26 ms·

The Linux Distributions of 1992

220 points by WoodenChair 5y ago

kar1181 5y ago
The ancient (read 90s) distros are a lot of fun to play with. Redhat still have a lot of their legacy distributions available and they are installable on vmware. You can learn a heck of a lot with really early distributions. I remember how complicated they seemed at the time but compared to nowadays it's pretty easy to have all the system components in your head at any one time. I spent a week or so upgrading component by component redhat 5.0 (hurricane) to be able to run a more modern version of glibc learning a lot about the c runtime stack under linux in the process.
- Agingcoder 5y ago
  Yes, I find 90s distros (I started with a strange linux distro called minilinux using an umsdos file system which I would start by typing 'linux' on the dos prompt, then moved on to Slackware 3 and redhat 2 around 1995 if I remember well) to be significantly simpler. Basically, they contain very little, so you can pretty much understand everything . Then, it's the usual 'build on it, get bigger, add complexity' , but knowing the early model makes understanding the modern product much easier.
  - nescioquid 5y ago
    > Basically, they contain very little, so you can pretty much understand everything . Slackware (7) mentored me into Linux competence. RedHat was making itself more convenient at the time, but if the system got into a bad state, it was very hard for me to figure out how to correct it. Slackware setup was more of a chore, but man did I end up an understanding of what was going on! I RTFMed because the M was fantasic. And if something did go wrong, I would usually have some ideas about where to start. That was such a valuable experience.
icedchai 5y ago
SLS Linux was my first distro. It was probably early 1993 when I first installed it, on a 386SX/20 with 3 megs of RAM. I think it was on 12 or 16 floppies.
- SemiNormal 5y ago
  My first was Slackware. Back when they would mail you a CD of the distro for free.
  - sillystuff 5y ago
    Wish I had known about that back then. I spent hours in a 24 hour access university computer lab, one night in '93, downloading Slack to floppies. Never looked back. '93 was the year of the GNU/Linux desktop for me.
- ansible 5y ago
  I ordered a set of SLS floppies from some random person I learned about via Usenet news groups (comp.os.minix and later comp.os.linux). It used Linux kernel version 0.99pl12 or thereabouts. I had previously been using Coherent Unix (with the enormous compendium in a thick book). I was first setting up my home NFS server using NE2000 Ethernet cards to try all that out. This was all run on a Gateway 386 @ 25MHz which started with 4MB of RAM.
  - icedchai 5y ago
    I also used Coherent for a bit. Its documentation was excellent! I remember the book with the shell on the cover: http://gunkies.org/wiki/File:Coherent_4_print_ad.jpg http://gunkies.org/wiki/File:Coherent_4_print_ad.jpg
fit2rule 5y ago
Yggdrasil OG in the house. I still have 40-odd floppies around, was a great day they shipped a bootable CD that went straight to X if you had the right hardware .. that blew a lot of our minds, back then ..
nobleach 5y ago
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 very familiar with AmigaOS, so this idea of a free Unix-like OS that I could install on commodity hardware was intriguing. A friend of mine bought the RedHat 5.2 distro from Best Buy and offered to let me borrow the CD-ROM. I was like, "that's piracy... no thanks". He said, "no, dude... you don't get it. It's free.". Looking back, I sometimes think. "How could you have been so into computers and NOT known about this???" Then I remember. Information just didn't travel as freely in those days. It was simply possible not to know things. Even though I read computer magazines, they were VERY focused on Windows or Mac. Once I found a distro I could install from floppies (Dragon Linux I think) I messed around until I got X running. Then it was CD-ROMs from CheapBytes and LinuxMall. In 1998 and 1999 I bet I installed every distro one could buy for 2 dollars on CD-ROM! I was a full time user. I have been ever since.
- hef19898 5y ago
  I remember discussions back the day between Linux and Windows proponents. I was clearly in the Windows camp, seeing Linux fans as, well, bizarre sometimes arrogant pseudo programmers. That changed, now that Linux is probably the last OS I can run without a cloud account easily. Heck, I'd even pay for it! Back the day I was a gamer, the main reason why Linux never really was an option. Later for work, it was Windows all the way for obvious reasons. Privately I am on Ubuntu now, along with LibreOffice. Won't go back, Windows turned into a major PIA when I tried to run different Teams and Office accounts not linked to the Windows 10 license due to home schooling and two kids. Gone were the days that a license key was all you needed. There is still a Windows boot partition, company hardware is Windows anyway. The only thing I have a hard time getting rid of is Excel. I am so used to that...
  - tomrod 5y ago
    MS really needs to release a Linux Excel.
tristor 5y ago
I ordered a copy of SLS on floppy disk from a guy out in Seattle or Portland (I forget) via an ad in the back of Computer Shopper magazine in the early 90s. I installed it on a Tandy 1000 RSX (386SX 25Mhz) my parents had recently replaced with an IBM PS/2 Model 77 (with a 486DX2 50Mhz). I was obsessed with Linux almost immediately because I could compile and run some of the software that I had gotten used to using on the UNIX mainframe I dialed into at the university nearby to get SLIP internet access. Stuff like Gopher, PINE for mail, etc. That experience pretty much cemented my love of computers and determined the trajectory of my life/career afterwards. In a lot of ways, Linux saved me from working construction with my dad in the small town I grew up in and allowed me to escape.
- anthk 5y ago
  >cemented >Portland >contruction Wait, you avoided a triple curse. JK, having professional tools for free in the 90's and early OO's was astrounding. No more Windows+shareware crap combos. In late 90's/early OO's you even got lots of games and multimedia software.
wiz21c 5y ago
I think I remember that I started with something called TSX11 / SunSite... Is there any HN'ers who see what that was ?
- gattilorenz 5y ago
  > TSX11 Could it be tsx-11.mit.edu? There's a (partial) mirror of that FTP site in 1996 here: https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/ftp-archives/tsx-11.mit.edu/ https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/ftp-archives/tsx-... As for SunSite, ibiblio also hosts https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/ftp-archives/sunsite.unc.edu https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/ftp-archives/suns... although I think that was a more popular name? A floppy distribution of Linux that I used around 2000 was hosted on sunsite.dk https://web.archive.org/web/20010127161100/http://sunsite.dk/mulinux https://web.archive.org/web/20010127161100/http://sunsite.dk... Update: WOW! I didn't know that Wine developement was already active in 1994! Somehow I had assumed it had started after Windows 95, however I just stumbled on this FAQ from 1994, mindblowing: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/ftp-archives/sunsite.unc.edu/Nov-06-1994/ALPHA/wine/Wine.FAQ http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/ftp-archives/sunsi...
- mindcrime 5y ago
  Not sure about TSX11, but there was a sunsite.unc.edu site back in the day, and they hosted Linux images (and lots of other F/OSS stuff). https://www.ibiblio.org/index.old/yeoldindex.html https://www.ibiblio.org/index.old/yeoldindex.html
- anonymousiam 5y ago
  Tsx11 was Ted Tso's MIT Linux site. Sunsite was unc (University of North Carolina). There was also funet in Finland (close to Linus). Those were the hot Linux sites back then.
- EvanAnderson 5y ago
  Back in the early 90s I purchased CD-ROMs that were nothing more than archives of tsx11 and sunsite. It was much nicer for large files than downloading with a 28.8kbps modem.
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deleted 5y ago
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butterisgood 5y ago
(Just a pile of self-indulgent reminiscing) I sometimes wish I'd heard of Linux a few years earlier. I didn't graduate high school until 1995, and didn't know much about Usenet until I got to college. Once I did, I learned there was a whole world of interesting, and disgustingly weird/creepy "stuff" on the internet. Anyway, sometime around 1996/97 I started using Linux (dual booting Win95 because I wasn't ready to try to live there), for all my programming assignment work as the options were to go to campus or dial up over the modem pool (not enough modems!) hoping to get a phone line to do my homework. Linux was a lot closer to the environment we were coding in, though DJGPP had helped me out a fair amount before I went to a more Unixy environment. We used a single RS/6000 running some version of AIX for email, usenet, and programming assignments across a student body of nearly 6000 of us kids... What a time! We made unwise use of telnet, "talk", finger, even learned to do so across the internet to other Unix machines we found. In our spare time we played Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem 3d, Descent. We played around with token ring networks, 10base-T ethernet, GNU Hurd, FreeBSD. The closest I get to feel to those nostalgic days is messing around with Plan 9 and 9front nowadays. So happy it's been MIT licensed (just this year), and Inferno also.
terrywang 5y ago
Grew up in China, the first Linux distro, in fact non-Windows OS was Red Bar Linux 6.3 (I form of CDs sold in those pirated software shops, never saw Linux on floppy), no one else around me use anything other than Windows (99.99% pirated). It opened up a door for me, later on I bought Mandrake Linux 8.1 (with Chinese input method and fonts - displaying CJK was pain back then). Fedora Core 1 was my main desktop and the (Distro Hopping & learning) journey continues, and picking up the skill tree around Linux brought me where I am today ;-) Note: Tried Slackware 10, like its KISS and BSD style rc but it wasn't liveable for me back then. Stuck with Fedore (Core) for very long until Ubuntu 6.06 (Canonical post CDs) and later tried Arch Linux (very close to Slackware before the systemd migration...).
- anezch 5y ago
  I live in Indonesia and have a very similar experience and situation (99.99% pirated Windows) with you. From Mandrake 8 to Fedora to Ubuntu 6. I remembered the time when I got my Ubuntu and Kubuntu CDs posted. The experience of using apt to download and update packages were a mindblowing experience at that time. That and the simplicity of Ubuntu was the main reason that I managed to persuade the management in the company where i work to migrate from win98 to ubuntu.
  - solmich 5y ago
    I got Mandrake 8 from InfoLinux magazine during their roadshows among universities in early 2000s, along with Rusmanto and Onno Purbo. Good old days.
    - terrywang 5y ago
      I dug out the 3 CDs and box Mandrake Linux 8.1 came with (2 are Mandrake 8.1 and 1 for fonts + input method framework) in the attic last time I visited my parents house ;-) For those who are interested to see how properly copyrighted Linux were sold in the 2000s in China -> [https://twitter.com/terrywang/status/1108847424498331648 https://twitter.com/terrywang/status/1108847424498331648]
  - 5y ago
skydhash 5y ago
I discovered linux through a couple of books (mostly about security) in 2008/2009. Then I downloaded linux mint (The gnome version). The only thing I recalled is how beautiful it was, all grey instead of the light beige and green of Windows XP. It felt like soft rubber button and XP felt like the clicky ones. And so many options. I spent days customizing KDE
- ulzeraj 5y ago
  I was an edgy teenager and wanted to use something different my friends were using so I asked my even more edgy friend how to start with Linux and he pointed me towards Slackware or Gentoo. That was back in 2003 I believe. I also remember being enamored with KDE. I'm not trolling. Thats exactly how I got into Linux and later other flavors of Unix like BSD and Solaris. Fast forward and that silly teenager angst paved the way to my whole career. PS: my even more edgy friend is still very edgy though he also became a father and a successful engineer.
sprucely 5y ago
Does anyone remember Win4Lin? It would run Windows 98 as a process and translate system calls to their Linux equivalent. It was very convient for testing my websites in IE. And I swear it was faster and more stable than running Windows on bare hardware. And when it did blue screen, I could have it back up in a matter of seconds.
- 10GBps 5y ago
  I remember it but it was no competition to VMware which I had been a user of since 1999.
- hulitu 5y ago
  Yes. Win4linux was the best way to run windows in linux for games back then. Even better than the real thing. It was better than vmware.
dleslie 5y ago
My first Linux was an early Slackware that came in a CD along with the book "Using Linux" I've placed an iso on archive: https://archive.org/details/UsingLinux https://archive.org/details/UsingLinux
heurisko 5y ago
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.
- krylon 5y ago
  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... ;-)
fmakunbound 5y ago
Around that time, I vaguely recall Linux switching from DWARF to ELF, some kind of libc5 (libc4 ??) to libc6 migration in the the ecosystem and a Sanyo CDROM driver that needed some source code edits to work for my model causing me endless grief as a kid exploring beyond DOS. Great times!
- EvanAnderson 5y ago
  I was running either a Slackware or SLS distro when I did the a.out to ELF transition. I remember the libc migration occurring but I don't recall the details. It amazes me that I pulled it off given how little I understood about how the system actually worked. My experience, up to that point, was with MS-DOS and being a user on a Xenix system (but not a sysadmin). I was really, really excited to have a Unix-like OS at home, but definitely didn't understand how shared libraries worked, etc.
  - bitwize 5y ago
    Slackware was a bit late transitioning from libc5 to GNU libc. I dropped a copy of GNU libc from Red Hat onto my Slackware box, and binaries that expected GNU libc pretty much just worked.
  - icedchai 5y ago
    I remember doing that, as well. I had Slackware running with some custom patches. I had to upgrade the kernel, libc, ld.so, and a bunch of other stuff. For a while, I had a system that ran both a.out and ELF binaries. This was back in 1996 or so?
    - EvanAnderson 5y ago
      I think '96. I remember a friend, who I only ever met face-to-face at Defcon 4, telling me that he didn't think I could pull off the migration and that I should just reload the system. That pins it at '96.
- oflebbe 5y ago
  I remember occasionally contributing to libc at that time. libc4 was a.out, at least that was the name I remember. libc5 was the first ELF libc and libc6 is glibc.
anonymousiam 5y ago
I was aware of Linux, but did not try a distro until SLS (Soft Landing System). It was distributed on a pile of 3.5" floppies, and booted from a floppy too. I moved to Yggdrasil (running from CD-ROM) to get the benefit of a full install with X and development tools in an era when the 650MB CD-ROM had three times the capacity of a high-end hard drive.
richard_todd 5y ago
I was at TAMU from 1995 to 1999, and ran either RedHat or Slackware. In the CS department where I worked part time it was all Solaris. Never heard of this TAMU distribution, but I would have been interested in helping to revive it if I had. Oh well!
- incompatible 5y ago
  I had TAMU as my first system, in 1993 I think. I didn't have a very effective internet connection but managed to get a copy on a pile of floppies. After that, I maintained it for years by hand by updating from individual source packages (I remember the upgrade to ELF being quite painful).
davidw 5y ago
My parents gave me a "laptop" in 1995, with a 386 processor, and 4 megs of ram. Even for the time it wasn't very powerful (my dad had a 486 desktop), but it was all mine, and I spent something like a whole weekend downloading the Slackware floppies. I thought it was just the coolest thing ever that every single piece of software on that system had source code that I could read and learn from. I used the 'jed' editor because Emacs was a bit heavy duty for the memory the system had. My next computer was a more powerful desktop that was able to run Emacs, the X windowing system and all that. I put Debian on it, and still use Ubuntu, a derivative of Debian.
fisian 5y ago
There is also this wikimedia illustration of the history of distributions. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Di...
abotsis 5y ago
I installed SLS. It took me all night to get the modelines right for 1024x768@8 bits. On one side, my how far things have come. On the other, why’s it so hard to get hotplug thunderbolt working. :)
quakeguy 5y ago
Yggdrasil was indeed the best name ever for a distro…
- blippage 5y ago
  Back in the day, I has initially assumed that Yggdrasil was named after the Cthulhu mythos, not realising it was a tree. Still, if ever I create an OS, I'm going to give a Lovecraftian name.
pvitz 5y ago
My first distribution was DLD ("Deutsche Linux Distribution", started already in 1992). The distribution came with a softcover manual that described everything from compiling your own kernel to setting up your own webserver etc. Delix, the company behind it, was later sold to Redhat.
rel2thr 5y ago
Crazy how much old software had ties to universities ( tamu Linux, BSD, wuftpd ). Are there any modern examples of this or have universities gotten out of the software game
- cogman10 5y ago
  I think it's more the case that the linux ecosystem has gotten too complex for a university student or professor to wrangle on their own.
- bityard 5y ago
  My guess is that university culture changed a lot over the last couple of decades, as well as the mainstream perception of computing technology and the Internet shifting from a neat science fiction type thing that some of us dreamed about to being completely ubiquitous. Most of the technology that powered the Internet in some form or another came out of the Universities prior to the dot-com boom. If you wanted to do something interesting with computers and networks on a scale that mattered, academia was really your only option. (Yes there were BBSes and AOL, and dial-up Internet in most areas. But in terms of what you could do, those were like driving a golf cart on the autobahn.) Now that the Internet is everywhere and programming as a career path is seemingly as popular as nursing or construction, the direction if the Internet is largely being determined by large companies and governments, not the people (or even the type of people) who built it. I suspect university CS departments probably lost that "wacky misfit club" atmosphere a long time ago. I'm sure the insane-and-rising cost of higher education isn't helping things out either. All that said, lots of Universities do still provide material support for open source software in the form of hosting and mirrors. For example, around half of all Ubuntu and Debian mirrors are universities. The OSU open source lab hosts infrastructure for a variety of projects. I also feel like we can "blame" Github here, since it (and a few other sites/projects like it) have become the de facto place to host source code and collaboration tools. (Whereas in the past it would have been an FTP/HTTP site and a mailing list.)
  - amyjess 5y ago
    > I also feel like we can "blame" Github here, since it (and a few other sites/projects like it) have become the de facto place to host source code and collaboration tools. (Whereas in the past it would have been an FTP/HTTP site and a mailing list.) Honestly, SourceForge did it first. GitHub just picked off where SF left off.
squarefoot 5y ago
Ah, Yggdrasil Linux! The Fall 1994 CD has been my first ever contact with the Linux world. I was with some colleagues doing some shopping for my company at that IT store, saw the CD and recalled that some friends on the local BBS (social media? What social media?!?) were praising it, so bought it and that's when it all started. Well, not quite, because the CD was damaged with errors about in the middle of the operation, which was very long, therefore hard to spot, and the installation procedure would continue anyway, so in the end I had a system which was bootable but often gave errors about files missing, this and that. I had no Internet connection back then, so I played with it as much as I could, but in the end had to wait a couple years before finding a perfectly working copy of Red Hat bundled within a magazine, and that became the actual start.
mongol 5y ago
Can't say I appreciated the suggested soundtrack.
lholden 5y ago
I grabbed SLS off a BBS in mid to late 1993. I was 12 and had a 386 with 8mb of ram and a monochrome display. I didn't at all use X11 at the time, but I loved that I could switch between virtual consoles, had real multi-tasking, and had a C compiler. Funny side note... we had just watched Jurassic Park, which sparked a conversation with my dad about Unix. Dad mentioned that Linux was like Unix and was free. I had no idea Linux (or Unix) was a thing until this conversation, but I had to check it out. When I discovered that it had a C compiler... I was absolutely hooked. This was such a pivotal moment in my life and was a major contributor to my eventually becoming a professional programmer.
flyinghamster 5y ago
I still have an InfoMagic 6-CD set from April 1996 and a retail copy of Red Hat 5.1 among my old disks. I'm almost tempted to try one of them out in VM for old times' sake. On the InfoMagic set, there were: * Disk 1: Slackware 3.0 and Debian 0.93R6 * Disk 2: Red Hat 3.0.3 * Disk 3: Sunsite Archive * Disk 4: GNU and Kernel Sources * Disk 5: tsx-11 Archive * Disk 6: Demos and Red Hat for Alpha
dwater 5y ago
My first installation in 1995 or 1996 was from a set of about 12 overwritten AOL floppy disks my friend had built from his installation of Slackware onto a 386SX. Later I got a 486 with a first gen 1x Sony CDROM drive that had it's own controller card, and I didn't have documentation for the DMA and IRQ settings. I had a RedHat CD from a magazine, so I had to go through a very long installation startup process from boot floppies to get to the CD config, and just kept guessing and rebooting until it finally worked and I discovered it wouldn't read the CD. I ended up going to a RedHat installfest somewhere in Maryland in the DC suburbs, I think at a Navy facility? It was on a Saturday and we were alone in this big government building and I remember there being a big rolling display of slices of a monkey brain in the lab where the installfest was being held. They had loaner 3Com 10baseT cards and a network install server running, so I was finally able to get it all working.
- jasperry 5y ago
  Also 1995 or 96 for me. I had read about Linux on the web and attempted to download a floppy version and install it, but to no avail. Then I saw a book with accompanying Slackware CD in the bookstore. Best investment I ever made. I /devoured/ that book and got it all working. The desire to have my own free UNIX on my PC probably drove me to learn faster than I have before or since. The rest is history...
3dbrows 5y ago
When I was about 12 or 13 I ran a website called freelin.org. This was around 2001. Its goal was to provide Linux on CD to anyone who asked, globally, without cost. My hope was that donations would cover costs. They didn’t. I tried my best to supply everyone based on pocket money (allowance) at the time. To my shame, a few people who donated £1 didn’t get a CD. If this was you, please let me know and I will make it up to you. I apologise. My enthusiasm was powered by the ability to do good by using my cable internet connection to download ISOs in trivial time. I cut a strange figure at the post office every Saturday sending packages to places like Macedonia.
- 6581 5y ago
  I remember stumbling upon freelin.org back then. I didn't donate (I already had enough bandwidth at that time to acquire the distros I wanted), but I admired being dedicated to Linux that much to provide a service like that.
  - 3dbrows 5y ago
    Delighted someone remembers it! Thanks.
VLM 5y ago
"Because of the general bugginess of SLS" I was there, and I don't recall that. It all "just worked" in the summer of 93 which was mere months after this article. On a 40 mhz 386dx, a kernel recompile took about an hour with 4 megs of ram so I upgraded to 5 megs using 4 256K sticks (back then simms were 8 bits wide and the 386 had a 32 bit bus, so ...) and then compile times dropped to 15 minutes. X window system worked fine IIRC. The big problem with SLS is the distribution method was zipped floppy disk images downloaded from BBSes that were basically split up tar files. So the only update mechanism to fix a minor corner of the X window system would be to redownload all the "X" series disk images, then do a complete reinstall of the X window system. IIRC the A series of floppy disks was about three disks and would boot and do nothing, but it did verify your hardware worked with linux so it was a natural starting point. The B series installed a "complete unix CLI environment" and the C series installed the compilers although you needed to install the K series to get the kernel source. In those days I believe we did not have modules yet so I had to recompile to get the mitsumi proprietary "not quite IDE" cdrom driver, or at least if we had modules nobody distributed that module in compiled format. Also in the pre-PCI era we set our ports and IRQs manually and it was possible at boot to override but most people recompiled their kernel to their local soundblaster sound card settings or whatever. I believe there might have been a T series of floppies which installed TCL/TK. The superb innovation of Debian was once you got it installed and you connected to the internet you could download deb files and upgrade, perhaps, just perl. Or you could install, perhaps, just the gawk implementation of awk. About half a decade later came apt and you could now upgrade "automatically" over the internet which seemed quite magical at the time. A big part of Debian in the old days was all FOSS license so its safe to use at work, and the universal OS "everything should be possible" kind of the opposite of the modern debian systemd era "theres only one way we will let you compute, and you'll like it or leave". I don't recall any claims of being bug free or less bugs at all; if anything debian was worse LOL. It was not clear until the APT era that binary distribution was the way to do linux. In the "old days" if you wanted a fancy irc client you simply ftp downloaded the source and tar -xzf whatever.tar.gz ; make ; make install ; make clean it and it worked quite well.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  My Western Digital IDE CD-ROM and Trident graphics card weren't so happy with Slackware 2.0.
codezero 5y ago
I think I still have my Slackware 1.0 CD in a closet back at home from around 1993/94. I went on to work at Red Hat in 1999, those were fun times for Linux :)
- jmclnx 5y ago
  If it is really 1.0, you should post it in Linux Questions http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/ http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/ people there have been looking for a 1.0 set. I think the earliest one found so far was 1.01
  - codezero 5y ago
    If it's rare, I doubt it's 1.0 then, but I'll check :)
not2b 5y ago
I tried both Yggdrasil and SLS in 1993 when I was still in grad school, ran SLS for a while on my 386 PC (with no floating point). Lots of floppies and slow downloads in those days.
dim13 5y ago
Really surprised to see The Gimp in 1992 … full 6 years before its initial conception.
minitoar 5y ago
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.
- kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
  You might be right (I don't really know for sure), but this is an ad hominem fallacy, which is probably why it's getting downvoted.
  - minitoar 5y ago
    I disagree it's an ad hominem fallacy. I'm judging him on his opinions and what he writes. I'm not surprised about the downvotes.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  I remember him beating to death the horse that was "social justice warriors taking over our open source projects" and I stopped following his youtube around that time (I think it was 2017?) That said it's kind of irrelevant to the topic.
- martin1975 5y ago
  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'd say racism is on the whole pretty rare. On the other hand, I do believe mental slavery is more prevalent than individual/collective racism :).
  - minitoar 5y ago
    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.
guenthert 5y ago
"Of the systems created in 1992, SLS (Softlanding Linux System) had what I would consider to be the biggest impact." Wasn't the impact not also due to the cunning marketing trick calling it SLS 1.0, when people were eagerly awaiting Linux 1.0 for months?
cmrdporcupine 5y ago
I used hjlu first, then mcc and then sls. I think. Never encountered TAMU, didn't try Yggdrasil. I think I ended using SLS longest. Most of this downloaded first with a 1200 baud and then 9600 baud modem. Vague recollection anyways. 486/50, 8MB RAM, 200MB drive. Memories.
jim02672 5y ago
Great. Another article on old Linux distributions that's just the same crap as in all the others. FYI the first picture, the one with the 0.12 boot & root floppies that is in every old Linux distro article, is the original distribution made by Linus Torvalds himself. Two releases later, 0.95a (3/17/1992), Jim Winstead started doing the root floppy. H.J. Lu's "bootable root disk" came shortly afterwards. (9/23/1992) When you see an article with that picture labeled as H.J. Lu's boot/root floppies, just stop reading. http://mirror.cs.msu.ru/oldlinux.org/Linux.old/docs/Linuxdocs.pdf http://mirror.cs.msu.ru/oldlinux.org/Linux.old/docs/Linuxdoc... http://grumbeer.dyndns.org/ftp/mail/www.kclug.org/1992/sep/3/0266.shtml http://grumbeer.dyndns.org/ftp/mail/www.kclug.org/1992/sep/3...
watersb 5y ago
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.

220 points by WoodenChair 5y ago

The ancient (read 90s) distros are a lot of fun to play with. Redhat still have a lot of their legacy distributions available and they are installable on vmware. You can learn a heck of a lot with really early distributions. I remember how complicated they seemed at the time but compared to nowadays it's pretty easy to have all the system components in your head at any one time. I spent a week or so upgrading component by component redhat 5.0 (hurricane) to be able to run a more modern version of glibc learning a lot about the c runtime stack under linux in the process.

Agingcoder 5y ago
Yes, I find 90s distros (I started with a strange linux distro called minilinux using an umsdos file system which I would start by typing 'linux' on the dos prompt, then moved on to Slackware 3 and redhat 2 around 1995 if I remember well) to be significantly simpler. Basically, they contain very little, so you can pretty much understand everything . Then, it's the usual 'build on it, get bigger, add complexity' , but knowing the early model makes understanding the modern product much easier.
- nescioquid 5y ago
  > Basically, they contain very little, so you can pretty much understand everything . Slackware (7) mentored me into Linux competence. RedHat was making itself more convenient at the time, but if the system got into a bad state, it was very hard for me to figure out how to correct it. Slackware setup was more of a chore, but man did I end up an understanding of what was going on! I RTFMed because the M was fantasic. And if something did go wrong, I would usually have some ideas about where to start. That was such a valuable experience.

icedchai 5y ago

SLS Linux was my first distro. It was probably early 1993 when I first installed it, on a 386SX/20 with 3 megs of RAM. I think it was on 12 or 16 floppies.

SemiNormal 5y ago
My first was Slackware. Back when they would mail you a CD of the distro for free.
- sillystuff 5y ago
  Wish I had known about that back then. I spent hours in a 24 hour access university computer lab, one night in '93, downloading Slack to floppies. Never looked back. '93 was the year of the GNU/Linux desktop for me.
ansible 5y ago
I ordered a set of SLS floppies from some random person I learned about via Usenet news groups (comp.os.minix and later comp.os.linux). It used Linux kernel version 0.99pl12 or thereabouts. I had previously been using Coherent Unix (with the enormous compendium in a thick book). I was first setting up my home NFS server using NE2000 Ethernet cards to try all that out. This was all run on a Gateway 386 @ 25MHz which started with 4MB of RAM.
- icedchai 5y ago
  I also used Coherent for a bit. Its documentation was excellent! I remember the book with the shell on the cover: http://gunkies.org/wiki/File:Coherent_4_print_ad.jpg http://gunkies.org/wiki/File:Coherent_4_print_ad.jpg

fit2rule 5y ago

Yggdrasil OG in the house. I still have 40-odd floppies around, was a great day they shipped a bootable CD that went straight to X if you had the right hardware .. that blew a lot of our minds, back then ..

nobleach 5y ago

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 very familiar with AmigaOS, so this idea of a free Unix-like OS that I could install on commodity hardware was intriguing. A friend of mine bought the RedHat 5.2 distro from Best Buy and offered to let me borrow the CD-ROM. I was like, "that's piracy... no thanks". He said, "no, dude... you don't get it. It's free.". Looking back, I sometimes think. "How could you have been so into computers and NOT known about this???" Then I remember. Information just didn't travel as freely in those days. It was simply possible not to know things. Even though I read computer magazines, they were VERY focused on Windows or Mac. Once I found a distro I could install from floppies (Dragon Linux I think) I messed around until I got X running. Then it was CD-ROMs from CheapBytes and LinuxMall. In 1998 and 1999 I bet I installed every distro one could buy for 2 dollars on CD-ROM! I was a full time user. I have been ever since.

hef19898 5y ago
I remember discussions back the day between Linux and Windows proponents. I was clearly in the Windows camp, seeing Linux fans as, well, bizarre sometimes arrogant pseudo programmers. That changed, now that Linux is probably the last OS I can run without a cloud account easily. Heck, I'd even pay for it! Back the day I was a gamer, the main reason why Linux never really was an option. Later for work, it was Windows all the way for obvious reasons. Privately I am on Ubuntu now, along with LibreOffice. Won't go back, Windows turned into a major PIA when I tried to run different Teams and Office accounts not linked to the Windows 10 license due to home schooling and two kids. Gone were the days that a license key was all you needed. There is still a Windows boot partition, company hardware is Windows anyway. The only thing I have a hard time getting rid of is Excel. I am so used to that...
- tomrod 5y ago
  MS really needs to release a Linux Excel.

tristor 5y ago

I ordered a copy of SLS on floppy disk from a guy out in Seattle or Portland (I forget) via an ad in the back of Computer Shopper magazine in the early 90s. I installed it on a Tandy 1000 RSX (386SX 25Mhz) my parents had recently replaced with an IBM PS/2 Model 77 (with a 486DX2 50Mhz). I was obsessed with Linux almost immediately because I could compile and run some of the software that I had gotten used to using on the UNIX mainframe I dialed into at the university nearby to get SLIP internet access. Stuff like Gopher, PINE for mail, etc. That experience pretty much cemented my love of computers and determined the trajectory of my life/career afterwards. In a lot of ways, Linux saved me from working construction with my dad in the small town I grew up in and allowed me to escape.

anthk 5y ago
>cemented >Portland >contruction Wait, you avoided a triple curse. JK, having professional tools for free in the 90's and early OO's was astrounding. No more Windows+shareware crap combos. In late 90's/early OO's you even got lots of games and multimedia software.

wiz21c 5y ago

I think I remember that I started with something called TSX11 / SunSite... Is there any HN'ers who see what that was ?

gattilorenz 5y ago
> TSX11 Could it be tsx-11.mit.edu? There's a (partial) mirror of that FTP site in 1996 here: https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/ftp-archives/tsx-11.mit.edu/ https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/ftp-archives/tsx-... As for SunSite, ibiblio also hosts https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/ftp-archives/sunsite.unc.edu https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/ftp-archives/suns... although I think that was a more popular name? A floppy distribution of Linux that I used around 2000 was hosted on sunsite.dk https://web.archive.org/web/20010127161100/http://sunsite.dk/mulinux https://web.archive.org/web/20010127161100/http://sunsite.dk... Update: WOW! I didn't know that Wine developement was already active in 1994! Somehow I had assumed it had started after Windows 95, however I just stumbled on this FAQ from 1994, mindblowing: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/ftp-archives/sunsite.unc.edu/Nov-06-1994/ALPHA/wine/Wine.FAQ http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/ftp-archives/sunsi...
mindcrime 5y ago
Not sure about TSX11, but there was a sunsite.unc.edu site back in the day, and they hosted Linux images (and lots of other F/OSS stuff). https://www.ibiblio.org/index.old/yeoldindex.html https://www.ibiblio.org/index.old/yeoldindex.html
anonymousiam 5y ago
Tsx11 was Ted Tso's MIT Linux site. Sunsite was unc (University of North Carolina). There was also funet in Finland (close to Linus). Those were the hot Linux sites back then.
EvanAnderson 5y ago
Back in the early 90s I purchased CD-ROMs that were nothing more than archives of tsx11 and sunsite. It was much nicer for large files than downloading with a 28.8kbps modem.
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butterisgood 5y ago

(Just a pile of self-indulgent reminiscing) I sometimes wish I'd heard of Linux a few years earlier. I didn't graduate high school until 1995, and didn't know much about Usenet until I got to college. Once I did, I learned there was a whole world of interesting, and disgustingly weird/creepy "stuff" on the internet. Anyway, sometime around 1996/97 I started using Linux (dual booting Win95 because I wasn't ready to try to live there), for all my programming assignment work as the options were to go to campus or dial up over the modem pool (not enough modems!) hoping to get a phone line to do my homework. Linux was a lot closer to the environment we were coding in, though DJGPP had helped me out a fair amount before I went to a more Unixy environment. We used a single RS/6000 running some version of AIX for email, usenet, and programming assignments across a student body of nearly 6000 of us kids... What a time! We made unwise use of telnet, "talk", finger, even learned to do so across the internet to other Unix machines we found. In our spare time we played Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem 3d, Descent. We played around with token ring networks, 10base-T ethernet, GNU Hurd, FreeBSD. The closest I get to feel to those nostalgic days is messing around with Plan 9 and 9front nowadays. So happy it's been MIT licensed (just this year), and Inferno also.

terrywang 5y ago

Grew up in China, the first Linux distro, in fact non-Windows OS was Red Bar Linux 6.3 (I form of CDs sold in those pirated software shops, never saw Linux on floppy), no one else around me use anything other than Windows (99.99% pirated). It opened up a door for me, later on I bought Mandrake Linux 8.1 (with Chinese input method and fonts - displaying CJK was pain back then). Fedora Core 1 was my main desktop and the (Distro Hopping & learning) journey continues, and picking up the skill tree around Linux brought me where I am today ;-) Note: Tried Slackware 10, like its KISS and BSD style rc but it wasn't liveable for me back then. Stuck with Fedore (Core) for very long until Ubuntu 6.06 (Canonical post CDs) and later tried Arch Linux (very close to Slackware before the systemd migration...).

anezch 5y ago
I live in Indonesia and have a very similar experience and situation (99.99% pirated Windows) with you. From Mandrake 8 to Fedora to Ubuntu 6. I remembered the time when I got my Ubuntu and Kubuntu CDs posted. The experience of using apt to download and update packages were a mindblowing experience at that time. That and the simplicity of Ubuntu was the main reason that I managed to persuade the management in the company where i work to migrate from win98 to ubuntu.
- solmich 5y ago
  I got Mandrake 8 from InfoLinux magazine during their roadshows among universities in early 2000s, along with Rusmanto and Onno Purbo. Good old days.
  - terrywang 5y ago
    I dug out the 3 CDs and box Mandrake Linux 8.1 came with (2 are Mandrake 8.1 and 1 for fonts + input method framework) in the attic last time I visited my parents house ;-) For those who are interested to see how properly copyrighted Linux were sold in the 2000s in China -> [https://twitter.com/terrywang/status/1108847424498331648 https://twitter.com/terrywang/status/1108847424498331648]
- 5y ago

skydhash 5y ago

I discovered linux through a couple of books (mostly about security) in 2008/2009. Then I downloaded linux mint (The gnome version). The only thing I recalled is how beautiful it was, all grey instead of the light beige and green of Windows XP. It felt like soft rubber button and XP felt like the clicky ones. And so many options. I spent days customizing KDE

ulzeraj 5y ago
I was an edgy teenager and wanted to use something different my friends were using so I asked my even more edgy friend how to start with Linux and he pointed me towards Slackware or Gentoo. That was back in 2003 I believe. I also remember being enamored with KDE. I'm not trolling. Thats exactly how I got into Linux and later other flavors of Unix like BSD and Solaris. Fast forward and that silly teenager angst paved the way to my whole career. PS: my even more edgy friend is still very edgy though he also became a father and a successful engineer.

sprucely 5y ago

Does anyone remember Win4Lin? It would run Windows 98 as a process and translate system calls to their Linux equivalent. It was very convient for testing my websites in IE. And I swear it was faster and more stable than running Windows on bare hardware. And when it did blue screen, I could have it back up in a matter of seconds.

10GBps 5y ago
I remember it but it was no competition to VMware which I had been a user of since 1999.
hulitu 5y ago
Yes. Win4linux was the best way to run windows in linux for games back then. Even better than the real thing. It was better than vmware.

dleslie 5y ago

My first Linux was an early Slackware that came in a CD along with the book "Using Linux" I've placed an iso on archive: https://archive.org/details/UsingLinux https://archive.org/details/UsingLinux

heurisko 5y ago

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.

krylon 5y ago
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... ;-)

fmakunbound 5y ago

Around that time, I vaguely recall Linux switching from DWARF to ELF, some kind of libc5 (libc4 ??) to libc6 migration in the the ecosystem and a Sanyo CDROM driver that needed some source code edits to work for my model causing me endless grief as a kid exploring beyond DOS. Great times!

EvanAnderson 5y ago
I was running either a Slackware or SLS distro when I did the a.out to ELF transition. I remember the libc migration occurring but I don't recall the details. It amazes me that I pulled it off given how little I understood about how the system actually worked. My experience, up to that point, was with MS-DOS and being a user on a Xenix system (but not a sysadmin). I was really, really excited to have a Unix-like OS at home, but definitely didn't understand how shared libraries worked, etc.
- bitwize 5y ago
  Slackware was a bit late transitioning from libc5 to GNU libc. I dropped a copy of GNU libc from Red Hat onto my Slackware box, and binaries that expected GNU libc pretty much just worked.
- icedchai 5y ago
  I remember doing that, as well. I had Slackware running with some custom patches. I had to upgrade the kernel, libc, ld.so, and a bunch of other stuff. For a while, I had a system that ran both a.out and ELF binaries. This was back in 1996 or so?
  - EvanAnderson 5y ago
    I think '96. I remember a friend, who I only ever met face-to-face at Defcon 4, telling me that he didn't think I could pull off the migration and that I should just reload the system. That pins it at '96.
oflebbe 5y ago
I remember occasionally contributing to libc at that time. libc4 was a.out, at least that was the name I remember. libc5 was the first ELF libc and libc6 is glibc.

anonymousiam 5y ago

I was aware of Linux, but did not try a distro until SLS (Soft Landing System). It was distributed on a pile of 3.5" floppies, and booted from a floppy too. I moved to Yggdrasil (running from CD-ROM) to get the benefit of a full install with X and development tools in an era when the 650MB CD-ROM had three times the capacity of a high-end hard drive.

richard_todd 5y ago

I was at TAMU from 1995 to 1999, and ran either RedHat or Slackware. In the CS department where I worked part time it was all Solaris. Never heard of this TAMU distribution, but I would have been interested in helping to revive it if I had. Oh well!

incompatible 5y ago
I had TAMU as my first system, in 1993 I think. I didn't have a very effective internet connection but managed to get a copy on a pile of floppies. After that, I maintained it for years by hand by updating from individual source packages (I remember the upgrade to ELF being quite painful).

davidw 5y ago

My parents gave me a "laptop" in 1995, with a 386 processor, and 4 megs of ram. Even for the time it wasn't very powerful (my dad had a 486 desktop), but it was all mine, and I spent something like a whole weekend downloading the Slackware floppies. I thought it was just the coolest thing ever that every single piece of software on that system had source code that I could read and learn from. I used the 'jed' editor because Emacs was a bit heavy duty for the memory the system had. My next computer was a more powerful desktop that was able to run Emacs, the X windowing system and all that. I put Debian on it, and still use Ubuntu, a derivative of Debian.

fisian 5y ago

There is also this wikimedia illustration of the history of distributions. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Di...

abotsis 5y ago

I installed SLS. It took me all night to get the modelines right for 1024x768@8 bits. On one side, my how far things have come. On the other, why’s it so hard to get hotplug thunderbolt working. :)

quakeguy 5y ago

Yggdrasil was indeed the best name ever for a distro…

blippage 5y ago
Back in the day, I has initially assumed that Yggdrasil was named after the Cthulhu mythos, not realising it was a tree. Still, if ever I create an OS, I'm going to give a Lovecraftian name.

pvitz 5y ago

My first distribution was DLD ("Deutsche Linux Distribution", started already in 1992). The distribution came with a softcover manual that described everything from compiling your own kernel to setting up your own webserver etc. Delix, the company behind it, was later sold to Redhat.

rel2thr 5y ago

Crazy how much old software had ties to universities ( tamu Linux, BSD, wuftpd ). Are there any modern examples of this or have universities gotten out of the software game

cogman10 5y ago
I think it's more the case that the linux ecosystem has gotten too complex for a university student or professor to wrangle on their own.
bityard 5y ago
My guess is that university culture changed a lot over the last couple of decades, as well as the mainstream perception of computing technology and the Internet shifting from a neat science fiction type thing that some of us dreamed about to being completely ubiquitous. Most of the technology that powered the Internet in some form or another came out of the Universities prior to the dot-com boom. If you wanted to do something interesting with computers and networks on a scale that mattered, academia was really your only option. (Yes there were BBSes and AOL, and dial-up Internet in most areas. But in terms of what you could do, those were like driving a golf cart on the autobahn.) Now that the Internet is everywhere and programming as a career path is seemingly as popular as nursing or construction, the direction if the Internet is largely being determined by large companies and governments, not the people (or even the type of people) who built it. I suspect university CS departments probably lost that "wacky misfit club" atmosphere a long time ago. I'm sure the insane-and-rising cost of higher education isn't helping things out either. All that said, lots of Universities do still provide material support for open source software in the form of hosting and mirrors. For example, around half of all Ubuntu and Debian mirrors are universities. The OSU open source lab hosts infrastructure for a variety of projects. I also feel like we can "blame" Github here, since it (and a few other sites/projects like it) have become the de facto place to host source code and collaboration tools. (Whereas in the past it would have been an FTP/HTTP site and a mailing list.)
- amyjess 5y ago
  > I also feel like we can "blame" Github here, since it (and a few other sites/projects like it) have become the de facto place to host source code and collaboration tools. (Whereas in the past it would have been an FTP/HTTP site and a mailing list.) Honestly, SourceForge did it first. GitHub just picked off where SF left off.

squarefoot 5y ago

Ah, Yggdrasil Linux! The Fall 1994 CD has been my first ever contact with the Linux world. I was with some colleagues doing some shopping for my company at that IT store, saw the CD and recalled that some friends on the local BBS (social media? What social media?!?) were praising it, so bought it and that's when it all started. Well, not quite, because the CD was damaged with errors about in the middle of the operation, which was very long, therefore hard to spot, and the installation procedure would continue anyway, so in the end I had a system which was bootable but often gave errors about files missing, this and that. I had no Internet connection back then, so I played with it as much as I could, but in the end had to wait a couple years before finding a perfectly working copy of Red Hat bundled within a magazine, and that became the actual start.

mongol 5y ago

Can't say I appreciated the suggested soundtrack.

lholden 5y ago

I grabbed SLS off a BBS in mid to late 1993. I was 12 and had a 386 with 8mb of ram and a monochrome display. I didn't at all use X11 at the time, but I loved that I could switch between virtual consoles, had real multi-tasking, and had a C compiler. Funny side note... we had just watched Jurassic Park, which sparked a conversation with my dad about Unix. Dad mentioned that Linux was like Unix and was free. I had no idea Linux (or Unix) was a thing until this conversation, but I had to check it out. When I discovered that it had a C compiler... I was absolutely hooked. This was such a pivotal moment in my life and was a major contributor to my eventually becoming a professional programmer.

flyinghamster 5y ago

I still have an InfoMagic 6-CD set from April 1996 and a retail copy of Red Hat 5.1 among my old disks. I'm almost tempted to try one of them out in VM for old times' sake. On the InfoMagic set, there were: * Disk 1: Slackware 3.0 and Debian 0.93R6 * Disk 2: Red Hat 3.0.3 * Disk 3: Sunsite Archive * Disk 4: GNU and Kernel Sources * Disk 5: tsx-11 Archive * Disk 6: Demos and Red Hat for Alpha

dwater 5y ago

My first installation in 1995 or 1996 was from a set of about 12 overwritten AOL floppy disks my friend had built from his installation of Slackware onto a 386SX. Later I got a 486 with a first gen 1x Sony CDROM drive that had it's own controller card, and I didn't have documentation for the DMA and IRQ settings. I had a RedHat CD from a magazine, so I had to go through a very long installation startup process from boot floppies to get to the CD config, and just kept guessing and rebooting until it finally worked and I discovered it wouldn't read the CD. I ended up going to a RedHat installfest somewhere in Maryland in the DC suburbs, I think at a Navy facility? It was on a Saturday and we were alone in this big government building and I remember there being a big rolling display of slices of a monkey brain in the lab where the installfest was being held. They had loaner 3Com 10baseT cards and a network install server running, so I was finally able to get it all working.

jasperry 5y ago
Also 1995 or 96 for me. I had read about Linux on the web and attempted to download a floppy version and install it, but to no avail. Then I saw a book with accompanying Slackware CD in the bookstore. Best investment I ever made. I /devoured/ that book and got it all working. The desire to have my own free UNIX on my PC probably drove me to learn faster than I have before or since. The rest is history...

3dbrows 5y ago

When I was about 12 or 13 I ran a website called freelin.org. This was around 2001. Its goal was to provide Linux on CD to anyone who asked, globally, without cost. My hope was that donations would cover costs. They didn’t. I tried my best to supply everyone based on pocket money (allowance) at the time. To my shame, a few people who donated £1 didn’t get a CD. If this was you, please let me know and I will make it up to you. I apologise. My enthusiasm was powered by the ability to do good by using my cable internet connection to download ISOs in trivial time. I cut a strange figure at the post office every Saturday sending packages to places like Macedonia.

6581 5y ago
I remember stumbling upon freelin.org back then. I didn't donate (I already had enough bandwidth at that time to acquire the distros I wanted), but I admired being dedicated to Linux that much to provide a service like that.
- 3dbrows 5y ago
  Delighted someone remembers it! Thanks.

VLM 5y ago

"Because of the general bugginess of SLS" I was there, and I don't recall that. It all "just worked" in the summer of 93 which was mere months after this article. On a 40 mhz 386dx, a kernel recompile took about an hour with 4 megs of ram so I upgraded to 5 megs using 4 256K sticks (back then simms were 8 bits wide and the 386 had a 32 bit bus, so ...) and then compile times dropped to 15 minutes. X window system worked fine IIRC. The big problem with SLS is the distribution method was zipped floppy disk images downloaded from BBSes that were basically split up tar files. So the only update mechanism to fix a minor corner of the X window system would be to redownload all the "X" series disk images, then do a complete reinstall of the X window system. IIRC the A series of floppy disks was about three disks and would boot and do nothing, but it did verify your hardware worked with linux so it was a natural starting point. The B series installed a "complete unix CLI environment" and the C series installed the compilers although you needed to install the K series to get the kernel source. In those days I believe we did not have modules yet so I had to recompile to get the mitsumi proprietary "not quite IDE" cdrom driver, or at least if we had modules nobody distributed that module in compiled format. Also in the pre-PCI era we set our ports and IRQs manually and it was possible at boot to override but most people recompiled their kernel to their local soundblaster sound card settings or whatever. I believe there might have been a T series of floppies which installed TCL/TK. The superb innovation of Debian was once you got it installed and you connected to the internet you could download deb files and upgrade, perhaps, just perl. Or you could install, perhaps, just the gawk implementation of awk. About half a decade later came apt and you could now upgrade "automatically" over the internet which seemed quite magical at the time. A big part of Debian in the old days was all FOSS license so its safe to use at work, and the universal OS "everything should be possible" kind of the opposite of the modern debian systemd era "theres only one way we will let you compute, and you'll like it or leave". I don't recall any claims of being bug free or less bugs at all; if anything debian was worse LOL. It was not clear until the APT era that binary distribution was the way to do linux. In the "old days" if you wanted a fancy irc client you simply ftp downloaded the source and tar -xzf whatever.tar.gz ; make ; make install ; make clean it and it worked quite well.

pjmlp 5y ago
My Western Digital IDE CD-ROM and Trident graphics card weren't so happy with Slackware 2.0.

codezero 5y ago

I think I still have my Slackware 1.0 CD in a closet back at home from around 1993/94. I went on to work at Red Hat in 1999, those were fun times for Linux :)

jmclnx 5y ago
If it is really 1.0, you should post it in Linux Questions http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/ http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/ people there have been looking for a 1.0 set. I think the earliest one found so far was 1.01
- codezero 5y ago
  If it's rare, I doubt it's 1.0 then, but I'll check :)

not2b 5y ago

I tried both Yggdrasil and SLS in 1993 when I was still in grad school, ran SLS for a while on my 386 PC (with no floating point). Lots of floppies and slow downloads in those days.

dim13 5y ago

Really surprised to see The Gimp in 1992 … full 6 years before its initial conception.

minitoar 5y ago

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.

kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
You might be right (I don't really know for sure), but this is an ad hominem fallacy, which is probably why it's getting downvoted.
- minitoar 5y ago
  I disagree it's an ad hominem fallacy. I'm judging him on his opinions and what he writes. I'm not surprised about the downvotes.
edgyquant 5y ago
I remember him beating to death the horse that was "social justice warriors taking over our open source projects" and I stopped following his youtube around that time (I think it was 2017?) That said it's kind of irrelevant to the topic.
martin1975 5y ago
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'd say racism is on the whole pretty rare. On the other hand, I do believe mental slavery is more prevalent than individual/collective racism :).
- minitoar 5y ago
  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.

guenthert 5y ago

"Of the systems created in 1992, SLS (Softlanding Linux System) had what I would consider to be the biggest impact." Wasn't the impact not also due to the cunning marketing trick calling it SLS 1.0, when people were eagerly awaiting Linux 1.0 for months?

cmrdporcupine 5y ago

I used hjlu first, then mcc and then sls. I think. Never encountered TAMU, didn't try Yggdrasil. I think I ended using SLS longest. Most of this downloaded first with a 1200 baud and then 9600 baud modem. Vague recollection anyways. 486/50, 8MB RAM, 200MB drive. Memories.

jim02672 5y ago

Great. Another article on old Linux distributions that's just the same crap as in all the others. FYI the first picture, the one with the 0.12 boot & root floppies that is in every old Linux distro article, is the original distribution made by Linus Torvalds himself. Two releases later, 0.95a (3/17/1992), Jim Winstead started doing the root floppy. H.J. Lu's "bootable root disk" came shortly afterwards. (9/23/1992) When you see an article with that picture labeled as H.J. Lu's boot/root floppies, just stop reading. http://mirror.cs.msu.ru/oldlinux.org/Linux.old/docs/Linuxdocs.pdf http://mirror.cs.msu.ru/oldlinux.org/Linux.old/docs/Linuxdoc... http://grumbeer.dyndns.org/ftp/mail/www.kclug.org/1992/sep/3/0266.shtml http://grumbeer.dyndns.org/ftp/mail/www.kclug.org/1992/sep/3...

watersb 5y ago

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.