3 ms·

Well, installing GNU/Linux on 1995 was not easy. On 1997-1999, with Slackware or Red Hat, it was almost manageable.

by anthk 3y ago

nubinetwork 3y ago
Redhat 7 from ~2000 was a pretty bad experience, most of the time I couldn't get a working display driver, and the stock vga driver was dog slow.
pjmlp 3y ago
When I went to CERN in 2002, it was the first time I used GNU/Linux in production, and even them had to start the Scientific Linux project in collaboration with Fermilab, to have something that could replace the Solaris use cases. Most researchers were either on Windows 2000 or the newly released OS X.
icedchai 3y ago
X11 was a clown show for a longgg time. Remember manually tweaking mode lines? For the longest time, my main Linux system was a Slackware box with almost everything rebuilt and reinstalled by hand. I still remember the a.out -> ELF upgrade and having to rebuild a bunch of libraries. And rebuilding the kernel, of course.
- mcculley 3y ago
  > Remember manually tweaking mode lines? I put my first Linux box together in late 1992 using SLS and a fixed frequency monitor. I got the mode line wrong and the magic black smoke escape from the monitor.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Yes, and only being able to do 800x600 on a 1024x768 display. That was my first Linux distribution, Slackware 2.0 with 1.0.99 kernel, if I got the numbers right. I already used Xenix and DG/UX by then, and it was a way to have UNIX at home.
saltcured 3y ago
Back in those early days with XFree86, it was exciting to get 2D accelerator drivers going so we could turn on "opaque window moves" in our window managers. By having the window contents "blitted" around on the card, we could finally move the actual window around instead of just a thin outline that would repaint after we stopped moving it. This required the graphics card to do it locally since there wasn't enough bus bandwidth nor cpu speed to have a software implementation copy around the window content in realtime!

Well, installing GNU/Linux on 1995 was not easy. On 1997-1999, with Slackware or Red Hat, it was almost manageable.

by anthk 3y ago

Well, installing GNU/Linux on 1995 was not easy. On 1997-1999, with Slackware or Red Hat, it was almost manageable.

Redhat 7 from ~2000 was a pretty bad experience, most of the time I couldn't get a working display driver, and the stock vga driver was dog slow.

pjmlp 3y ago

When I went to CERN in 2002, it was the first time I used GNU/Linux in production, and even them had to start the Scientific Linux project in collaboration with Fermilab, to have something that could replace the Solaris use cases. Most researchers were either on Windows 2000 or the newly released OS X.

icedchai 3y ago

X11 was a clown show for a longgg time. Remember manually tweaking mode lines? For the longest time, my main Linux system was a Slackware box with almost everything rebuilt and reinstalled by hand. I still remember the a.out -> ELF upgrade and having to rebuild a bunch of libraries. And rebuilding the kernel, of course.

mcculley 3y ago
> Remember manually tweaking mode lines? I put my first Linux box together in late 1992 using SLS and a fixed frequency monitor. I got the mode line wrong and the magic black smoke escape from the monitor.
pjmlp 3y ago
Yes, and only being able to do 800x600 on a 1024x768 display. That was my first Linux distribution, Slackware 2.0 with 1.0.99 kernel, if I got the numbers right. I already used Xenix and DG/UX by then, and it was a way to have UNIX at home.

saltcured 3y ago

Back in those early days with XFree86, it was exciting to get 2D accelerator drivers going so we could turn on "opaque window moves" in our window managers. By having the window contents "blitted" around on the card, we could finally move the actual window around instead of just a thin outline that would repaint after we stopped moving it. This required the graphics card to do it locally since there wasn't enough bus bandwidth nor cpu speed to have a software implementation copy around the window content in realtime!