On Tue, Jul 17, 2001 at 02:31:15PM +0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Anyway, actually I was talking about those people who're really good
> in Slakware, just what Andre Varon commented.
How about those of us who have been using Linux even -before-
Slackware? :> [gawd, ang tanda na namin sa Linux]
Changing the topic slightly so my post becomes more informative and/or
entertaining... [Okay... those who hate my long posts can bail out
now.]
Early Days With Linux
It was interesting trying out the various early distributions.
The older distributions were basically different ways of getting a
working Linux setup on which you could start messing around and
attempting to port available *N*X source over from tar.Z (not even
tar.gz). SLS (Soft Landing Systems) is no longer around but that was
one of the first distributions of Linux that our oldies on the list
cut their Linux teeth on (Hi Kelsey and Doc Mana :) ). I tried a few
other distributions like MCC, TAMU, Yggdrasil and of course Slackware
came later as improvements to the original SLS scripts. Of these,
Yggdrasil was the first to offer a Linux distribution on CD-ROM.
If you'll recall, CD-ROM drives were not commonplace in the early
1990s. So software generally came on floppy diskettes. To create the
initial floppies, one really had to use a special DOS program,
rawrite, to read the boot/root floppy images (were these in Minix
format? Does anybody recall?) and then write them out to the floppy
diskette. I was unlucky enough to have floppy cables that didn't allow
me to use 3.5" diskettes to boot from, so I had to modify rawrite and
recompile it using Borland's Turbo C under DOS to be able to create
5.25" diskettes. The early floppy images were mostly for 3.5" disks.
Creating the boot and root floppies was certainly an exercise in
patience. Copying them was also non-trivial because DOS's DISKCOPY
only works with DOS formatted disks. I didn't have any bootlegger DISK
COPY programs either, so during one of the first Linux Copying
EyeBalls held at my place here in Manila in the early 1990s, we had to
resort to using rawrite to make the first few disks. Copying the rest
of the floppy disks wasn't as difficult since they were in DOS format.
Getting Linux on one's system back then was certainly painful, and
potentially risky. Hence the humor in that early distribution's name,
Soft Landing Systems, because you were never sure your machine
wouldn't crash. Like the tagline said, it was created "for a gentle
touchdown after DOS bailout." (Yes, I'm repeating myself.) It was also
not geared toward novice installs. To install Linux, one needed to be
crazy enough to risk losing all data or have backups of everything. It
is still advisable to backup your important data before attempting to
install Linux on a machine with existing information. Nowadays though,
distributions become more and more novice friendly.
Have 386 Will Compile
As a side note, I had been running my Bulletin Board System (BBS)
Alien's Alcove on DOS on an XT clone. Then I learned about Linux, and
that was what spurred me to upgrade. I got myself a 386DX (or was it
an SX) just so I could run Linux! :)
Compiling the kernel back then took a long time. Long enough to grab a
pizza and/or watch a movie and then some while waiting for it to churn out.
One of the very first programs that I played around with source back
then was minicom, which is a ProComm+ like program for Linux. I didn't
like the way the dialer worked so I modified the code to do
round-robin dialing. I sent in my patch to the author, but he politely
declined my patch because they had already worked on that problem and
were about to release a new version that had that feature in. Oh well,
my shot at having a patch in free software gone down the drain. :P
Before The Net Hit PH
It was crazy days scouring the FTP sites via email. Back then, it was
the only way to do it because PH wasn't wired to the Internet the way
it is nowadays. Using email to FTP gateways was fun though. The first
files you would request were the ls-lr or index files for the FTP
archive. After sending your email to retrieve the file, the gateway
would uuencode the file for you and send it back to you in chunks.
Some of us managed to get our source tar files using this method for a
long while before PH got wired.
Even before the WWW exploded onto the scene, we would also traverse
the Net via email for gopher sites. Later on, you could even "surf"
the web via email. But that was basically a stop-gap measure until we
had "live" access to the net.
So one can imagine all the activity surrounding a search for
appropriate source code to port over to Linux. One really had to get
his hands dirty scouring the net via email.
Of course, the comp.os.linux.* newsgroups being gated by Jonathan
Marsden on his BBS, FEBNews, became a hit with us early adapters. It
became a source of information about the fledgeling OS that had
captured our attention.
There was, however, a lack of books or magazines that tackled Linux.
The only publications that I can remember that were related were SysAdmin
Magazine, Unix Review, and a few other Unix trade magazines that
cropped up in the magazine stall here and there. Then, one of the
first books about Linux hit the streets. "Running Linux" was perhaps a
hint that Linux was growing up and being recognized.
<more in future installments... or at the Linux 10th Anniversary
Celebration>
--
___ eric pareja ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) - "We're all crazy. No one wants to admit it."
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