The Forgotten Secrets of the First Linux LiveCD (Yggdrasil Linux)
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- Опубліковано 13 тра 2024
- If you know anything about early Linux, you probably know what Linux LiveCDs are. But if I were to ask you what the first Linux LiveCD was, what would you answer?
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Chapter Marks:
00:00 - Prelude
01:30 - Chapter 1 - The First Linux LiveCD
11:08 - Chapter 2 - Popping The Hood
18:24 - Chapter 3 - And The Install Script I Rode In On
25:53 - Chapter 4 - The Root Of The Matter …
If you said Yggdrasil Plug and Play Linux, then you know either like pain, or you know your Linux history. In either case, you are in good company. Yggdrasil Linux is often one of those things that comes up in conversation, but little actual information can be found about it. That's because for many years, it was a lost media distribution, meaning it was known to exist, but no copies were properly preserved.
After a lot of effort, I did actually manage to find additional copies of Yggdrasil that had been saved properly, as well as reconstruct the December 1994 release. Next, I found a lot of surprising features, such as the ability to use DOS MSCDEX drivers, and more, and an automatic phone home device powered by UUCP.
This lead to an adventure in exploring the ins and outs of ancient Linux compatibility, and determining what, if anything Yggdrasil Incorporated had patched and changed, and trust me when I say it was *a lot*.
Music provided under license by Epidemic Sound (www.epidemicsound.com/)
Tracks used in order:
- Incomplete - Gavin Luke
- Enigma - David Celeste
- A Key Figure - David Celeste
- We Still Have Courage - Bonnie Grace
- Particle Emission - Silver Maple
- Enigma - David Celeste
- Me and My Horse - Sight of Wonders
- Progressive Progress - Howard Harper-Barnes
- Superior - Silver Maple
- Paradigm Shift - Gavin Luke
- The Road Less Travelled - Christoffer Moe Ditlevsen
- Acceleration - Dream Cave
- Dreamed of This - Dream Cave
- Just Playing - Jules Gaia
- Progressive Progress - Howard Harper-Barnes
- For the Many - Jon Bjork
- Never Forgotten - Christoffer Moe Ditlevsen
- Observations - From Now On
- Colossal Logic - Rand Aldo
- Sacred Waters - Gabriel Lewis
- The Unforgettable - Gavin Luke
- Just Playing - Jules Gaia
- Particle Emission - Silver Maple
#linux #ncommander #retrocomputing #yggdrasillinux - Наука та технологія
That MPEG demo out of a bootable CD in 1994 surely blew dozens of minds.
Blew the minds of the dozen or so people that used Linux
@@ivanv754 At least eight of those were in my office so I wonder who the other four were? 😀
@@ivanv754 the dozens of people who herd of Linux in 94*.
@meehhhe Of You I've seen multiple still active ftp servers hosted by universities containing 90s era linux files. I was doing research on its history and trying to find old kernel versions and some sources I found are surprisingly old. Actually I believe the linux kernel was originally shared via ftp in 1992. So since the internet existed and many who used it that early were probably into this kinda stuff or in an academic environment I'm sure many people overall were aware of linux by 1994. Of course you'd have to be in certain circles for the chance to learn about it for the most part, and wider society probably wasn't aware to a much more significant degree than today. GNU was started in the early to mid 80s so that older group of developers and those who were interested in or participated in making free alternatives to unix features would probably be aware of the linux kernel pretty quickly. That's several possible areas of potential exposure and together that means many people should've known about linux. I also have to bring up bsd. BSD was not yet open source when the first source code for the linux kernel became publicly available. It did however become available shortly after so the fact that linux is dominant today goes to show that it was adopted by enough people in the short period where it was the only free and open source option that it continued to be the default choice even after BSD and GNU Hurd became options. I may not have been around back then, but everything seems to suggest that while those who used linux or took interest in it definitely weren't average people you'd run into in normal day to day life there probably was a significant number of them overall for it to have grown into what it is today. It didn't take long for word of unix to go around and it was probably the same case for linux.
I'd also like to add for those interested the original ftp server is still up. It's on the ftp funet fi domain but youtube deletes links. It still has some linux stuff on it but I haven't looked into this one too much. I've looked around for a few minutes and already found a gcc tar file from 1994. Apparently the 0.01 kernel which predates the adoption of the GPL is available on here too. Going here would've saved me a lot of google searches but who would've expected the original source to still be up and providing historical files.
"Let me make this clear, THIS SHOULDN'T WORK"
That's our Linux!
Yuppp that's a real Linux feeling
I didn't get that statement. As in 1994 most distro's had good hardware support. And precompiling tolerant modules was pretty commonplace for some to do. Mainline was not the barometer for what linux supported. It was always very minimal in the early days.
Ah, the feelings. If you download a tarball, install it and the program do not complain about a missing library or do not gives you a segfault then something is not right.
yea! that’s what i think when installing arch!
Love it. For nearly 30 years no one has believed when I've told them about running Yggdrasil with mscdex mounted cd-rom. Drive I used back then succesfully was Sanyo branded and connected to parallel port. It was incredible slow compared to then common mitsumi/panasonic drive connected to sound card that was directly linux supported.
I do somewhat suspect it may be dependent on the CD-ROM driver used. I tried OAKCDROM, Adaptic, and a few others, with no luck, but its also possible I needed to try an earlier version more extensively.
@@NCommander Maybe mscdex and dos version used matters too?
Honestly X and sound just working out of the box in 1994 is a complete shocker. Would be interesting to see the extent of modifications they made to get such a seamless experience. Wasn't really around at that time, but I heard enough stories to know that the rest of distros became truly user friendly only a decade later.
True. Having a running X on my first Linux (Slackware 2) required at least a kernel recompilation.
No kidding, my first X window based distro was a mid 90s Red Hat version and it was a nightmare to upgrade graphics card because X would throw a fit.
Ohh,you innocent child. Just thinking back about it makes me barking mad. I'm not even sure I believe NCommander on this point. I refuse to believe that several profanities,hair-pulling,and virgin sacrifices aren't somehow involved.
It's because he is using PCem emulating compatible hardware
@@DeelightFenua I know. It was absolutely normal to first get a terminal-based system up and running, and then compile the kernel with the correct settings for the hardware you had. Kernel modules did not exist. The first 'CD-ROM' distributions actually had the floppy disk images on them. Linux kernel and installer - one disk. Bash and basic tools - one disk. Gcc and basic libraries - five disks. TeX and fonts - 10 disks. You get the picture. Sounds incredible cumbersome, but the advantage was that you really had a feel for how the system was put together. With the advent of Install- and Live-DVDs we have lost this - you just shovel 5GiB of data onto your HD and then try to find out what's actually on the system.
If you had a SCSI system with some non-standard settings (like me on my WD7000-FASST2), you had to either re-set them to factory default, or ask a friend to make a kernel with the right settings for you. I remember that I once long-distance phoned the vendor and they told me the possible options on the phone. And super-quick, the phone call lasted less than three minutes. Outstanding competence and customer service!
My very first introduction to Linux was purchasing Yggdrasil Linux released on 27 1.44Mb disks from an advert placed in an electronics trade newspaper published in England in 1993. Packed with the disks were about 12 pages of information on A4 paper. The only cost was was for the blank 1.44 Mb disks. The first disk was a boot disk and a couple of workmates and I spent about two or three weeks in getting everything working including X Windows on 386 PC's. I have been using various distros of Linux ever since and stopped using MS Windows in 1999. It was a very steep learning curve but so worth the effort in the end.
Huh...
I was always under assumption that Knoppix was one of the first liveCD distros but seeing what Yggdrasil did waaaay back when Windows 95 wasn't even released, is impressive despite its flaws.
Wow, Yggdrasil is incredibly forward thinking (in concepts anyway). Simple to try/install, integrated configuration and interfaces, networking promoted, etc etc. I feel like there is a lot of stories to be told by previous employees of the company, I wonder if any of that will be uncovered.
I remember using Knoppix live CD and thinking how cool it was in the early 2000s. Never knew this existed.
Same. I was amazed by Knoppix.
same here!
Back in that era (I think a little earlier) I ran Slackware. I remember that it had a 0.9x kernel. Setting up X and dialup networking was a chore, but worth it. If I never hear the word "modeline" ever again I'll be happy. Fortunately my then ISP supported Unix/Linux and was owned by a friend of mine. Setting up SLIP and an associated chat script was still a pain.
SLIP..... Shivers. Then the joys and magic that was diald
Slackware was my first Linux Distro back in 1994 on a 25Mhz 486 with 8MB of RAM.
Getting X to work was such a pain. I remember having to edit configuration files to put in my monitors timings, and having to guess at them. I also remember warnings that getting the timings wrong could very well permanently break your monitor.
Once graphics were up, getting the mouse and sound to work was just as painful at times.
@@codingwithculp Linux setup is so much easier now, just install it and it works. It's easier than Windows nowadays. It sure was a PITA getting XFree86 and sound working back then.
The IDE CDROMHDD / HDDHDD IO lock was a problem for some time. It was encouraged to have the HDD on an other controller than the CDROM. There where a lot of hot-fixes. It was ultimately solved when the IO Manager was rewritten the first time. I got into Linux 1996 and the early Linux kernels had spotty IDE support at best. I always used SCSI cards and drives in my computers.
I sometimes miss the early days of Linux, but then i remeber the three weeks to make X11 run with the new and better graphics card / monitor combination i got.
I did too although it wasn't just for Linux, but windows did better under SCSI.
I remember that, I always put my IDE CD-ROM on other controller.
You're a mad man going through all of this to get it working! I love the effort you put into this video and it will help preserve this little bit of Linux history.
Wow! A blast from the past. I still have my original CD and book. Not sure where the floppys are, most likely still lurking somewhere. Yes, it was a PITA to install. I gave up with the Misumi CD drivers and went SCSI. I already had SCSI HDDs so a CDROM wasn't that much of a push. It was a great intro to a full distro after coming from the 0.99 betas. Though I eventually abandoned it for Slackware '96 (Still have those CDs and huge book too). Might have to locate both of those and spin up a VM. Thanks for the (painful but joyful) memories. :-)
CD and book. Was this the Linux version that came with a VHS tape with the installation steps, available at Best Buy?
16:44 The GDT isn't necessarily the complex part - GDT is (at a hardware level) a pointer to special data in memory (specifically, a table with the layout of how the OS uses memory), so there's no reason you can't have two GDT's and swap the pointer as needed.
What impresses me, is that they managed to get Linux and DOS to avoid tripping over each other. These are operating systems, not applications - they can't run in user mode (unless Yggdrasil provided an outright hypervisor), so they can see - and overwrite - each others' memory. And instructing them to not do that, requires special attention. You'd have to boot Linux to a spare scrap of RAM, then tell it every single byte (well, page, more likely) of RAM DOS uses, then tell DOS the same thing about Linux.
It's not necessarily very difficult at a basic level, but it definitely requires some inventiveness, especially if either operating system leans particularly heavily on assuming it's the only OS on the system (which is likely).
So I asked this question today but maybe I should ask you directly since you might be familiar, how is it possible that this live CD could be capable of executing BIOS functions in protected mode as it seems to imply is happening? I guess there could be a wrapper though which we don't see in the video where really it's dropping into real mode, executing BIOS calls, and then re entering protected mode, I'm not really sure.
@@TheGoodChap It implies that it drops into real mode.
@@bootmii98 the whole thing is interesting, maybe a bit of a mess but pretty clever
Edit: I completely forgot he responded to me with the answer, you can start x86 cpus in virtual 8086 mode which allows them to access old-school realmode features that aren't normally available but it's still hackey and has problems
That awesome ! I never knew that early Linux distributions were going that far ! Yggdrasil Linux was really ahead of its time, as you said, at the time, Linux had little support for CD-ROM drives, it only really supported SoundBlaster Compatible one, its very impressive for only a Linux distro of that time, to develop new drivers for other CD-ROM drives and literally modifiying the Linux kernel to make it work.
Wonderful overview, thanks for making it.
I was puzzled, though, why you thought a 720K image wasn't meant for a 720K format (either a DSDD disk, or a DSHD disk formatted to 720K which also works).
It's worth noting that emulators solve a lot of problems. We had to do a lot more manual config and recompilation when using real hardware back then (you mentioned "this is a heavily tweaked and modified installation" but in those early days, they *all* were -- there was no "standard" or "vanilla" distro). Also worth noting that back then, expectations were different. You mentioned that the speed "must have been glacial" but that's only compared to today's expectations. Back then, we were used to applications taking 10-20 seconds to load (and once they loaded, as long as you weren't dipping into swap, they ran fine).
I didn't notice it was 720k until debugging the LILO issue. I don't normally keep my icons large enough for file sizes to be visible; idid that for the camera.
@@miko-nv9cl Ah, I missed that detail, thanks. You're right, for the kernel to be patched *on the distro* was uncommon back then. Patching the kernel was something you did during or after the install, but you're right, it was not common to have it patched even before installation.
I also agree when you say expectations were different back then. For example I had a 200 mb hard drive when I got my first CD rom reader, so having part of the running system symlinked ro the CD was quite a good idea.
@@miko-nv9cl Yeah, I'm wondering who wrote all this stuff - how many people had that level of skill with Linux in 1994?
@@NCommanderI vaguely recall this sort of issue elsewhere... something to do with how the 720 maps differently, was used for copy protection on some ancient software. I may misremember but off in that direction. Anyway, I salute your spectacular persistence!
Hope you're doing well! We missed you so much!
I'm coping as well as you can be. Won't say things are back to normal but getting a video up/out is a big landmark.
Fascinating video. I didn't know that they had improved the Linux kernel that much. I have touched Yggdrasil a bit in my early Linux days, but my first real Linux install was Slackware 3.0 on a weird machine : the Texas Instrument Travelmate 4000M 486 DX4/100-based notebook. That thing actually had a built-in Adaptec AHA1520 SCSI controller just for an external, obviously, CDROM drive. That made things much easier.
Configuring sound for the MediaVision Jazz16 chip poorly emulating a Soundblaster Pro was kind of a nightmare. Configuring X for the Cirrus Logic 6440 chip was tricky too, I certainly had to play a lot with the modelines to get it working.
I have co-authored a how-to at that time, which you can still find by Googling "The Texas Instruments TravelMate 4000M Linux Mini-HOWTO". A blast from the past.
Props for the extremely in-depth archeological work. It helps us understand the current state of things better.
Ah, what a wonderful look back at Linux many years ago. And it’s of course still running my computer today. Thanks for putting this together and please keep making more!
Wow this is super amazing, and I can’t believe you have gone through all of this effort to get this working for a video!
I missed seeing content from you for a while, but now that you’re back it’s amazing!
Great video--I wish it was longer because I've been spoiled by the livestreams, but I'm glad you're back.
You're my new hero! Thank you for putting so much work into recovering this wonderful element of our linux history!
You have patience that transcends that of a saint to go through and meticulously test these things. Nice work!
That "Hi there!" startup sound was clearly taken from Peter Gabriel's "Big Time".
Ah, the old LI boot freeze that's given me some flashbacks. Getting X11 working that easily is absolutely mind blowing, was a nightmare back then.
The CD-ROM though, darn, and there I was installing Slackware for several dozen floppies.
I really like your production, narration, and editing style. It's really informative while being concise and smooth. Have you ever thought of maybe doing a behind-the-scenes video about how you learned to make such information-packed videos and what tools you use?
Back in the 90's compiling kernels and editing config files in vi to get things working was second nature, but even back then I wouldn't have been able to go to such lengths to get it working. That was impressive.
This is where I started using Linux and still is. Thank You for the fun video 😊
I knew this was going to be awesome, but this was even more impressive. Quite some amazing Linux history.
Yes, I have ran Yggdrasil! I also still have the book. My first exposure to Linux was a friend showing off a 0.12 kernel running from two 5 1/4" floppy's. My first hands-on experience was a 0.95 version. Yes, I am that old ;)
Such a great video my dude - thanks for the content
Gotta love that "Hi there!" sample lifted straight from Peter Gabriel's "Big Time"
I honestly didn't know where it was from. until the comments brought it up.
This is an heroic deep dive into the past! And to my childhood as Yggdrasil was my very first contact with Linux at that time. And I vaguely remember it was not a piece of cake on my 486 DX2/66 with I think 4MB RAM! I remember just starting emacs and hitting swap
Back then we used to say that emacs stood for "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping" I used emacs at work on my HP workstation, at home on Linux I had to use Jove which is similar in many ways, but much smaller. I don't know if Jove is still around.
emacs gets unhappy with anything less than 8 MiB. It was notorious for it. Lot of why people learned vi.
@@NCommander I never could get used to vi. Back when I was a sysadmin, I used vi just enough to get a machine set up, and then I'd install emacs. One of my co-workers was one of the developers of Xemacs, so I had moral support from him! By that time I had a machine at home that could run real emacs, not just Jove.
One must remember the legacy of this distribution is the "mkisofs" program that they developed. It eventually morphed into "genisofs". (which is used today).
YES. I’ve been waiting so long for this video you’ve been teasing thank you
Awesome Walkthru, I tried for a long time with a copy years ago to get this working, I don't know what ever happened to the CD.
Also; Watch Captain America: The First Avenger, During the into Red Skull Pronounces' "Y-igg Draz- Ill, The tree of Knowledge"
Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
I had completely forgotten the name Yggdrasil.
:-D
I remember, i received the, quite costly, December 94 version in Early 95, it came in a zip-lock bag, with printed instructions that had the tree on the cover.
And it blew me away, that it was capable of booting from CD.
I had to chuckle a big laugh, because I followed the same steps to compile the (absolutely mandatory ;-) ) Nethack.
Unfortunately I had to stop using it after a short time, because my Mitsumi CD Rom died and it just wouldn't work with my new Phillips drive.
The dramatic music made this absolutely hilarious
Thinking about it, the fact that Linux today (or even in the early 2000s) had/has such good driver support is testimony to how far we've come. From an early Linux boot disk that only worked on 720k disks and only a few CD drives being supported to every piece of hardware under the sun.
Kudos to all who have brought us here.
I started out with this release many, many years ago. Started me on a career in Linux so I can't complain!
This video brings back memories!
Yggdrasil was my first Linux distribution. I don't recall which version I had exactly (I might still have that CD somewhere though). I did run it on a 386SX (3.1 Bogo MIPS!) using a Mitsumi CD ROM drive (with its own ISA controller card) and a 100 MB IDE hard drive which was shared with Windows 3.11. Pro tip: the two OSs can share a swap space if you use a DOS formatted parution for it and configure Linux to use a swap file rather than a raw partition. I don't remember running from the CD, but I probably tried it when I first got it... I did install everything I needed on the hard drive. I was able to rebuild the Linux kernel from source. Back then there were no kernel modules, so if you wanted to add or remove a device driver, you had to recompile the whole kernel, which on my computer took several hours!
One more thing: the printed manual included the following chapter: "How to install X Window without calling the fire department". It dealt with setting up the video timings which if set wrong on some monitors could supposedly cause them to overheat and catch fire! Mine worked fine (I think my video card was a Tseng Labs ET4000) but required careful reading of my monitors user manual (the fact I was an EE student who was learning about TVs and monitors at the time came in handy) !
This was before my foray into using Linux. I started using it either in the late 90s or early 2000s. The first live distro I used was Knoppix. It was a pretty well loaded up KDE distro put together by a guy named Klaus Knopper. I remember using it here and there as a live distro, but not as an installation. It even eventually expanded its features enough that had a DVD live distro version.
Great video, I really enjoyed watching this. Thank you.
Clearly, Yggdrasil was ahead of time. I remember in the 2000's experimenting Linux (I don't remember the distribution, though), and the windows styles were similar to what's seen in this video. Even the cross cursor.
The Rock Ridge extensions were a lifesaver with Linux! I had a single-speed CDrom burning a few years later, and you were able to make Linux CDROMs directly from a loopback and DD created ISO image! That saved so much time and effort and was very easy to burn.
Agree so Hyped. :) Loved my Yggdrasil Floppy / CDs
The quality of videos is very good!
Omg. The nightmares you've awakened. Thank you for a trip down memory lane. Things are so much easier today, most people have no idea of the trials and tribulations of the OG system administrators.
I bought Yggdrasil Linux in 1993 and could get it working on a 386 but didn’t know how to use it so I soon reinstalled DOS. It also came on a CD, on it it said LGX, which stood for Linux, GNU and X Windows. A year later I got a Slackware CD boxset, that’s when I really got into Linux.
My fascination levels spiked with this video! Yggdrasil was around 9 years ahead of its time!
Great Video.. Brings back memorys. :)
I remember a friend and I recompiling the kernel to get ALSA sound working. 1998. By then I was already into Linux for a year or so. My first Linux was Redhat Apollo.
I was a university UNIX nerd student with an Amiga. Then I found the earlier Yggdrasil (non-live) book with CD/floppy. So I went and built myself a killer workstation for the time. Wouldn't support my SCSI hardware. Went and bought another computer from the big-box store, installed it on that, built a kernel with my SCSI card support. Then took the second computer back for a refund. Pretty quickly moved onto Slackware. Probably the version before this one. Pretty much knew what I was doing all UNIX and hardware wise at that time. Had just been waiting for affordable UNIX workstation for years.
Yes true, back in the days we started with a boot floppy 👍 nice share man... Cool finds.. i still have some 1993 images/iso but man it is down deep in my storage 😀
That brings back memories. I don't think "pain" is my description but I did remember few of my usual devices were off the compatibility list and I just experienced some interesting but ultimately useless Live CD.
I think the impressive thing about this isn't that it ran, but Linux allowed you to do something like this. As you mentioned it was a weird time when not everything ran like it should. Every manufacturer had their own way of doing things (an example was the cdrom support). I remember not being able to load SCSI cdrom drivers under DOS, but that exact same SCSI cdrom ran without any issues under Novell. Even if I didn't have Novell networking (with the add on cdrom) I still had to load the Novell networking drivers in first, have that fail, and then load in the SCSI cdrom. The sound Blaster cdrom was an IDE cdrom, but you had to load the sound drivers first and then the cdrom drivers, and the IDE cdrom supplied with the sound card didn't work as a generic cdrom plugged into the IDE controller on the mainboard (or add in card). Later on Windows 95 would recognize that cdrom plugged into the mainboard, but you had to install Win95 fully without cdrom support. Later BIOS did have support for IDE cdrom so you could load the SB cdrom DOS driver without installing the SB card.
I could go on and on with proprietary scanners, printers, monitors (yes. we had monitors that refused a 60hz refresh rate), modems (I had one that plugged into the SCSI port), serial ports, parallel ports, etc. that only worked with specific software or hardware configurations. There wasn't a "generic" IDE, SCSI, serial, parallel, etc. interface that used "generic" protocols even though we had "generic" interfaces and protocols already. Some manufactures just wanted to be special.
Wowwwww Wowwwwww, just wowwwwwwwwwww.... Man, I do not have enough words to congratulate you on your work. Honestly, I cannot even imagine how hard is to compile this experience so old in just one video.
I was just wondering since the Yggdrasil people might not be around anymore, I'd love someone shows this video to Linus Torvalds and see his reaction to this.
Man, kudos a thousand to you.
Fascinating video thanks
I remember when I was developing the DDP feature on OpenDVDProducer, the only open source code available related to this was developed for Yggdrasil. At the time I discover that, I imagined it was necessary to create a lot of new things in order to be able to release/produce a bootable CD/DVD, like creating a program to generate the DDP tapes (yes, at the time it seems that they create a master tape to generate DVDs.)
The Fall 1994 to Dec 1994 fix checks out.
In my experience, when Linux sh!ts the bed the solution is to wait a few months/years and try again. 😅
Also, mind blown that sound and X worked out of the box. Even modern distros can't do that! 😉
As someone who has been using Linux since 1998, this was a great video. Makes me sad I missed this era of Linux though….
It's ... very mixed feelings. This is idealized because I know exactly what hardware will and won't work, but it was a much mor eiffy experience back in those days.
@@NCommander I’ve been daily driving Linux almost since when I first discovered it… I can’t say I miss the days when I would select my hardware around compatibility opposed to strictly what I wanted. I still loved Linux and when you did set it up right it was fantastic. But then again, I was one of those people who used to run slack and would spend a few days building my OS, drivers, etc and pretty much the term “out of the box” didn’t exist. Now I use an Ubuntu based distro and it’s more or less as easy as windows to set it up with almost any hardware config you have…. I’ve even had good performance gaming on my current system with AAA titles.
Interesting video once again. Thanks.
@ 8:08 That background music reminded me of *The Star Hustler with Jack Horkheimer* (PBS show early 80's)
Yggdrasil was just barely before my time... I started on Slackware in 1996 and it was one of the greatest discoveries I had made in my personal computing journey.
Good video!
Very interesting.
Thanks for sharing. 😉👌🏻
Wonderful video, thank you!
wow this really takes me back
Yggdrasil was my very first Linux. I drove from San Jose to Mountain View (not very far) to buy the disk over the counter. Spent the next two days getting my video and sound card to work -- totally worth it! I've been a Linux user ever since.
Hey! I just found my Yggdrasil disk in my storage boxes!
Would it be possible for you to share ISO you've made? Thank you for very interesting documentary.
WOW: I was goofing around about 6 months ago, and created a new background for my Manjaro install... I created a "fake" desktop and had used the name Yggdrasil Linux as the name! I was unaware at the time that It was one of the original distros... I wonder if I had tried it back in the day and just forgot about it. Great history video!
I remember ygrassil but the first live CD I actually used was mandrake/mandriva at some point they moved to a live CD that doubled as an installer. IIRC it could store user data on the dvd or also onto an attached usb. I remember being shocked that my user data was just magically saved on a live CD.
I _vividly_ remember playing with this! The CD (and I guess the floppy..?) came shrink-wrapped to a booklet. Lots of Open Source software came that way back then.
BTW, when you were describing the speed as "glacier" I think you meant 'glacial'...
I was starting using Linux as main OS around 97-98. And even then setting up X was a skill I had to learn. impressive how well this worked back in 94. And thanx for this nostalgia trip. I had forgotten the fights with LILO :D
I have the Fall 1993 0.99pl13 set - with the 3.5" and 5-1/4" floppies. It was my first version and was installed on a 386 40MHz IBM PS/2 Model 30. It was where we built the first version of BRU for Linux. BRU was the first commercially available software for Linux. And remember, everything was that slow back then. For example, building BRU took over 2.5 hours. On a modern i7, it takes around 22 seconds (using make -j 8).
Also, Yggdrasil's founder Adam Richter is still a software engineer at Facebook and can be found on LinkedIn. Hi Adam if you're lurking.
You could schedule your UUCP connections simply with cron to meet your discounted LD calls. Remember, SCO XENIX was still the pinnacle of PC-base Unix at that time. As far as Linux was concerned, it was on par with XENIX and BSD386 of the same era.
And, while it's a nit, you pronounce it IGG druh zill and SIM link.
It'd be interesting to hear from someone involved in this project.
Wow! What a blast from the past! I cannot now recall how I got Yggdrasil - I'm somewhat sceptical that I'd have paid for it at that time - but I do remember the floppy disc issues, loving that it worked and more so that it looked like my Solaris boxes, and hating that it didn't really work without the CD and so on.
My box then was an HP 33MHz 486 with 8Mb of memory and I think a 40Mb IDE disc and an IDE CD. The not really working thing was frustrating and after about a year of gathering every distribution anyone had ever heard of to try out I settled on Red Hat Linux which remained my desktop distro of choice for almost a decade thereafter while still collecting things to install on whatever machines were spare in the office including various Macs and SparcStations.
I remember walking home from Uni with a stack of 35 or so floppy disks containing Slackware. I don't remember when that was, but it was running Kernel 0.99.11 and it kernel panicked a lot. Later I got one of those Yggdrasil CDs which made installation much easier.
my first experience with linux....Yggdrasil!!!! Loved it and never had to go back to the computer lab to get my homework done. Also...destroyed my Dell and rebuilt it with Yggdrasil. I missed almost 2 wks of class trying to figure that thing out. Much appreciated.
Came bundled in the Linux Bible ;).
The name sounds like a type of over the counter medication. Tv Ad could be: "8 out of 10 leading doctors recommend Yggdrasil over other brands for cold and flu symptom management. Get your box today at your local pharmacy - no prescription required!"
The “Hi there!” sample heard at 9:19 seems to be the same as in the song Peter Gabriel - Big Time (from the album “So” (1986)). In case nobody else mentioned this.
9:19
«Hi there» - Peter Gabriel
I think Yggdrasil was the first 'in a box' version of Linux that I used… prior to that I had been downloading images from FTP and Gopher sites and building my own on a Minix setup. Slackware was also around, but both of them were on dozens of floppy images rather than CDs. My test system eventually bit the dust when I tried out Windows 95 on it-I was an MS registered developer back then and got all the really early access MSDN things. Win95 spent so much time swapping to disk that it fried the HD! LOL By the time I got a new HD for my test system magazines had started putting 'Live' CDs on their covers and I worked my way through a host of different distros. It's all got a trifle boring a staid now… thank goodness the RaspberryPi still gives scope for experimentation!
Knoppix shipped with Linux Magazine from a UK publisher?
Got mine for about $40 at Borders a long, long time ago (like 2+ decades ago).
Did not know about Yggdrasil.
Good vid.
I got my copy of Knoppix 3.7 back when it was released by courier over night.
Cost me around 10€ or so but despite my PC then barely being able to handle KDE3.3, I loved it.
Even made a backup of the CD because it means quite a bit to me from a retrospective as it too was my first Linux distro which I used parallel to Windows 98 SE and later Windows XP at a time when I started to do a bit more with computers than just to play games.
@@MegaManNeo
Same here. Knoppix & KDE, but eventually fell in with Gnome for many, many years due to stability. Bought Red Hat Home Edition after finding out Knoppix couldn't be installed (at that time). Memories.
thanks for the video, iv never heard of this distro before so cool to discover something that seems widely pretty obscure. curious as to what virtual machine your using
I think it's 86Box in this video. Sometimes he uses PCem too
Here SUSE Linux (1994). And NO, it is not only for girls!:P
I can confirm that dial up configuration (a topic in this or another video) was annoying. But you did it one time ... then it worked (maybe a slogan from a provider? **g** ).
Thanks for the video, bringing it back into our minds ... which is preservation and showing up this gem, NCommander!:)
I enjoyed SuSE for many years because it had a really nice command-line interface.
Very nice!
Man just the name sounds like some sort of ancient, primordial beast of forgotten lore or for modern installers, of forgotten boot configuration and programming
This was the first version of Linux that I had ever seen or even heard of. I bought a copy of it in the early 1990s when I was in the Navy at a software shop in Akihabara, Japan.
Very nice video
I always used the soundblaster CD drivers... DOS based.. they worked great up to Slackware Linux live boots
This video kinda makes me want to try it, since I never tried any vintage or retro distros, let alone used X, which I've been wanting to try.
I used Yggdrasil back in 1994! Kernel 0.97 AND yes, you had to recompile the kernel every time you changed CDroms, or installed a new version of Yggdrasil, which took several hours to complete!
A link to the ISO downloads please? I was expecting it in the description but only found links to your sites but not the link to the first Live Linux CD. I would love to try this OS too.
great video my first working linux was calderia in a box it was mostly not finished but later I got mandrake on cd in pcgamer mag free with another one was good working copy
My first experiments in Linux go back to around 1998 with installations from SUSE and Mandake Linux. While neither of those (as they were back then) would be called a modern installation and not very user friendly by modern standards but they were so much better than this system that it shows a huge difference in terms of how things developed over a relatively short period.
I was looking forward to this ever since I saw the notification, and man was it way cooler than I thought
What a trailblazer, more than deserves the high regard it has. Definitely look more like a proper distro
And while maintenance costs might've played a factor. I theorize it was more to do with the lead author
just quitting. After all, it was a ways off from companies like RedHat being a thing. Even now it's a struggle
I can't remember the distro, but I think I remember one that had gcc and X that fit on a single floppy. I remember having to somehow reconfigure the floppy to be 2 megabytes and it was luck of the draw that you had both a drive and disk that was able to do that.
In the era it was very common to have the CDROM drive attached to the sound card through a proprietary interface; and even ATAPI drives, as long as they weren't sharing the controller could work well with the VM86 driver hack.
in 1994 720k disks, while obsolete because larger formats were available, 720k disks still made and were cheaper than 1.44mb disks. if you didn't need the larger space, using 720k disks still made sense