How Linux got to be Linux: Test driving 1993-2003 distros
SlackwareThis Forum is for the discussion of Slackware Linux.
Notices
Welcome to LinuxQuestions.org, a friendly and active Linux Community.
You are currently viewing LQ as a guest. By joining our community you will have the ability to post topics, receive our newsletter, use the advanced search, subscribe to threads and access many other special features. Registration is quick, simple and absolutely free. Join our community today!
Note that registered members see fewer ads, and ContentLink is completely disabled once you log in.
If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us. If you need to reset your password, click here.
Having a problem logging in? Please visit this page to clear all LQ-related cookies.
Get a virtual cloud desktop with the Linux distro that you want in less than five minutes with Shells! With over 10 pre-installed distros to choose from, the worry-free installation life is here! Whether you are a digital nomad or just looking for flexibility, Shells can put your Linux machine on the device that you want to use.
Exclusive for LQ members, get up to 45% off per month. Click here for more info.
What's missing is any notion of package management. All installs and uninstalls are entirely manual, with no tracking.
So I pulled down sysadm.tgz, and in usr/bin/sysinstall, there is some semblance of package management, coming from SLS. I think he just doesn't recognize it never having used it really. Of course I didn't verify on a live system what this is. I'm not sure if there is a full copy of Slackware 1.0 out there to get a fully installed system, and how much needed to come from SLS disks. Slackware 1.1.2 definitely has some kind of pkgtools going. I definitely did not experience these times, any old timers want to comment?
I think nostalgia definitely requires to have been there to feel it. But I know he was just surveying the past.
Nice trip down memory lane! I'm relatively new to Linux. I started with Caldera Openlinux 2.3 in 2002. Caldera later morphed into the hated SCO. After that I used Red Hat 9 for a time. I started Slacking with 10.0 in 2004. I've been a Slacker ever since.
I'll always be a Slacker.
It's crazy to see how far Gnome has changed over these years. I had my first experiences with Linux back in college in the early 2000s. In that, we used Red Hat (started with 6.0 in one class and 7.0 for another). It piqued my interest, so I downloaded the latest Red Hat iso, 7.2 at the time, and tried installing it on my laptop. I was successful in installing it, but once booted up, I found it didn't recognize my cd drive and it had no drivers for my ethernet PCMCIA card (wireless was not very common back then -- my college didn't offer any wireless network and I didn't get my first 802.11b router for another year or two). I felt trapped because to get drivers for my network device, I needed to burn it to a disc (long before USB drives and I think the driver was too big for a floppy), but I wouldn't be able to open a disc on the laptop. Unfortunately, solving that went well beyond my current set of skills, so I just reinstalled Windows 2000 and just used Linux in the class. Once the Linux classes ended, Linux got shelved in the back of my mind. I remembered being particularly impressed with gedit, of all things, because if I navigated to an ftp directory for a website through the file manager, I could open an html file with gedit, make my changes, and save directly back to the ftp. At the time, I felt this was downright amazing instead of needing to edit the files locally and sync them to the server. I vaguely remember the desktop running Gnome, but it just seemed like a souped up Windows desktop with a lot of cool features.
Fast forward a few years and my buddy had been dabbling with many Linuxes, distro-hopping and collecting ISOs. He found Slackware and needed some help with it. I remembered some of my experiences from college and helped him through it. It piqued my interest again, so I tried installing it on a relatively recent laptop. I think this was around the 10.1 or 10.2 timeframe. It took a week of recompiling the kernel until I could get my IPW2200 wireless working (support wasn't included in the kernel by default, so I think I was patching and who knows what else... it's all a blur now). I was hooked.
However, over the years, with the way Gnome has changed, I started questioning whether I had actually used Gnome or KDE back in my Red Hat days. The Gnome I remembered using just felt so similar to the KDE I was using in Slackware... I started wondering if I remembered it wrong (but not enough to actually research it). Gnome was "progressing" into quite a different beast from the one I used back in the day, and when I installed it into Slackware (because I wanted gedit, not realizing other programs offered something similar), it just seemed so foreign and unintuitive. I couldn't get used to it, so I kept using the familiar and easy-to-use (for me) KDE 3.5. I continued using gedit for some time, so I was grateful for the projects offering Gnome for Slackware. Eventually, I found alternative tools that didn't require Gnome, so I haven't installed it in probably over a decade. It was kinda interesting to see the Gnome desktop from Red Hat 6.0 and get that reminiscent feeling of my early KDE days and realizing that back then, Gnome and KDE weren't nearly as different as they are today. Then you have to be amazed that both projects are still around, and not only around, but still extremely strong, both with large followings. Major props to all the devs involved in both projects!
It's crazy to see how far Gnome has changed over these years.
It's also crazy to see how WindowMaker has not changed over the years. I'm still using it on machines where I want a minimal GUI, and besides some minimal changes to ~/.Xresources to adjust Xterm's appearance, everything's still in the same place where it was fifteen years ago.
LinuxQuestions.org is looking for people interested in writing
Editorials, Articles, Reviews, and more. If you'd like to contribute
content, let us know.