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This is a blast from the past. This was my first venture into unix OS systems. I installed this on my parents Mac from a Jaz drive over SCSI. I was 16 years old

by nhance 6y ago

This is a blast from the past. This was my first venture into unix OS systems. I installed this on my parents Mac from a Jaz drive over SCSI. I was 16 years old. Somehow I was able to get it to work, but I have memories of trying to compile programs and having to dive into the source and make changes with the blind confidence only a teenager could have. I'm surprised the system was as stable as it was

classichasclass 6y ago
Got it running to this day on a Workgroup Server 9150. Seems appropriate for that particular machine.
vt240 6y ago
I think this was also the first "Linux" I ever installed. On one of those Tanzania clone, Motorola StarMax 3000s. I seem to recall, that it never booted through OF, at that point. I can't remember which version that was, probably the early DR3.
- fzzzy 6y ago
  Do you still have that StarMax? The Mac clones are becoming extremely rare.
  - vt240 6y ago
    Unfortunately, it went to the thrift shop many years ago, along with all the vintage UNIX workstations I wish I still had today. Haha. Hopefully, someone picked them up and they didn't just get recycled.
    - temp0826 6y ago
      Gosh, talk about nostalgia in this post, hah. One of my first adventures into Linux was mklinux on a Umax S900. That thing was a tank.
  - unpixer 6y ago
    Some of them were rare even when they were new; I have a Radius 81/110 in my basement, built by a company that was in the Mac clone business for about three and half minutes. Not even sure it could run MkLinux.
    - vt240 6y ago
      Wow, that one was rare. I don't think I ever saw but one Radius clone when I was doing on-site service.
  - spear 6y ago
    The first computer I bought was a Power Computing Power 120(?). I think it's still in a box in my garage. I went through a few Linux distributions for it: MkLinux first, then LinuxPPC, and finally Yellow Dog Linux. The driver for the Ethernet card needed to be patched for big-endian machines and the kernel needed a patch to allow the ADB keyboard CapsLock to be remapped to Control. Fun times.
    - vt240 6y ago
      Yeah I ended up using YellowDog on my G3 Wallstreet all through college. It worked great for Linux on a Laptop for those days.
  - rvense 6y ago
    I found a StarMax in the bin behind a local university department a few months ago. I thought those days were long over, but there are still strokes of luck, apparently. These PPC Macs are a bit overlooked, in my mind, but of course this is exactly the era that I really started to get into computers. Just seems like everyone else is either attracted to the compacts, or the colourful iMac era ones.
durkie 6y ago
Me too! Down to the Jaz drive over SCSI. On a Performa 6115. Mostly I did it because everyone on IRC was talking about linux and bsd all the time. After a few months with it I finally got a dedicated computer for FreeBSD (with that super hot Adaptec 2940UW to keep the SCSI going)
- unixhero 6y ago
  Those Adaptec cards were fantastic products.
- hestefisk 6y ago
  Ah yes. There was a time when SCSI was the hottest hardware for workstations and geeks. When my classmates in the late 90es bought 3D cards for their computers, I was counting every penny to afford an Adapted UltraSCSI controller and disk system. It was really fast and knocked the socks off ATA. My last controller was a 19160U which ran like a dream on Linux and FreeBSD. It was very noise though with a set of 10k rpm drives in my little teenage room.
  - durkie 6y ago
    Sounded like a jet engine! I just looked up the 2940UW and see that it's capable of 40MB/s...how far we've come
seppel 6y ago
> but I have memories of trying to compile programs and having to dive into the source and make changes with the blind confidence only a teenager could have. That is an awesome sentence. I sometimes miss this blind confidence I had as a teenager.
- mleonhard 6y ago
  Some months ago, something snapped and I decided to finally let myself start working on the impossible projects that I have dreamed about for a while. I got back that feeling I had as a teenager, of coding without any ideas of the limits of my own abilities. Specifically, I want to make some devops tools that I need and don't exist yet: - A simple HTTP file server that uses mutual-TLS for auth and all configuration comes from a single TOML file. Passwords are poisonous to security. Stateful config APIs are poisonous to maintainability. - A lightweight Dockerd replacement that uses mutual-TLS for auth, fetches binaries from the file server, actually verifies the SHA-256 digest of binaries (dockerd doesn't), and receives all configuration by HTTP PUT of a single config.toml file. It will store VM stdout logs locally and make them available via mutual-TLS HTTP. - A metrics server that fetches logs via mutual-TLS HTTP, stores them in the file server, parses them (as JSON), calculates metrics and alarm states, caches derived data on the file server, serves a dashboard, re-exports specific metrics and alarm states, and notifies third-party services (Pagerduty/Opsgenie) on alarm state changes. All config comes from a single config.toml file. - A simple monitoring daemon that performs repeated website and API requests and emits metrics to logs. These get picked up by the metrics server. - An infrastructure management tool without the problems of Terraform. Specifically, it must support creating resources which contain other resources. And it shouldn't require the maintenance nightmare of multi-stage Terraform deployments. I started writing this stuff in Golang. But I quickly became frustrated with Golang's incomplete libraries. There are stupid things missing like min(int,int) and basic synchronization structs (WaitableBool). Golang's http library doesn't support dynamic server-side request timeouts or mutual-TLS. I guess they want you to run Golang servers behind nginx or expensive Google Cloud load balancers, probably on Kubernetes. No thanks. I learned Rust and started writing the tools above. I fell in love with forbid(unsafe). All of Rust's HTTP server libraries contain copious amounts of unsafe code. And none support mutual-TLS. So I started writing a safe Rust HTTP client & server library. Half-way through, I realized how much unsafe code is in tokio & async-std. So I wrote and released a small safe Rust async runtime, called "safina". Amazingly, it works. I resumed working on the HTTP library, adding TLS support. Then I realized that rustls has a lot of unsafe Rust/C/assembly code. So I started writing a safe Rust TLS 1.3 library. Now I'm deep into that project. It's satisfying. I wish you will forget your limitations and try new things without reservation.
alsetmusic 6y ago
I read about MKLinux online at 14. I asked my mother to take me to Barnes and Nobles to see if I could find a book on Linux, as per the webpage that introduced me. No books on Linux in my Midwestern town at that time. I didn’t know what to do when it booted my Mac to a CLI, so I erased it. I didn’t really get to a command line again until Mac OS X some years later. I’m so jealous of today’s budding computer nerds. The world is their oyster. Info about how to use new things is very accessible. Damn kids /s.
- randallsquared 6y ago
  ...but there's so much to do, see, and read that they mostly will not access it. At least, that's my impression.
  - iFreilicht 6y ago
    Yeah, it's too much to do in one human lifetime, but we still discover lots of new stuff every day and thanks to SE, online docs and wikis of varying quality, it's quite easy to get things to run in no time, even if you've never heard of them before.
- girvo 6y ago
  I recently got my 12 year old cousin a RPi 400. I’m so incredibly jealous of him now!
- sufehmi 6y ago
  It was even worse in Indonesia. Once I realize how far behind we were in general computer news & information, I literally mailed USD$ 100 to Ziff-Davis' office That's how I got my monthly PC Magazine subscription (this was when they were the best magazine about PC) Also good technical books were practically non-existent I got my first Assembly and Norton's book from a bookstore specializing in bootleg copies Only years later I began to be able to buy good books Things are so much better now, thankfully
  - waltwalther 6y ago

by nhance 6y ago

classichasclass 6y ago

Got it running to this day on a Workgroup Server 9150. Seems appropriate for that particular machine.

vt240 6y ago

I think this was also the first "Linux" I ever installed. On one of those Tanzania clone, Motorola StarMax 3000s. I seem to recall, that it never booted through OF, at that point. I can't remember which version that was, probably the early DR3.

fzzzy 6y ago
Do you still have that StarMax? The Mac clones are becoming extremely rare.
- vt240 6y ago
  Unfortunately, it went to the thrift shop many years ago, along with all the vintage UNIX workstations I wish I still had today. Haha. Hopefully, someone picked them up and they didn't just get recycled.
  - temp0826 6y ago
    Gosh, talk about nostalgia in this post, hah. One of my first adventures into Linux was mklinux on a Umax S900. That thing was a tank.
- unpixer 6y ago
  Some of them were rare even when they were new; I have a Radius 81/110 in my basement, built by a company that was in the Mac clone business for about three and half minutes. Not even sure it could run MkLinux.
  - vt240 6y ago
    Wow, that one was rare. I don't think I ever saw but one Radius clone when I was doing on-site service.
- spear 6y ago
  The first computer I bought was a Power Computing Power 120(?). I think it's still in a box in my garage. I went through a few Linux distributions for it: MkLinux first, then LinuxPPC, and finally Yellow Dog Linux. The driver for the Ethernet card needed to be patched for big-endian machines and the kernel needed a patch to allow the ADB keyboard CapsLock to be remapped to Control. Fun times.
  - vt240 6y ago
    Yeah I ended up using YellowDog on my G3 Wallstreet all through college. It worked great for Linux on a Laptop for those days.
- rvense 6y ago
  I found a StarMax in the bin behind a local university department a few months ago. I thought those days were long over, but there are still strokes of luck, apparently. These PPC Macs are a bit overlooked, in my mind, but of course this is exactly the era that I really started to get into computers. Just seems like everyone else is either attracted to the compacts, or the colourful iMac era ones.

durkie 6y ago

Me too! Down to the Jaz drive over SCSI. On a Performa 6115. Mostly I did it because everyone on IRC was talking about linux and bsd all the time. After a few months with it I finally got a dedicated computer for FreeBSD (with that super hot Adaptec 2940UW to keep the SCSI going)

unixhero 6y ago
Those Adaptec cards were fantastic products.
hestefisk 6y ago
Ah yes. There was a time when SCSI was the hottest hardware for workstations and geeks. When my classmates in the late 90es bought 3D cards for their computers, I was counting every penny to afford an Adapted UltraSCSI controller and disk system. It was really fast and knocked the socks off ATA. My last controller was a 19160U which ran like a dream on Linux and FreeBSD. It was very noise though with a set of 10k rpm drives in my little teenage room.
- durkie 6y ago
  Sounded like a jet engine! I just looked up the 2940UW and see that it's capable of 40MB/s...how far we've come

seppel 6y ago

> but I have memories of trying to compile programs and having to dive into the source and make changes with the blind confidence only a teenager could have. That is an awesome sentence. I sometimes miss this blind confidence I had as a teenager.

mleonhard 6y ago
Some months ago, something snapped and I decided to finally let myself start working on the impossible projects that I have dreamed about for a while. I got back that feeling I had as a teenager, of coding without any ideas of the limits of my own abilities. Specifically, I want to make some devops tools that I need and don't exist yet: - A simple HTTP file server that uses mutual-TLS for auth and all configuration comes from a single TOML file. Passwords are poisonous to security. Stateful config APIs are poisonous to maintainability. - A lightweight Dockerd replacement that uses mutual-TLS for auth, fetches binaries from the file server, actually verifies the SHA-256 digest of binaries (dockerd doesn't), and receives all configuration by HTTP PUT of a single config.toml file. It will store VM stdout logs locally and make them available via mutual-TLS HTTP. - A metrics server that fetches logs via mutual-TLS HTTP, stores them in the file server, parses them (as JSON), calculates metrics and alarm states, caches derived data on the file server, serves a dashboard, re-exports specific metrics and alarm states, and notifies third-party services (Pagerduty/Opsgenie) on alarm state changes. All config comes from a single config.toml file. - A simple monitoring daemon that performs repeated website and API requests and emits metrics to logs. These get picked up by the metrics server. - An infrastructure management tool without the problems of Terraform. Specifically, it must support creating resources which contain other resources. And it shouldn't require the maintenance nightmare of multi-stage Terraform deployments. I started writing this stuff in Golang. But I quickly became frustrated with Golang's incomplete libraries. There are stupid things missing like min(int,int) and basic synchronization structs (WaitableBool). Golang's http library doesn't support dynamic server-side request timeouts or mutual-TLS. I guess they want you to run Golang servers behind nginx or expensive Google Cloud load balancers, probably on Kubernetes. No thanks. I learned Rust and started writing the tools above. I fell in love with forbid(unsafe). All of Rust's HTTP server libraries contain copious amounts of unsafe code. And none support mutual-TLS. So I started writing a safe Rust HTTP client & server library. Half-way through, I realized how much unsafe code is in tokio & async-std. So I wrote and released a small safe Rust async runtime, called "safina". Amazingly, it works. I resumed working on the HTTP library, adding TLS support. Then I realized that rustls has a lot of unsafe Rust/C/assembly code. So I started writing a safe Rust TLS 1.3 library. Now I'm deep into that project. It's satisfying. I wish you will forget your limitations and try new things without reservation.

alsetmusic 6y ago

I read about MKLinux online at 14. I asked my mother to take me to Barnes and Nobles to see if I could find a book on Linux, as per the webpage that introduced me. No books on Linux in my Midwestern town at that time. I didn’t know what to do when it booted my Mac to a CLI, so I erased it. I didn’t really get to a command line again until Mac OS X some years later. I’m so jealous of today’s budding computer nerds. The world is their oyster. Info about how to use new things is very accessible. Damn kids /s.

randallsquared 6y ago
...but there's so much to do, see, and read that they mostly will not access it. At least, that's my impression.
- iFreilicht 6y ago
  Yeah, it's too much to do in one human lifetime, but we still discover lots of new stuff every day and thanks to SE, online docs and wikis of varying quality, it's quite easy to get things to run in no time, even if you've never heard of them before.
girvo 6y ago
I recently got my 12 year old cousin a RPi 400. I’m so incredibly jealous of him now!
sufehmi 6y ago
It was even worse in Indonesia. Once I realize how far behind we were in general computer news & information, I literally mailed USD$ 100 to Ziff-Davis' office That's how I got my monthly PC Magazine subscription (this was when they were the best magazine about PC) Also good technical books were practically non-existent I got my first Assembly and Norton's book from a bookstore specializing in bootleg copies Only years later I began to be able to buy good books Things are so much better now, thankfully
- waltwalther 6y ago