 distinct software packages. I think stable is well below that, though probably north of 40k. A "full" installation is not possible as many packages mutually conflict. Though it wouldn't surprise me if a maximal install of software alone would be well over 100 GB. Much of the growth has come in support libraries, especially internationalisation. For a while there was a package which would go through, post-install, and remove unneeded translations and charactersets.
    - ufo 7y ago
      Why is there such a big difference in the number of packages in stable and unstable? I always thought that stable was mostly just a snapshot of the testing branch, and that everything in unstable would make into testing before the freeze period.
      - dredmorbius 7y ago
        First, don't take my counts as gospel. .... lessee ... OK, the Debian 10 ("buster") release notes give "over 59,000 other packages" (in addition to a dozen or so listed), so it's about 10k that didn't make the stable release. https://www.debian.org/News/2019/20190706 https://www.debian.org/News/2019/20190706 Only software with no release-critical bugs is included in the release, and with 70k+ packages in total, it's not surprising that some (mostly more obscure / unmaintained / or recently developed, I'd suspect) don't make the release cut. Debian also makes a practice of splitting out source packages ("over 29,000") into release packages, along arbitrary divisions such as: core vs. additional / support packages, base and dev, debug (unstripped and debugging compiliation options left in), documentation, and increasingly, various language support. So a single upstream could conceivably result in numerous Debian releases. Development tools are especially prone to this, see Python, Perl, R, etc., as examples. This allows for modularlity and precision in package selection, smaller installations, and choices in performance vs. diagnostics (debug) options. Pared-down systems can be configured without documentation packages, a fat desktop can be configured with full docs and support. Incidentally, the integrated support and DWWW package (Debian-WWW project) make your system effectively self-documenting via a local webserver, which can be extremely helpful. Similarly, each installed package creates an entry in /usr/share/doc/<packagename>, without the idiotic version number Red Hat adds (frustrating the ability to link directly to package docs without knowing the specific version number). It's even possible to reconstruct the package set of a corrupted Debian system from that list: http://qref.sourceforge.net/Debian/reference/ch-package.en.html#s-recover-status http://qref.sourceforge.net/Debian/reference/ch-package.en.h... Public examples used to be easier to find, this one turns up searching "powered by dwww version": https://lists.ci.juneau.ak.us/dwww/ https://lists.ci.juneau.ak.us/dwww/
    - JNRowe 7y ago
      > The last package count I made of unstable was over 70,000 distinct software packages. I think stable is well below that, though probably north of 40k. For others, like me, interested in this you can grab a txt/JSON package list for mangling locally[1]. With the data I have grabbed it is 65k vs 57k. > Though it wouldn't surprise me if a maximal install of software alone would be well over 100 GB. A rough estimate[2] of just ``main`` on Buster: $ awk -F: '/^Installed-Size/ {print $2}' /var/lib/apt/lists/*buster_main* | numsum 272960149 1. https://packages.debian.org/stable/ https://packages.debian.org/stable/ - Scroll to the bottom for links 2. https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#installed-size https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.ht...
      - dredmorbius 7y ago
        That's installed size in kB, correct? So, 273 GB, more or less, for "main". "Well over 100 GB" ;-)
        JNRowe 7y ago
        There is even talk on supporting packages that are larger than 10GB[1], so three or four hundred gigabytes might be passed quicker than we'd think... 1. https://lwn.net/Articles/789449/ https://lwn.net/Articles/789449/ - Gives a little information if you scan for "size"
      - muxator 7y ago
        Kudos for numsum! After so many years using Linux, I still missed that one. Thanks!
Arnavion 7y ago
>Disable any virus-warning features your BIOS may provide. If you have a virus-protection board or other special hardware, make sure it is disabled or physically removed while running Linux. These aren't compatible with Linux, and Linux has a better method of protecting you from viruses. The BIOS feature is presumably referring to boot sector virus protection that old BIOSes used to have that made them read-only. But what are "virus-protection boards" ? The only search results with quotes are for variants of that page, and searching without quotes gives too many irrelevant results.
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  Must mean something like https://www.asus.com/Motherboard-Accessories/TPM-M-R2-0/ https://www.asus.com/Motherboard-Accessories/TPM-M-R2-0/ e.g. before IME and so on were built in, you could add them as extras.
  - Arnavion 7y ago
    That's a TPM. Not sure what you mean by "IME", but TPMs both still exist and did not exist in 1998. They also don't have anything to do with virus scanning.
    - goatinaboat 7y ago
      Right, it was just a guess. I was using Linux professionally in 1998 and I have never heard of a virus scanning board. Not sure I used Debian before 2001 though.
- iv42 7y ago
  Possibly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThunderByte_Antivirus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThunderByte_Antivirus
  - Arnavion 7y ago
    Yes, looks like it. More information about that is at https://www.virusbulletin.com/uploads/pdf/magazine/1991/199109.pdf https://www.virusbulletin.com/uploads/pdf/magazine/1991/1991... (page 21)
AceJohnny2 7y ago
Oh those were the days. Related: "Installing Linux on a Dead Badger" (2004) http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/installing-linux-on-a-dead-badger-users-notes/ http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/installing-l...
- dddddaviddddd 7y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20190810142256/https://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/installing-linux-on-a-dead-badger-users-notes/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190810142256/https://strangeho...
raverbashing 7y ago
Unfortunately the oldest version available seems to be 3.0, though there was a mention about 2.0 https://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/ https://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/ It would be interesting to test such an old version for historical purposes
- mattl 7y ago
  https://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/older-contrib/2.0/ https://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/older-cont...
ufo 7y ago
It's interesting that the very first thing in the page is a section on copyrights, free software and the Debian Social Contract.
alrs 7y ago
So here's what installing Debian was like in 1998. Short of going to a first-tier University AND having a campus job that allowed you near the ethernet jacks, you were either going to spend weeks downloading disk images over your 38.4 kbps modem, or you were going to buy a collection of Linux distributions + the Sunsite archive on a 5-cd set that was released quarterly and available at computer stores. Assuming that your CDROM spoke standard ATAPI instead of some weird hooks-up-to-a-soundcard interface from 1994, you probably had to create a floppy boot disk by dd'ing it off the cdrom, as your BIOS was 50/50 able to support the El Torito extensions that allowed a CDROM to boot the computer. The dialog-based installer wasn't too different from now, IIRC. I think it was Debian that had options for installing from not just floppy and ftp, but NFS as well. Once the machine was booted, you hoped to see "LILO" was successfully installed to bootsector and you could choose which OS to boot. If LILO didn't install right, it would just present "LI" and a blinking cursor. If you still had DOS on the machine, the recourse was to use a DOS floppy boot disk and use the undocumented "fdisk /mbr" command to put a normal DOS boot sector back on your hard drive. Once the machine was up, you most likely had to get PPP working with your modem. Hopefully you had an external modem. Minicom was close enough to Telix that you'd use that to make sure that AT commands were making it to the modem, and then you went down the rabbit hole from there. Getting X working sucked. I think by 1998 there was a helper script for generating your XFree86 conf, but even that would most likely require some hand-tweaks. If at this point you had your modem working you could at least get online with PPP or even just a plain shell account to start searching DejaNews for hints on how to get that working. dselect was awesome, it felt like being connected to the world's hugest BBS, where you were guaranteed that every piece of software in the archive would work on your machine. Now you're a few days in: You've got X working (probably at a wonky refresh rate), you can connect to the Internet (when your ISP has an open line and you aren't hitting a busy signal) and you've got Netscape installed. Getting your soundcard working is probably still a week off.
- owaislone 7y ago
  I got started with Linux in 2007. Only internet I had in 2007 was a terribly unreliable dial-up and GPRS on my mobile. I was able to install a torrent app on my Symbian N80 which allowed me to download ~700mb Ubuntu images. It took 2-3 days for the downloads to finish and I'd leave my phone plugged in most of the time. That year was probably the most fun I've had with computers. Linux desktop was buzzing with things like Beryl and Compiz back then.
nategri 7y ago
Ah, "winmodems." I think the final boss of my ca. 1999 Red Hat install was a winmodem.
- techdevangelist 7y ago
  Yea getting winmodems to work on Windows was a chore good luck anywhere else. The era of managing irq’s, jumpers for cpu clock multipliers, and if there was the tiny twist in middle of a floppy ribbon to make it bootable couldn’t end soon enough.
  - jdsully 7y ago
    The twist was to determine which was the A and which was the B drive. IMO a lot nicer than the jumpers you had to set properly on both IDE drives.
nickjj 7y ago
This mildly reminds me of the early 2000s when I first got introduced to Linux and my friend guided me through installing Gentoo over TeamSpeak for the first time. That was a productive 6 hours! Fast forward to 2019 and now you can click a button on DigitalOcean's site and have Debian 10 running in about 30 seconds.
thom 7y ago
I came to Debian slightly later than 98, but memories of the floppy net install image fill me with joy. A whole OS bootstrapped from a 1.44MB medium was very cool.
neilv 7y ago
Here's a few old Linux install-related Web pages: * 1999 university lab/department-specific instructions for Red Hat: https://www.neilvandyke.org/lab-linux-1999/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/lab-linux-1999/ * 2000 assembling PC with Linux-friendly components: https://www.neilvandyke.org/cheap-pc-2000/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/cheap-pc-2000/ * 2003 laptop-specific install instructions for Debian: https://www.neilvandyke.org/linux-thinkpad-560e/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/linux-thinkpad-560e/ One thing I notice in the 1999 one is that, although I was already interested in privacy&security, I was pretty cavalier about where I got RPMs. Maybe it was hard to imagine that anything Linux could be evil?
INTPenis 7y ago
My very first book that I begged my mother to buy for me was Debian GNU/Linux bible with a Debian 2.2 CD. Debian was great for a long time but since 2014 I've been a RedHat convert using CentOS and Fedora where applicable. I firmly believe them to be better than Debian or Ubuntu. Partly because I made the effort to learn things like SElinux and iptables.
jojoo 7y ago
> you were going to buy a collection of Linux distributions + the Sunsite archive on a 5-cd set that was released quarterly and available at computer stores. I ordered debian potato (debian 2.2 / August 2000) as CD Sets via a german book store. Came with an OKish book. I distinctly remember that the SuSe book was better and i was really glad when i got a old SuSe manual from someone who upgraded his machine and got a new manual along with the 10 CDs. Great times.
guggle 7y ago
I started tinkering with linux the same year but with Mandrake instead. It felt just like the beginning of the web, some kind of far west where anything was possible, with no clear tracks to follow.
esotericn 7y ago
Well, it boots up in QEMU. I believe my first install of Debian was woody, or Debian 3. 'If your monitor displays color, please select "Color" here.' edit: Hard drive partitioned; we're formatting as ext2 now. The installer is remarkably like modern Debian. edit: Still churning; perhaps my 8GiB partition was rather overkill ;) https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/debian2/00-ext2.png https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/debian2/00-ext2.pn... golly: https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/debian2/01-ext2.png https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/debian2/01-ext2.pn... 8 character root password: https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/debian2/02-rootpw.png https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/debian2/02-rootpw.... got me a dpkg: https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/debian2/03-dpkg.png https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/debian2/03-dpkg.pn... I'm installing the sysadmin 'selection' ... we're getting Python 1.5 :D :O https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/debian2/05-xfree86.png https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/debian2/05-xfree86... I didn't want me no damned GUI! Mouse is broken! Update: I'm in, I have vim, loopback, a user account, but no network interface. Another time. :)
bluedino 7y ago
A couple years after this, you could buy a Redhat CD off the shelf at Best Buy, and if you had popular or generic hardware, it would pretty much install. And a few years after that, Mandrake or Corel Linux booted from a CD and had great graphics and everything. By the time I got back to Debian, it was for servers. Netinstalls were compact and awesome! And then Ubuntu came out and blew everyone's mind, how complete it was installed just off the CD. Even the idiots could install it then.
squarefoot 7y ago
Debian in 1998? Try the fall 1994 Yggdrasil Linux in 1995 then:) The CD (bought in a store, only copy available) was damaged out of the box in a subtle way so that it started spitting errors over one hour after the installation began when I was very likely in front of the third coffee. But the installation continued somehow, so in the end the system sorta worked but I had problems everywhere and no books, no Usenet, no Internet to ask for advice, just a local BBS I couldn't connect to anyway because that half working PC was the only hardware at disposal. This is what kept me back like 2 more years before trying Linux again (Red Hat).
asveikau 7y ago
I got started with Linux in that year. I think I did red hat 5.1 and then Debian 2.0. A few years later I tried openbsd 2.6. The distros were too big for dialup, and Red Hat was charging a lot (or seemed like it for free software) for CDs in a fancy retail box. But there was a website "cheap bytes" that would burn CDs of distros for about $2. I remember my apt-get dist-upgrade to Debian 2.1 because it took forever on dialup.
interfixus 7y ago
> You must have at least 4MB of RAM and 40MB of hard disk When the world made sense... It would have been around this time - 97/98 - that I first set up Red Hat 4 as a dual boot with Windows 95. No hoops to run through, really, except endless fiddling with PPP to get some sort of internet connection. The thing came on a magazine cd-rom, and as my pc either didn't do cd-booting or I didn't know it did, I had to cook a couple of floppies from provided images, presumably using my beloved Disk Copy Fast. Download was out of the question. Largest thing I did in that respect back then was StarOffice - a whooping 52 Mb package which took five or six hours, done at night when phone rates were lower. Later, I got rid of the Windows partition...
jake_morrison 7y ago
I first installed SLS Linux in 1992. It came as floppy disk images on a CD-ROM. I installed it on my girlfriend's new 386 computer, which had a monster 10MB hard disk. It booted up to the text console. I logged in, typed ls, was happy it looked like the Sun machines I had used in college. Then deleted it because she needed the space for DOS, Lotus 123, dBase IV, and WordPerfect. I used Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, etc in my day job. I used to try to install Debian on my new computers and fail because the kernel on the installer CD was too old to support the latest chips. Finally I switched my desktop to RedHat Linux in the late 90s. For a while, I ran Gentoo, which meant compiling everything from scratch as part of the installation process. One day for everything up to text mode, then another day to get KDE running.
29athrowaway 7y ago
2 years later, Knoppix (one of the first popular live CD distros, based on Debian) made it much easier for people to experience Linux.
ac29 7y ago
> If you have a virus-protection board or other special hardware I've heard of all sorts of esoteric PC hardware, but I've never heard of hardware anti-virus boards. Anyone know more about these? A web search hasnt produced anything useful.
- blindblom 7y ago
  Hard to track down, but this could have referred to something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThunderByte_Antivirus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThunderByte_Antivirus
dehrmann 7y ago
I did something similar earlier this year: I installed modern Debian on a PII machine from 1998. Turns out those are the oldest "modern" x86 chips supported by Debian. The only special thing I had to do was install it to the disk in a VM because I didn't have a way to boot from a CD on that computer.
cyberjunkie 7y ago
Tried installing my first Linux distribution, Slackware (3.4) in 1997. It worked. I deleted the only partition on that 630MB Seagate drive, and wondered why Windows wouldn't boot anymore.
vlindos 7y ago
I got my Debian from a CDROM packed with PC Magazine back in 1998. Unfortunately the disk was scratched and the installation was failing at the unpacking of one the deb packages. I had no knowledge in tech other than some turbo pascal and ms dos batches scripting skills. I had no internet connection (it was too expensively). I had to do installation dual boot, to preserve the ms dos partition for the job of parents. I had almost zero knowledge in English. My PC was 4 years old 386dx with 4mb of ram. However I did had spare summer vacation time at disposal. It took every third evening this summer but just before school I was able to hack the installation to skip the bad debs and boot into the New magical OS. And then yet another adventure of configuring the new world called Linux stared.

82 points by voltagex_ 7y ago

Somewhat disappointed this isn't about installing and using Debian Linux 2.0 on a PC now 2 decades later, and comparing it to the experience of a modern Debian. I'd even watch a video (does LGR know anything about Linux?).

ufo 7y ago
Another thing I am curious about is the section about system requirements. How much disk space would be necessary for a full installation of literally every possible package in Debian 10?
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  I've been installing Debian since rougly 1998, with separate partitions for most major filesystems. My last /usr partition was 20 GB, and that's no longer sufficient for a generous (though far from complete) Debian install. The last package count I made of unstable was over 70,000 distinct software packages. I think stable is well below that, though probably north of 40k. A "full" installation is not possible as many packages mutually conflict. Though it wouldn't surprise me if a maximal install of software alone would be well over 100 GB. Much of the growth has come in support libraries, especially internationalisation. For a while there was a package which would go through, post-install, and remove unneeded translations and charactersets.
  - ufo 7y ago
    Why is there such a big difference in the number of packages in stable and unstable? I always thought that stable was mostly just a snapshot of the testing branch, and that everything in unstable would make into testing before the freeze period.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      First, don't take my counts as gospel. .... lessee ... OK, the Debian 10 ("buster") release notes give "over 59,000 other packages" (in addition to a dozen or so listed), so it's about 10k that didn't make the stable release. https://www.debian.org/News/2019/20190706 https://www.debian.org/News/2019/20190706 Only software with no release-critical bugs is included in the release, and with 70k+ packages in total, it's not surprising that some (mostly more obscure / unmaintained / or recently developed, I'd suspect) don't make the release cut. Debian also makes a practice of splitting out source packages ("over 29,000") into release packages, along arbitrary divisions such as: core vs. additional / support packages, base and dev, debug (unstripped and debugging compiliation options left in), documentation, and increasingly, various language support. So a single upstream could conceivably result in numerous Debian releases. Development tools are especially prone to this, see Python, Perl, R, etc., as examples. This allows for modularlity and precision in package selection, smaller installations, and choices in performance vs. diagnostics (debug) options. Pared-down systems can be configured without documentation packages, a fat desktop can be configured with full docs and support. Incidentally, the integrated support and DWWW package (Debian-WWW project) make your system effectively self-documenting via a local webserver, which can be extremely helpful. Similarly, each installed package creates an entry in /usr/share/doc/<packagename>, without the idiotic version number Red Hat adds (frustrating the ability to link directly to package docs without knowing the specific version number). It's even possible to reconstruct the package set of a corrupted Debian system from that list: http://qref.sourceforge.net/Debian/reference/ch-package.en.html#s-recover-status http://qref.sourceforge.net/Debian/reference/ch-package.en.h... Public examples used to be easier to find, this one turns up searching "powered by dwww version": https://lists.ci.juneau.ak.us/dwww/ https://lists.ci.juneau.ak.us/dwww/
  - JNRowe 7y ago
    > The last package count I made of unstable was over 70,000 distinct software packages. I think stable is well below that, though probably north of 40k. For others, like me, interested in this you can grab a txt/JSON package list for mangling locally[1]. With the data I have grabbed it is 65k vs 57k. > Though it wouldn't surprise me if a maximal install of software alone would be well over 100 GB. A rough estimate[2] of just ``main`` on Buster: $ awk -F: '/^Installed-Size/ {print $2}' /var/lib/apt/lists/*buster_main* | numsum 272960149 1. https://packages.debian.org/stable/ https://packages.debian.org/stable/ - Scroll to the bottom for links 2. https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#installed-size https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.ht...
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      That's installed size in kB, correct? So, 273 GB, more or less, for "main". "Well over 100 GB" ;-)
      - JNRowe 7y ago
        There is even talk on supporting packages that are larger than 10GB[1], so three or four hundred gigabytes might be passed quicker than we'd think... 1. https://lwn.net/Articles/789449/ https://lwn.net/Articles/789449/ - Gives a little information if you scan for "size"
    - muxator 7y ago
      Kudos for numsum! After so many years using Linux, I still missed that one. Thanks!

Arnavion 7y ago

>Disable any virus-warning features your BIOS may provide. If you have a virus-protection board or other special hardware, make sure it is disabled or physically removed while running Linux. These aren't compatible with Linux, and Linux has a better method of protecting you from viruses. The BIOS feature is presumably referring to boot sector virus protection that old BIOSes used to have that made them read-only. But what are "virus-protection boards" ? The only search results with quotes are for variants of that page, and searching without quotes gives too many irrelevant results.

goatinaboat 7y ago
Must mean something like https://www.asus.com/Motherboard-Accessories/TPM-M-R2-0/ https://www.asus.com/Motherboard-Accessories/TPM-M-R2-0/ e.g. before IME and so on were built in, you could add them as extras.
- Arnavion 7y ago
  That's a TPM. Not sure what you mean by "IME", but TPMs both still exist and did not exist in 1998. They also don't have anything to do with virus scanning.
  - goatinaboat 7y ago
    Right, it was just a guess. I was using Linux professionally in 1998 and I have never heard of a virus scanning board. Not sure I used Debian before 2001 though.
iv42 7y ago
Possibly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThunderByte_Antivirus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThunderByte_Antivirus
- Arnavion 7y ago
  Yes, looks like it. More information about that is at https://www.virusbulletin.com/uploads/pdf/magazine/1991/199109.pdf https://www.virusbulletin.com/uploads/pdf/magazine/1991/1991... (page 21)

AceJohnny2 7y ago

Oh those were the days. Related: "Installing Linux on a Dead Badger" (2004) http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/installing-linux-on-a-dead-badger-users-notes/ http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/installing-l...

dddddaviddddd 7y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20190810142256/https://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/installing-linux-on-a-dead-badger-users-notes/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190810142256/https://strangeho...

raverbashing 7y ago

Unfortunately the oldest version available seems to be 3.0, though there was a mention about 2.0 https://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/ https://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/ It would be interesting to test such an old version for historical purposes

mattl 7y ago
https://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/older-contrib/2.0/ https://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/older-cont...

ufo 7y ago

It's interesting that the very first thing in the page is a section on copyrights, free software and the Debian Social Contract.

alrs 7y ago

So here's what installing Debian was like in 1998. Short of going to a first-tier University AND having a campus job that allowed you near the ethernet jacks, you were either going to spend weeks downloading disk images over your 38.4 kbps modem, or you were going to buy a collection of Linux distributions + the Sunsite archive on a 5-cd set that was released quarterly and available at computer stores. Assuming that your CDROM spoke standard ATAPI instead of some weird hooks-up-to-a-soundcard interface from 1994, you probably had to create a floppy boot disk by dd'ing it off the cdrom, as your BIOS was 50/50 able to support the El Torito extensions that allowed a CDROM to boot the computer. The dialog-based installer wasn't too different from now, IIRC. I think it was Debian that had options for installing from not just floppy and ftp, but NFS as well. Once the machine was booted, you hoped to see "LILO" was successfully installed to bootsector and you could choose which OS to boot. If LILO didn't install right, it would just present "LI" and a blinking cursor. If you still had DOS on the machine, the recourse was to use a DOS floppy boot disk and use the undocumented "fdisk /mbr" command to put a normal DOS boot sector back on your hard drive. Once the machine was up, you most likely had to get PPP working with your modem. Hopefully you had an external modem. Minicom was close enough to Telix that you'd use that to make sure that AT commands were making it to the modem, and then you went down the rabbit hole from there. Getting X working sucked. I think by 1998 there was a helper script for generating your XFree86 conf, but even that would most likely require some hand-tweaks. If at this point you had your modem working you could at least get online with PPP or even just a plain shell account to start searching DejaNews for hints on how to get that working. dselect was awesome, it felt like being connected to the world's hugest BBS, where you were guaranteed that every piece of software in the archive would work on your machine. Now you're a few days in: You've got X working (probably at a wonky refresh rate), you can connect to the Internet (when your ISP has an open line and you aren't hitting a busy signal) and you've got Netscape installed. Getting your soundcard working is probably still a week off.

owaislone 7y ago
I got started with Linux in 2007. Only internet I had in 2007 was a terribly unreliable dial-up and GPRS on my mobile. I was able to install a torrent app on my Symbian N80 which allowed me to download ~700mb Ubuntu images. It took 2-3 days for the downloads to finish and I'd leave my phone plugged in most of the time. That year was probably the most fun I've had with computers. Linux desktop was buzzing with things like Beryl and Compiz back then.

nategri 7y ago

Ah, "winmodems." I think the final boss of my ca. 1999 Red Hat install was a winmodem.

techdevangelist 7y ago
Yea getting winmodems to work on Windows was a chore good luck anywhere else. The era of managing irq’s, jumpers for cpu clock multipliers, and if there was the tiny twist in middle of a floppy ribbon to make it bootable couldn’t end soon enough.
- jdsully 7y ago
  The twist was to determine which was the A and which was the B drive. IMO a lot nicer than the jumpers you had to set properly on both IDE drives.

nickjj 7y ago

This mildly reminds me of the early 2000s when I first got introduced to Linux and my friend guided me through installing Gentoo over TeamSpeak for the first time. That was a productive 6 hours! Fast forward to 2019 and now you can click a button on DigitalOcean's site and have Debian 10 running in about 30 seconds.

thom 7y ago

I came to Debian slightly later than 98, but memories of the floppy net install image fill me with joy. A whole OS bootstrapped from a 1.44MB medium was very cool.

neilv 7y ago

Here's a few old Linux install-related Web pages: * 1999 university lab/department-specific instructions for Red Hat: https://www.neilvandyke.org/lab-linux-1999/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/lab-linux-1999/ * 2000 assembling PC with Linux-friendly components: https://www.neilvandyke.org/cheap-pc-2000/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/cheap-pc-2000/ * 2003 laptop-specific install instructions for Debian: https://www.neilvandyke.org/linux-thinkpad-560e/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/linux-thinkpad-560e/ One thing I notice in the 1999 one is that, although I was already interested in privacy&security, I was pretty cavalier about where I got RPMs. Maybe it was hard to imagine that anything Linux could be evil?

INTPenis 7y ago

My very first book that I begged my mother to buy for me was Debian GNU/Linux bible with a Debian 2.2 CD. Debian was great for a long time but since 2014 I've been a RedHat convert using CentOS and Fedora where applicable. I firmly believe them to be better than Debian or Ubuntu. Partly because I made the effort to learn things like SElinux and iptables.

jojoo 7y ago

> you were going to buy a collection of Linux distributions + the Sunsite archive on a 5-cd set that was released quarterly and available at computer stores. I ordered debian potato (debian 2.2 / August 2000) as CD Sets via a german book store. Came with an OKish book. I distinctly remember that the SuSe book was better and i was really glad when i got a old SuSe manual from someone who upgraded his machine and got a new manual along with the 10 CDs. Great times.

guggle 7y ago

I started tinkering with linux the same year but with Mandrake instead. It felt just like the beginning of the web, some kind of far west where anything was possible, with no clear tracks to follow.

esotericn 7y ago

Well, it boots up in QEMU. I believe my first install of Debian was woody, or Debian 3. 'If your monitor displays color, please select "Color" here.' edit: Hard drive partitioned; we're formatting as ext2 now. The installer is remarkably like modern Debian. edit: Still churning; perhaps my 8GiB partition was rather overkill ;) https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/debian2/00-ext2.png https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/debian2/00-ext2.pn... golly: https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/debian2/01-ext2.png https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/debian2/01-ext2.pn... 8 character root password: https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/debian2/02-rootpw.png https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/debian2/02-rootpw.... got me a dpkg: https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/debian2/03-dpkg.png https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/debian2/03-dpkg.pn... I'm installing the sysadmin 'selection' ... we're getting Python 1.5 :D :O https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/debian2/05-xfree86.png https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/debian2/05-xfree86... I didn't want me no damned GUI! Mouse is broken! Update: I'm in, I have vim, loopback, a user account, but no network interface. Another time. :)

bluedino 7y ago

A couple years after this, you could buy a Redhat CD off the shelf at Best Buy, and if you had popular or generic hardware, it would pretty much install. And a few years after that, Mandrake or Corel Linux booted from a CD and had great graphics and everything. By the time I got back to Debian, it was for servers. Netinstalls were compact and awesome! And then Ubuntu came out and blew everyone's mind, how complete it was installed just off the CD. Even the idiots could install it then.

squarefoot 7y ago

Debian in 1998? Try the fall 1994 Yggdrasil Linux in 1995 then:) The CD (bought in a store, only copy available) was damaged out of the box in a subtle way so that it started spitting errors over one hour after the installation began when I was very likely in front of the third coffee. But the installation continued somehow, so in the end the system sorta worked but I had problems everywhere and no books, no Usenet, no Internet to ask for advice, just a local BBS I couldn't connect to anyway because that half working PC was the only hardware at disposal. This is what kept me back like 2 more years before trying Linux again (Red Hat).

asveikau 7y ago

I got started with Linux in that year. I think I did red hat 5.1 and then Debian 2.0. A few years later I tried openbsd 2.6. The distros were too big for dialup, and Red Hat was charging a lot (or seemed like it for free software) for CDs in a fancy retail box. But there was a website "cheap bytes" that would burn CDs of distros for about $2. I remember my apt-get dist-upgrade to Debian 2.1 because it took forever on dialup.

interfixus 7y ago

> You must have at least 4MB of RAM and 40MB of hard disk When the world made sense... It would have been around this time - 97/98 - that I first set up Red Hat 4 as a dual boot with Windows 95. No hoops to run through, really, except endless fiddling with PPP to get some sort of internet connection. The thing came on a magazine cd-rom, and as my pc either didn't do cd-booting or I didn't know it did, I had to cook a couple of floppies from provided images, presumably using my beloved Disk Copy Fast. Download was out of the question. Largest thing I did in that respect back then was StarOffice - a whooping 52 Mb package which took five or six hours, done at night when phone rates were lower. Later, I got rid of the Windows partition...

jake_morrison 7y ago

I first installed SLS Linux in 1992. It came as floppy disk images on a CD-ROM. I installed it on my girlfriend's new 386 computer, which had a monster 10MB hard disk. It booted up to the text console. I logged in, typed ls, was happy it looked like the Sun machines I had used in college. Then deleted it because she needed the space for DOS, Lotus 123, dBase IV, and WordPerfect. I used Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, etc in my day job. I used to try to install Debian on my new computers and fail because the kernel on the installer CD was too old to support the latest chips. Finally I switched my desktop to RedHat Linux in the late 90s. For a while, I ran Gentoo, which meant compiling everything from scratch as part of the installation process. One day for everything up to text mode, then another day to get KDE running.

29athrowaway 7y ago

2 years later, Knoppix (one of the first popular live CD distros, based on Debian) made it much easier for people to experience Linux.

ac29 7y ago

> If you have a virus-protection board or other special hardware I've heard of all sorts of esoteric PC hardware, but I've never heard of hardware anti-virus boards. Anyone know more about these? A web search hasnt produced anything useful.

blindblom 7y ago
Hard to track down, but this could have referred to something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThunderByte_Antivirus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThunderByte_Antivirus

dehrmann 7y ago

I did something similar earlier this year: I installed modern Debian on a PII machine from 1998. Turns out those are the oldest "modern" x86 chips supported by Debian. The only special thing I had to do was install it to the disk in a VM because I didn't have a way to boot from a CD on that computer.

cyberjunkie 7y ago

Tried installing my first Linux distribution, Slackware (3.4) in 1997. It worked. I deleted the only partition on that 630MB Seagate drive, and wondered why Windows wouldn't boot anymore.

vlindos 7y ago

I got my Debian from a CDROM packed with PC Magazine back in 1998. Unfortunately the disk was scratched and the installation was failing at the unpacking of one the deb packages. I had no knowledge in tech other than some turbo pascal and ms dos batches scripting skills. I had no internet connection (it was too expensively). I had to do installation dual boot, to preserve the ms dos partition for the job of parents. I had almost zero knowledge in English. My PC was 4 years old 386dx with 4mb of ram. However I did had spare summer vacation time at disposal. It took every third evening this summer but just before school I was able to hack the installation to skip the bad debs and boot into the New magical OS. And then yet another adventure of configuring the new world called Linux stared.