3 ms·

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

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.