Post #1869305
2026-05-01 07:08 UTC
Replies (7)
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@branch300bpm@social.vivaldi.net 2026-05-01 07:14
@gourd If you have time and patience, then absolutely. One thing you'll learn is why there's so many kind-of-frontends (like firewalld or networkmanager) or tools with duplicated functionality (ifconfig vs ip) in modern Linux.
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@retrofan64@oldbytes.space 2026-05-01 07:43
@gourd you would not have nano to play with and would, if you'd installed Pine, have pico instead. You can't get much earlier than by going off to SLS. This predates Slackware. It was also often knowing how to build software from tarballs - common Makefile modifications, xmkmf -a and the like. Java was a far off dream. It was just such a strange time and way for me to lean computing with an OS like Linux, in parallel with OS/2 2.x, with a brief glimpse of Warp before going win 95 / Linux dual boot. You'd be a year or two away from a modular Linux kernal and there was no initrd. You booted this big old chunky kernal up and if it didn't know ext2 and your / partition (no logical volumes) was in ext2 then... Come back with a rebuilt kernal. Another fun dividing line is when we shifted from a.out to ELF. That was a nightmare to manage in Slackware.
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@neckspike@indiepocalypse.social 2026-05-01 11:00
@gourd my first experience with Linux was a boxed copy of Red Hat 5 and I did not get that shit working after two attempts.
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@gmc@friends.chasmcity.net 2026-05-01 11:44
@gourd In the beginning there were no online repositories. It all came on floppies and later CD ROMs. An update would be a new CD ROM. For most software, you'd find a source tarball and compiled it yourself, after having downloaded, compiled and installed all its dependencies manually. Oh, and we'd have to compile our own kernels first before we could think about configuring X11 :)
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@raster@mastodon.uno 2026-05-01 15:13
@gourd Linux in the first half of 2000 required more manual configuring, expecially in the Xfree86 era, and documentation today could not be easy to fetch, buried under stuff relative to modern releases. If you aren't discourage could be an interesting experience, and you can see how the Linux DE have changed too in the course of years, without actually change at all about their user experience.
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@gmc@friends.chasmcity.net 2026-05-01 17:58
@gourd Well, I don't particularly miss the experience of having to compile the kernel to get things to work to be honest :)
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@jamie@boothcomputing.social 2026-05-01 22:17
@gourd Yes? You haven't lived until you've waited 4-6 hours for a kernel to compile then realize you needed the _other_ driver module. Or had to hunt hacked source to get a piece of hardware to work because it wasn't quite standard and the manufacturer just fixed it in the (windows) drivers. Linux is fun...