That is not true. RedHat 6.1 actually has a graphical mode installer. But it failed to load on his computer (due to X server auto-configuration not working), and failed back to using text installer. (the boxes and stuff, that is still and was considered a text installer) If you are lucky, or provide settings on a kernel command line, it will actually use graphical installation. I distinctly remember using graphical installation on 6.x or 7.x, and I just tried 6.1 in qemu emulator (needed to pass -vga cirrus, because with -vga std, x server was not detecting a vendor), and it starts X server, and jumps into a graphical installation, which is actually pretty and nice.
This era of Red Hat was just so cool. I dearly love that logo. I dabbled in Linux back in '99, and it was good geeky fun. Now the magic is gone because pretty much just works. That being said, it's my home server/gaming desktop now, and it runs real games. We're not limited to Frozen Bubble and TuxRacer anymore.
I can relate to the love of the logo. I was fresh out of university 2016 and wanted to work in tech but did not have any experience and knowledge. No company offered me a job but grinded hard plus studied all the thing related to tech trends on youtube. Landed on "help desk" position and it was the first week during training that I came across the logo. It was so cool to see a tech company with a shadowman wearing the fedora all red and black. Searched online what the company did and dived deeply in Linux. Took me two years and two companies(1 year help desk & 1 year CS for cybersecurity when I landed on Redhat's sales rep position(this was after IBMs acquistion). Everyday was a blessing and felt so proud working for a company that hit me so hard by looking at the logo and the people were awesome + the culture. Worked 1 year for RH and retired at age 32. Still miss the logo and till today I get a slight high heartbeat when I come across the logo.
I was working in IT support in 99 and although we had hundreds of windows units in house, we had a lot of special systems with red hat. It always got my spirits up when I got my hands on a red hat station.
I remember my father installing Red Hat Linux on my old 486 machine when we got a Pentium to replace it. It took him ages. I couldn't believe it, and stomped my feet and wailed about how bad it was. Little did I realise that a few decades later every computational device I had would be running some sort of Linux OS. So much of what people take for granted in the latest OSes has been highlighted here beautifully. ESPECIALLY the networking issues. Good work as usual!
I first installed Slackware from a few dozen floppy disks in 1995. In 1996 I got the Infomagic 6 CD Linux collection. I think I tried out Redhat back then but eventually stayed on Slackware. Linux was so powerful back then, with virtual terminals and true multitasking and all the stuff from the Unix world. And if you had a suitable video card you might have been able to tease out video modes from your monitor that were not possible on Windows.
Yes. Slackware was the best dist back then I think. I ran it for a few tears I think. But I had no supported graphics card then. Just terminal. But a good chance to learn editing text files and remember where they are, still today 😊
Yeah, Slackware 3.2 was the starting point for me. Great stuff. There are still things I learned back then at my Mom's house after school that are giving me an edge in my career to this day. Insane.
I remember the main issue when I tried this back in the day was I didn't have Ethernet at home, instead was using a PCI 56k modem, which I recall was what was known as a "WinModem" where the hardware was fairly basic and the proprietary Windows driver did all the hard work. I believe it took a LOT of effort and reverse engineering from driver coders to get these working in Linux at all.
Yep, I remember this. I first installed Red Hat 6.2 in about 2001 and had the same problem. Luckily I managed to persuade my (now) mother in law to let me swap my WinModem with her chunky external 56k one.
WinModems were my biggest problem. I missed out on desktop Linux for years because of those cursed things. At least proprietary graphics drivers give you more for your suffering now. And they actually work of course, which was never a given with earlier hardware.
I also remember having a Motorola WinModem that I couldn't get to work in Red Hat Linux 9, back in 2001. I ended up just buying an external modem that just worked out of the box.
0:32 “They say Linux is complicated that you have to jump into terminal all the time, networking doesn’t work, sound doesn’t work.” Proceeds to jump into terminal after sound doesn’t work, network doesn’t work. At least in 1999 “they” were right about Linux!
You have to use the terminal once or twice to run a command or two that the manual tells you about. And the sound configuration tool is hardly rocket scientist stuff. Of course, "they" were the same people who whined throughout the 1980s that Unix was really hard to use, that "oh no, you need to run a command to list the current directory" even though in DOS, which was apparently acceptable to the masses, you had to run a command to list the current directory. I installed exactly this version of Red Hat in 1999 from one version of this box set on a Dell laptop. The only problem I remember now was that the Crystal audio hardware didn't like being initialised before some of the other hardware, thanks to the way the stupid, archaic PC architecture was designed. Adding an init script to reinitialise the audio during the boot sequence fixed that. Maybe flippant remarks about the command line come to mind at this point, but then people go on about config.sys and whatever else on DOS, so maybe Linux users might be allowed to customise the boot process as well. Oh, and prior to using this box set with that Dell laptop, I actually installed Red Hat 6.0 over the network using a boot floppy. Even the X server managed to set itself up, as far as I recall, and that involved the fairly esoteric and now largely forgotten NeoMagic video hardware. I can honestly say that setting Red Hat up on that laptop was less annoying and involved less intervention than setting up the officially supported Windows NT 4.0 distribution which my colleagues kept using, regardless of what "they" might have said about the matter.
@@paul_boddie Well, he did have to jump through hoops people running windows didn't have to... rerunning xconfig to set the card up correctly, running sndconfig because the installer didn't, having to set a static IP because Redhat was too stupid to background dhcpcd... Linux was coming along, but still was miles away from where it needed to be for a "desktop" system. It was easy for him to debug these days because we have Google. In 1999, finding the answers to these issues could take days or weeks, if you even knew where to ask. Setting up X and sound hardware was always a pain in the ass.
Pretty sure he was talking about today. I don't think anyone would have argued with that at the time. Like he said, networking and sound were well known problem points. But I've never heard of anyone not having a plug and play experience for around a decade now.
yeah but in this context he's talking about people's perceptions of modern linux, and the point of the video is to demonstrate how long ago all that was true
Brings back memories of many hours spent trying to get Red Hat 5.1 running on an HP Vectra in 1997. Whether X would work was always seemingly in the lap of the Gods and I never had a clue about vertical sync rates: I recall dire warnings about 'if you enter the wrong ones, your monitor might be destroyed', which was certainly a novel and scary departure from Windows 95 installations! Never could get networking working 😢. But fun times: and what a pleasure to see Gnome 1.4 (?) again: the days when Gnome was my preferred usable desktop seem very long ago now!! Loved the video. Thank you for it.
I wanted to have a more traditional Linux experience, so put Arch on my PC. It only took two attempts to get it working, I was well impressed. Sadly I didn't have to manually compile the kernel, but X did break in amusing and hard to figure out ways to add some spice. But I did forget to set up the bootloader so the machine didn't boot after installing it. 11/10, highly recommend if you have a long weekend and nothing to do.
interestingly i installed my first linux ca. 2002, and i believe it was redhat, but it didn’t recognize or install the mouse at all (a standard ps/2 one), and i had to dabble in terminal to make it work. so this wasn’t encouraging
Nothing changed after all those years lol. I have run Linux for a bunch of years as my main system and often it was something very basic that had to be fixed again 😢 Especially after updates.
Thank you for this nostalgia hit ! Used RedHat in late 90's on school's server, spent lots of hours learning, letting it overnight to render PoVRay images, compiling whatever picked our teenage attention or simply having a blast with our 256kbps line.
Nice video, man! I remember installing Fedora Core 1 and Mandrake on my Athlon Thunderbird, back in the day, from IT magazines that had special numbers with installation guides and nice pressed and colorfull distros CDs. ALSA was prezent, so sound was working out of the box. Some cool stuff were: playing movies with mplayer from text mode, without loading Xserver, or connecting to internet with PPP dialup scripts, or TUX racer and FOOBILIARD with 3d acceleration. I also had a SmoothWall distro running for a while on a Pentium 166 MMX, 32 mb ram, back in the early 2000s. I still have that Pentium 166 MMX PC. That was a fun time to be around!
Ahhh I love the retrogasm. I vividly remember wanting to try Linux back in 1999 or 2000. I was an avid PC user, about 15 years old back then, and definitely a geek. I heard about Linux and wanted to try it. I had installed DOS and Windows in various versions many times over so I felt quite confident I'd be able to do it. Bought Red Hat. Failed. Bought SuSE. Failed miserably. Couldn't get it to boot. Got all kinds of error messages I couldn't make sense of. Finally tried Slackware and succeeded, to much of my delight. Used it as a daily driver ever since. Got into compiling my own kernels and everything. But I remember getting started was very, very hard. Mind you, the internet wasn't full of tutorials and articles yet, back in the day.
The fun times I had with the sndconfig command, and working out refresh rates for screens. If you put in some very silly values you could kill some SVGA monitors for good.
Thanks for bringing back the memories. I anticipate waking up screaming in the middle of the night for the next week or two from having nightmares about configuring Linux.
Great video. Looks like Red Hat really got it right back then. I first tried installing Linux in 2007 (Debian with KDE desktop). Even then I had to do a lot of faffing about in the terminal and editing config files to get stuff working, like USB support and sound card. Now using Ubuntu Studio 24.04 with KDE, just minor tweaks to get things how I like them!
I actually had an older RedHat version. In which you got 8 Cd's to install on a computer. If I recall that it would take over an hour for the install to complete. Course, being new to Redhat and Linux ...I installed everything. Jump ahead to 2024 and I work as a Redhat Systems Administrator. I still use Redhat, but wish IBM would spin it off and make it useable by all.
I remember installing, I think it was Slackware... Back in 96 or 97? I installed over and over again trying to get the x configuration correct. Then someone told me that there was a program for configuring it lol. I had a 486 dx4-100 and eventually I got networking working too. That was huge because now I could telnet into the Solaris systems and do my computer science homework instead of walking all the way to the lab. I even set up X display forwarding so I could use fancy graphical apps. This is probably why I never really learned VI or emacs. Nedit for the win lol.
I had an extremely similar experience... Slackware back in '96 or '97. I also reinstalled many times as it was easier than trying to fix wrong installation choices. Many headaches trying to edit the Xf86 config file. It took me forever to figure out there was actually a shortcut hotkey combo to cycle through some of the commonly used example settings, to find one that would get a working desktop, before editing the file to be more specific to my exact hardware. If I recall, the hotkey was Ctrl+Shift+Left/Right Arrows ?
Back in 1999 I bought that same box and installed it on a ~120MHz Pentium. Your adventures in networking were not as bad as mine. I had help getting it up and running, but picked up the most generic network card, and for reasons I don't remember, had to download an updated kernel module on another PC, then copy it over the serial port, compile, and it worked. A year later I had added a SCSI card to the machine and had a massive 18 GB /home on it. I had also added an early Lucent Wavelan on an ISA to PCMCIA card adaptor and could wirelessly connect to my computer, and also allow wireless roaming around my college dorm. I do not miss these early days, but I certainly learned a lot.
Wow! Brought back a lot. My first Linux party was with the mile high stack of Slackware. Back in those days, actually before this RH 6.4, if you didn't know what to do, the Slackware doofs were not going to share the secret sauce - RTFM. A couple weeks later, I was rummaging through a Thrift Shop and spotted a box that had Red Hat 5.4 printed on the front. It had a single floppy and a couple of CDs with professional labels, a well written book, and the rest of the goodness. I took it home, read through the book, put the CD into my computer and within a short time (relatively) I was running Red Hat in its own partitions. Yes, I had to fiddle with the CLI but it was all in the book! Very soon, I had dual boot setup (keep the wife happy) with Linux for me and Windows for her. I gave the tall stack of Slack back, and never looked back again. Today, I run Kubuntu on my own laptop, and the rest of the family has their own toys. Life is great, thanks to that Thrift Store and the chance encounter with someone's second hand treasure.
I tried installing Red Hat back then. It didn't support my video card, complained that 16 MB of RAM was "very little" (even though it was perfectly fine for Windows 9x at the time), and made me manually sort out the dependencies of all the software it included. No thanks!
@@stargazer7644 I've used Windows 9x in as little as 4 MB of RAM. It was slow, but usable. And it doesn't take up anywhere near 500 MB of hard drive space.
@@DerekLippold Of course it depends on what you're trying to run, but Linux is much lighter weight than Windows. It has always worked great on older hardware that Windows was completely unusable on.
Ah nostalgia. Redhat 5 was the first Redhat I used, but started on Slackware and used Afterstep as my first 'desktop' - more a simple application launcher than the desktop we think of today :D I actually got Slackware on the 'Slackware Unleashed' book at Waterstones - and I loved how Red Hat, SuSE and Mandrake did the big boxes with installation / admin manuals included.
I too started on slackware 0.99. Desktop was dwm I think. Getting X working back then was a challenge due to lack of support for much hardware. Sound worked although could be a bit patchy. It was a time of eagerly awaiting the next kernel release and compiling it to see what support had been included.
@@_chrisr_ oh yes, always compiling the kernel with exactly what you needed and any optimisations for the architecture, those were the days... Sometimes breaking it in the process 😅
Wow, that's a very well done distro. It's amazing to see they were that well put together even back then. You complained about the partitioning but it reminds me of Gparted so I see no real issue. Since it comes with a manual and troubleshooting apps, it seems to me like a great experience if you're willing to put in a slight bit of effort.
@21:30: Actually you can use 'su' to switch to root user within a normal user login, a bit like 'sudo -i', but have some env configuaration stuff changed I don't know. And you can use the Xconfigurator like in the install steps, just type that long name in. I had my time with this stuff in those times and it wasn't too much fun...
Great video. I actually remember buying Redhat 6.1 myself for work or the small business where I was working back then. We used it as a mail server and on command line use as a server it was pretty ok. For graphical configs I was totally lost and not even thought about sounds. If I remember correctlt some friend bought 6.2 for his work and that was already so much improved from 6.1 that it made me jealous. :)
Never heard of Linux until many years later after this was released. A pain in the neck to configure back then. The first Linux I've tried was Xubuntu. And now it's my favorite Linux version, on second place it is Linux mint. I grew up with the XFCE desktop. I have P-Pro 200mhz (single cpu) 128mb ram machine in my retro collection, but it doesn't support cd-rom boot. Bios supports up to 8gb harddrive unless you use a controller card. Would've been a fun project for me to try someday, but as I said the bios doesn't support cd-rom boot. Great video and great content on your channel. Just finished watching this video and just subscribed. 🙂
I bet you that thing would even run on a 386 if given enough ram. It took distributions aaaages to finally switch over their x86 binary packages to 586+
@@HPPalmtopTube You can technically reach 64 megs with four 30-pin simms so am kinda surprised not more people tinker with custom modules. (Only seen Bits und bolts thus far) Imagine a late 8-slot board! 😂
@@Chriva After some googling I found that an 8MB 30 pin SIMM module cost approx $800 in 1990. Although the 386 was released in 1985, so was already on the market for 5 years in 1990, we're talking of installing the first versions of linux, so let's use 1990 as our date. 32MB = 4x 8MB modules = 4x $800 = $3200, adjusted for inflation would make the 32MB of RAM SIMM modules cost approx $7,719.69 in today's money. Maybe a bit shy of a new car but $8000 is definately enough to buy a decent used hatchback Toyota nowadays :) If you were to use 4x 16MB 30 pin SIMM modules and have 64MB total, the price will probably be 2.5x the price for an 8MB module (larger modules were more expensive per MB), so it probably would cost nearly $20K in today's money! :) That's enough for a very nice used car or a small brand new one! :) However I don't think 16MB modules were available in 1990, probably a few years later like 1993-94 or so... This is why a lot of the early 90's SUN (SparcStation) and SGI (Indigo/Indigo2/Indy) workstations were so expensive, as even in 1990 having 32, 64 or even 128MB was pretty usual in those systems. I have an SGI Indigo2 from 1995 that is maxed out with 1GB of 72 pin modules. I bought it a few years ago so it's cheap / retro gear, but having 512MB or 1024MB of RAM in a workstation would have cost the price of a house!
@@Chriva @Chriva After some googling I found that an 8MB 30 pin SIMM module cost approx $800 in 1990. Although the 386 was released in 1985, so was already on the market for 5 years in 1990, we're talking of installing the first versions of linux, so let's use 1990 as our date. 32MB = 4x 8MB modules = 4x $800 = $3200, adjusted for inflation would make the 32MB of RAM SIMM modules cost approx $7,719.69 in today's money. Maybe a bit shy of a new car but $8000 is definately enough to buy a decent used hatchback Toyota nowadays :) If you were to use 4x 16MB 30 pin SIMM modules and have 64MB total, the price will probably be 2.5x the price for an 8MB module (larger modules were more expensive per MB), so it probably would cost nearly $20K in today's money! :) That's enough for a very nice used car or a small brand new one! :) However I don't think 16MB modules were available in 1990, probably a few years later like 1993-94 or so... This is why a lot of the early 90's SUN (SparcStation) and SGI (Indigo/Indigo2/Indy) workstations were so expensive, as even in 1990 having 32, 64 or even 128MB was pretty usual in those systems. I have an SGI Indigo2 from 1995 that is maxed out with 1GB of 72 pin modules. I bought it a few years ago so it's cheap / retro gear, but having 512MB or 1024MB of RAM in a workstation would have cost the price of a house!
@@Chriva @Chriva After some googling I found that an 8MB 30 pin SIMM module cost approx $800 in 1990. Although the 386 was released in 1985, so was already on the market for 5 years in 1990, we're talking of installing the first versions of linux, so let's use 1990 as our date. 32MB = 4x 8MB modules = 4x $800 = $3200, adjusted for inflation would make the 32MB of RAM SIMM modules cost approx $7,719.69 in today's money. Maybe a bit shy of a new car but $8000 is definately enough to buy a decent used hatchback Toyota nowadays :) If you were to use 4x 16MB 30 pin SIMM modules and have 64MB total, the price will probably be 2.5x the price for an 8MB module (larger modules were more expensive per MB), so it probably would cost nearly $20K in today's money! :) That's enough for a very nice used car or a small brand new one! :) However I don't think 16MB modules were available in 1990, probably a few years later like 1993-94 or so...
The floppy image was actually required to be on the disc thanks to El Torito boot specification. This one uses floppy emulation as most did in this era. The standard was never really replaced and we just started using no emulation mode with bootloaders. It could also emulate 2.8mb floppies or a hard drive image.
This is very cool and it brings back a lot of memories. I started out with slackware version 3 and it came in a huge book that included a couple of CDs. I still use slackware to this day and I'm at version 15. I never really got into Windows at all other than work. Prior to slackware I used os2 warp but it was very clear that IBM was no longer going to support it. At the time in '96 , I was not going to dish out $250 for a Windows operating system, so I stumbled across the slackware book at the bookstore and was in the clearance section for roughly $10 $15. I still have it.
I am surprised that Red Hat only used one Boot disk in this version. Most distros around that time still had two floppies, in a "Boot" and a separate "Root" disk, before getting to the CD's.
This PC is from 1995, not from 1999. Typical PC from 1999 is 450MHz+, 64MB+, cd-rom in every PC and so in. So it's totaly fine to see such a sluggishness))
I can remember downloading Slackware to a gazillion floppies and installing via command line. If you wanted X windows it was a whole new level of pain and configuration
Brings back memories... Sort of. 1999 I started using Slackware. My first Distro was Redhat. Acquired from an old book I bought from my Uni book store at the time.
CD-ROM was not unusual in 1999, we had CD-ROM on all our computers and even a CD-Burner on all our workstations on the computer lab in our middle school in 1994
4:20 you did ask, yes it is still in use, but not by ordinary users anymore, it serves as a back end to more advanced package managers like yum or dnf.
I tried and boy I'm glad I didn't get into Linux back then. Everything was painful and not even stable. My Windows experiences were vastly superior I shit you not. Only around Ubuntu 8.04 Linux desktops began to be semi-usable.
While I did this for a few years, and it was legitimately better than Windows 98 or Windows ME, I can't honestly say it was better than Windows XP, which is what lured me back to Windows. Without the internet it was all a huge pain, I had to wait for a new version of Mandrake to come to best buy, but with Windows all sorts of new software was available and stores all over town. I run Debian stable these days, because Linux is a much better experience now than it was then, and Microsoft has proven, time and time again that they have no interest in actually improving their product.
@@verablack3137 Yeah. Nowdays Linux is absolute viable system to run and has been for desktops for quite long. Laptops though where really bad experience for quite long. Around was it Ubuntu 18.04 when dual gpu systems where hype on laptops things where quite bad for Linux systems. Things got worked out for next release only to get regression in next. Especially bad since so many network solutions didn't have proper drivers and worked quite poorly. Windows 95 wasn't that good either for sure, but one could at least find the drivers needed to work. But sure enough it was easy to make system settings so that conputer might blue screen. 2000/XP where really good OS's increasing stability. But still every OS has its pros and cons. I currently use set of devices from MacOS, Windows to Linux and can't say one is the ultimate solution. Not even MacOS which by the fanboys talking seemed to be something extraordinary,but finally investing in Macbook and Mini I can't say they're really worth the money invested.
God i remember installing that on servers in my company back in the day. Compaq Proliant 3000 servers. COuld be a pain in the backside to configure with the Compaq raid controllers. Pretty bomb proof too. Managed them using a telnet session from my Nokia 9000 series communicator phone. Usually from a flight to New York or London or Tokyo....
My first Unix was Coherent by Mark Williams Company. It ran on my 386-20 with 4 MB of RAM and a 40MB hard drive and came on about 40 floppies. This would have been about 1990.
Blast from the past! I remember the sound and video configuration being a nightmare back then. And coming from the world of Windows that was kinda strange. I even remember compiling drivers to try to see if the last bleeding stuff worked.. I do not remember the voice of Linus Torvalds. Probably because I never made the sound card work! :D
Today few regular users use RHEL, instead they're on Fedora. Also I am getting British LGR vibes from this but for UNIX-like nerds like me 😄 Neat! Also you say without modern internet this would be a pain, but that's what the phone support was for. It was pretty good from what I hear, still is.
aaah yeah good old linux days. i always had problems with sound on every linux distro. dealing with alsa drivers or compiling kernels with sound modules... until i tried freebsd, this changed my life completly. everything was suported and install was simple and straight forward, compiling kernel was a dream, ports were amazing, i never looked back to linux ever again.
I used this version of Red Hat :D what a time to live! I was so excited to have this CD and it felt so cool while everyone else was using windows in the school lol
From experience with old labels in storage, odds are the adhesive on the stickers will have gone by now, either they'll be permanently stuck to the backing or they'll peel off but not stick back on to anything else.
Installed linux on my 1MB 286 in the first half of the 90s. It took two weeks running a 4MB kernal on this machine to recompile the kernel without unnecessary features. The resulting kernel was only 1 MB and it ran fine for a couple of years.
Remember the linux winamp clone, XMMS (I think this what it was called). Until now, I don't know why, but the sound quality was FREAKIN' AWESOME! Running tbe same hardware under Windows 98 or 2000 using Winamp did not come close in comparison. Anyone have any idea why?
ohhh enlightenment desktop :) what does it mean when the machine loops through the memory count several times in a row on boot? i've seen machines do that and never quite understood why and when a realtek network adapter misbehaves.... try an intel network adapter realtek drivers do weird things sometimes, and if the auto config is applying a generic network driver ..... well it's something worth ruling out, let's just put it that way
It means the Quick POST option is disabled, Award's standard memory test is a little paranoid and unnecessary on a known-good machine. A different network adaptor probably wouldn't have made any difference since the system is using a generic NE2000 driver.
I am a Linuxian from second hour (1991). A bundle of SUSE CDs with all the programs and then burning updates at university :D I remember some processes vividly. I can remember when we as a group looked (hunted) for the first affordable drive you could boot from :D. But I can't remember when it was possible for us. Maybe 1995.
That was my first Linux! I bought it from one of those bluestar super-computer sales. (They would set up a bunch of vendors flea market style for a weekend. They were fun when they were around) I got it working okay, but at the time it couldn't replace windows for me.
In about 2001 or 2002 I setup put Mandrake on my personal machine, an Intel Triton 75mhz absolutely maxed out with 64mb of ram and an ATI Mach 64, a SCSI controller and a 2GB SCSI drive and a Sound Blaster 16 and it all worked pretty well. Gnome and KDE were both too slow, but running Blackbox I managed to have a very usable system. It all seemed pretty similar to that Red Hat Install, except most things worked if not out of the box, easily solved with the manual. I remember how exciting it was that despite not having internet I had this huge catalog of software for only $50, though I remember being very disappointed in the game selection that Mandrake Linux came with.
Ahh a Tiny man, just like my best mate was. I was/am a Gateway 2000 person. We both used these to use direct dialup to play Quake and Red Alert 🎉😊 the good days and many fond memories.
this was the first linux i installed and used, it was a nightmare having to compile the most basic apps like ICQ chat etc. I went back to windows in a hurry
oh, I am sure I have one or two distros of Linux on CD from around that era... I should do something like this myself and see if it is as smooth as your install was.
And actually RedHat6.1 required about 64Megs of RAM (which I didn't have, only 32 SDRAM in my socket7 PC) and it was possible to fill about 2gigs of HDD if installing everything from those CDs.
And just the other day I installed Debian + Ollama and had a llm up and running in less than an hour.. It took longer updating the bios on the motherboard (yes - I had issues)
Funny, i started with all these distrib after sls and slackware with kernel 0.94 pl2, redhat 1.2 etc, all you needed was to avoid windows only crappy modem, graphic cards etc, reducing the choice but a quest. And you better get to compile your oxn kernel to have the only needed drivers and get as much memory available. I loved it
I first installed Linux from the cds I got in a Linux administration book. It was Red Hat 6.0. The blurb on the book said something like "Red Hat 6 is the best Linux distribution available today. How do we know this? Because Linus Torvalds uses it!". Good times!
the last time I HAD to enter the terminal on linux was to edit some printer configuration files for cups or whatever. Almost everything else is plug and play for the most part. Granted I do optionally enter the terminal to accomplish certain tasks faster than what the GUI can do.
Running Fedora (and Mint before this for a few years) as my main system. I have been toying with it since the early 2000's, but now, I think it's a very nice replacement possibility, mainly due to the amount of web apps (even though I'm not a fan of their performance). With Fedora I was pleasantly surprised it started updating the bios of my Lenovo laptop, always needed Windows for that. :)
Gnome would have been the WM in this era for sure. I spent a weekend at work downloading the .isos for 6.1 from an unofficial FTP server and ran it for a couple years on a Toshiba Tecra 8000. Worked great.
Such great memories from that era of Linux. I would have followed up the fresh install by installing Ximian's Desktop, a more polished and refined version of Gnome 1.4 iirc. RedCarpet was their update tool, and we still have Evolution the mail client etc. Great time.
I started with Red Hat (3.something) in 1996, continued with Slack and Debian, but it was not until 2004 and Ubuntu that I didn't have spend hours trying to get X working after a new install. Things "just worked" with Ubuntu (which I later abandoned for Mint).
I used to go to the library and check out the Linux books. There were CD holders in the back of the books with different distros. I don't know why exactly but Mandrake was my favorite distro around 1997-98 when I was about 12. I would only make it a few days on a Linux Desktop before getting frusturated and because I loved WinAmp skins. The good old days...
You didn't need to install drivers for a winmodem. IIRC, 1 cdrom to install, 1 cdrom for source code. I actually bought RH 7.2 back in the day and things did not go that smoothly. I think it came with a cdrom for staroffice and some demos as well.
I remember trying an early version of Red Hat and Mandrake Linux in the early 2000s and my experience was pretty similar to what is in this video. For a PC user that was somewhat seasoned like I was, having used PCs regularly since the 386 era, Linux was a more difficult to setup than Windows but not impossible. Mostly took some patience and the ability to access the internet from another computer. However, for someone who was much less experienced and trying to set it up on their first or only PC, I could see it feeling like it was freaking awful to do at the time! One thing I think really helped people get some decent experience with Linux were downloadable and burnable Live CDs! That way a person could burn a CD, reboot their computer, boot into a Linux environment and play around without having to try to setup a dual boot configuration or blow away an existing Windows install. Especially handy on a family PC.
Ironically that "graphical mode" setup actually runs in text mode, just styled to look graphical.
There were lots of "graphical" applications (including installers) for the MS-DOS / PC-DOS / DR-DOS platform prior to the introduction of Windows 95.
That is not true. RedHat 6.1 actually has a graphical mode installer. But it failed to load on his computer (due to X server auto-configuration not working), and failed back to using text installer. (the boxes and stuff, that is still and was considered a text installer)
If you are lucky, or provide settings on a kernel command line, it will actually use graphical installation.
I distinctly remember using graphical installation on 6.x or 7.x, and I just tried 6.1 in qemu emulator (needed to pass -vga cirrus, because with -vga std, x server was not detecting a vendor), and it starts X server, and jumps into a graphical installation, which is actually pretty and nice.
The program used for the graphical install is called Dialog, it's actually quite competent and fun to work with once you understand how it works.
@@RileyMeta Getting X configured back in the day was challenging. But the text boxes were common.
@@RileyMetayep! And its based on libncurses
This era of Red Hat was just so cool. I dearly love that logo. I dabbled in Linux back in '99, and it was good geeky fun. Now the magic is gone because pretty much just works. That being said, it's my home server/gaming desktop now, and it runs real games. We're not limited to Frozen Bubble and TuxRacer anymore.
Frozen Bubble and TuxRacer 😀
@ Memory unlocked, right? And FreeCiv too. No shame at all in playing them if you actually want to play those particular games.
TuxRacer the best
I can relate to the love of the logo. I was fresh out of university 2016 and wanted to work in tech but did not have any experience and knowledge. No company offered me a job but grinded hard plus studied all the thing related to tech trends on youtube. Landed on "help desk" position and it was the first week during training that I came across the logo. It was so cool to see a tech company with a shadowman wearing the fedora all red and black. Searched online what the company did and dived deeply in Linux. Took me two years and two companies(1 year help desk & 1 year CS for cybersecurity when I landed on Redhat's sales rep position(this was after IBMs acquistion). Everyday was a blessing and felt so proud working for a company that hit me so hard by looking at the logo and the people were awesome + the culture. Worked 1 year for RH and retired at age 32. Still miss the logo and till today I get a slight high heartbeat when I come across the logo.
I was working in IT support in 99 and although we had hundreds of windows units in house, we had a lot of special systems with red hat. It always got my spirits up when I got my hands on a red hat station.
I remember my father installing Red Hat Linux on my old 486 machine when we got a Pentium to replace it. It took him ages. I couldn't believe it, and stomped my feet and wailed about how bad it was. Little did I realise that a few decades later every computational device I had would be running some sort of Linux OS. So much of what people take for granted in the latest OSes has been highlighted here beautifully. ESPECIALLY the networking issues. Good work as usual!
I watched your Mac mini eGPU video and after seeing this one, I'm officially subbed. Keep going with weird Linux shenanigans, I love them
I first installed Slackware from a few dozen floppy disks in 1995. In 1996 I got the Infomagic 6 CD Linux collection. I think I tried out Redhat back then but eventually stayed on Slackware.
Linux was so powerful back then, with virtual terminals and true multitasking and all the stuff from the Unix world. And if you had a suitable video card you might have been able to tease out video modes from your monitor that were not possible on Windows.
Same here, that Infomagic collection was fantastic.
Yes. Slackware was the best dist back then I think. I ran it for a few tears I think. But I had no supported graphics card then. Just terminal. But a good chance to learn editing text files and remember where they are, still today 😊
Me too. This video gave me flashbacks!😅
Yeah, Slackware 3.2 was the starting point for me. Great stuff. There are still things I learned back then at my Mom's house after school that are giving me an edge in my career to this day. Insane.
I remember the main issue when I tried this back in the day was I didn't have Ethernet at home, instead was using a PCI 56k modem, which I recall was what was known as a "WinModem" where the hardware was fairly basic and the proprietary Windows driver did all the hard work. I believe it took a LOT of effort and reverse engineering from driver coders to get these working in Linux at all.
Yep, I remember this. I first installed Red Hat 6.2 in about 2001 and had the same problem. Luckily I managed to persuade my (now) mother in law to let me swap my WinModem with her chunky external 56k one.
WinModems were my biggest problem. I missed out on desktop Linux for years because of those cursed things. At least proprietary graphics drivers give you more for your suffering now. And they actually work of course, which was never a given with earlier hardware.
I am extremely triggered by the word "Winmodem".
I also remember having a Motorola WinModem that I couldn't get to work in Red Hat Linux 9, back in 2001. I ended up just buying an external modem that just worked out of the box.
0:32 “They say Linux is complicated that you have to jump into terminal all the time, networking doesn’t work, sound doesn’t work.” Proceeds to jump into terminal after sound doesn’t work, network doesn’t work. At least in 1999 “they” were right about Linux!
You have to use the terminal once or twice to run a command or two that the manual tells you about. And the sound configuration tool is hardly rocket scientist stuff. Of course, "they" were the same people who whined throughout the 1980s that Unix was really hard to use, that "oh no, you need to run a command to list the current directory" even though in DOS, which was apparently acceptable to the masses, you had to run a command to list the current directory.
I installed exactly this version of Red Hat in 1999 from one version of this box set on a Dell laptop. The only problem I remember now was that the Crystal audio hardware didn't like being initialised before some of the other hardware, thanks to the way the stupid, archaic PC architecture was designed. Adding an init script to reinitialise the audio during the boot sequence fixed that. Maybe flippant remarks about the command line come to mind at this point, but then people go on about config.sys and whatever else on DOS, so maybe Linux users might be allowed to customise the boot process as well.
Oh, and prior to using this box set with that Dell laptop, I actually installed Red Hat 6.0 over the network using a boot floppy. Even the X server managed to set itself up, as far as I recall, and that involved the fairly esoteric and now largely forgotten NeoMagic video hardware. I can honestly say that setting Red Hat up on that laptop was less annoying and involved less intervention than setting up the officially supported Windows NT 4.0 distribution which my colleagues kept using, regardless of what "they" might have said about the matter.
@@paul_boddie Well, he did have to jump through hoops people running windows didn't have to... rerunning xconfig to set the card up correctly, running sndconfig because the installer didn't, having to set a static IP because Redhat was too stupid to background dhcpcd... Linux was coming along, but still was miles away from where it needed to be for a "desktop" system. It was easy for him to debug these days because we have Google. In 1999, finding the answers to these issues could take days or weeks, if you even knew where to ask. Setting up X and sound hardware was always a pain in the ass.
Pretty sure he was talking about today. I don't think anyone would have argued with that at the time. Like he said, networking and sound were well known problem points. But I've never heard of anyone not having a plug and play experience for around a decade now.
yeah but in this context he's talking about people's perceptions of modern linux, and the point of the video is to demonstrate how long ago all that was true
Brings back memories of many hours spent trying to get Red Hat 5.1 running on an HP Vectra in 1997. Whether X would work was always seemingly in the lap of the Gods and I never had a clue about vertical sync rates: I recall dire warnings about 'if you enter the wrong ones, your monitor might be destroyed', which was certainly a novel and scary departure from Windows 95 installations! Never could get networking working 😢. But fun times: and what a pleasure to see Gnome 1.4 (?) again: the days when Gnome was my preferred usable desktop seem very long ago now!! Loved the video. Thank you for it.
I got my first RHCE certification on Red Hat Linux 6.1 back in 1999. This brought up a lot of really cool old memories. Thank you.
To this day, having a Broadcom WiFi chip is still a problem, while Intel stuff works without issue.
That's on Broadcom TBH. The Intel WiFi chips are superior anyways.
Wow this was my first linux distro actually. This video is gonna be great to watch!
mine too, gawd this brings so many memories.. I tried to dual boot and wiped off win 98 in a partitioning process lol
Same, Red Hat 6.1 was the first Linux distro I tried. And boy, was it different from Windows !! 😂
I wanted to have a more traditional Linux experience, so put Arch on my PC. It only took two attempts to get it working, I was well impressed. Sadly I didn't have to manually compile the kernel, but X did break in amusing and hard to figure out ways to add some spice. But I did forget to set up the bootloader so the machine didn't boot after installing it. 11/10, highly recommend if you have a long weekend and nothing to do.
30:46 an piece of history
Danke!
interestingly i installed my first linux ca. 2002, and i believe it was redhat, but it didn’t recognize or install the mouse at all (a standard ps/2 one), and i had to dabble in terminal to make it work. so this wasn’t encouraging
Nothing changed after all those years lol.
I have run Linux for a bunch of years as my main system and often it was something very basic that had to be fixed again 😢
Especially after updates.
@@p_mouse8676 😔
@@p_mouse8676 Not my experience these days though, that was definitely the case years ago for me as well.
Thx for the trip down memory lane!
I have my SUSE 9.0 professional box. It was very nice to get a printed manuals.
Thank you for this nostalgia hit ! Used RedHat in late 90's on school's server, spent lots of hours learning, letting it overnight to render PoVRay images, compiling whatever picked our teenage attention or simply having a blast with our 256kbps line.
Nice video, man! I remember installing Fedora Core 1 and Mandrake on my Athlon Thunderbird, back in the day, from IT magazines that had special numbers with installation guides and nice pressed and colorfull distros CDs. ALSA was prezent, so sound was working out of the box. Some cool stuff were: playing movies with mplayer from text mode, without loading Xserver, or connecting to internet with PPP dialup scripts, or TUX racer and FOOBILIARD with 3d acceleration. I also had a SmoothWall distro running for a while on a Pentium 166 MMX, 32 mb ram, back in the early 2000s. I still have that Pentium 166 MMX PC. That was a fun time to be around!
Ahhh I love the retrogasm. I vividly remember wanting to try Linux back in 1999 or 2000. I was an avid PC user, about 15 years old back then, and definitely a geek. I heard about Linux and wanted to try it. I had installed DOS and Windows in various versions many times over so I felt quite confident I'd be able to do it. Bought Red Hat. Failed. Bought SuSE. Failed miserably. Couldn't get it to boot. Got all kinds of error messages I couldn't make sense of. Finally tried Slackware and succeeded, to much of my delight. Used it as a daily driver ever since. Got into compiling my own kernels and everything. But I remember getting started was very, very hard. Mind you, the internet wasn't full of tutorials and articles yet, back in the day.
The fun times I had with the sndconfig command, and working out refresh rates for screens. If you put in some very silly values you could kill some SVGA monitors for good.
Thanks for bringing back the memories. I anticipate waking up screaming in the middle of the night for the next week or two from having nightmares about configuring Linux.
Great video. Looks like Red Hat really got it right back then. I first tried installing Linux in 2007 (Debian with KDE desktop). Even then I had to do a lot of faffing about in the terminal and editing config files to get stuff working, like USB support and sound card. Now using Ubuntu Studio 24.04 with KDE, just minor tweaks to get things how I like them!
You brought me to the old time! Thank you
I actually had an older RedHat version. In which you got 8 Cd's to install on a computer. If I recall that it would take over an hour for the install to complete. Course, being new to Redhat and Linux ...I installed everything. Jump ahead to 2024 and I work as a Redhat Systems Administrator. I still use Redhat, but wish IBM would spin it off and make it useable by all.
I remember installing, I think it was Slackware... Back in 96 or 97? I installed over and over again trying to get the x configuration correct. Then someone told me that there was a program for configuring it lol. I had a 486 dx4-100 and eventually I got networking working too. That was huge because now I could telnet into the Solaris systems and do my computer science homework instead of walking all the way to the lab. I even set up X display forwarding so I could use fancy graphical apps. This is probably why I never really learned VI or emacs. Nedit for the win lol.
I had an extremely similar experience... Slackware back in '96 or '97.
I also reinstalled many times as it was easier than trying to fix wrong installation choices.
Many headaches trying to edit the Xf86 config file.
It took me forever to figure out there was actually a shortcut hotkey combo to cycle through some of the commonly used example settings, to find one that would get a working desktop, before editing the file to be more specific to my exact hardware.
If I recall, the hotkey was Ctrl+Shift+Left/Right Arrows ?
Back in 1999 I bought that same box and installed it on a ~120MHz Pentium. Your adventures in networking were not as bad as mine. I had help getting it up and running, but picked up the most generic network card, and for reasons I don't remember, had to download an updated kernel module on another PC, then copy it over the serial port, compile, and it worked.
A year later I had added a SCSI card to the machine and had a massive 18 GB /home on it. I had also added an early Lucent Wavelan on an ISA to PCMCIA card adaptor and could wirelessly connect to my computer, and also allow wireless roaming around my college dorm.
I do not miss these early days, but I certainly learned a lot.
Wow! Brought back a lot. My first Linux party was with the mile high stack of Slackware. Back in those days, actually before this RH 6.4, if you didn't know what to do, the Slackware doofs were not going to share the secret sauce - RTFM. A couple weeks later, I was rummaging through a Thrift Shop and spotted a box that had Red Hat 5.4 printed on the front. It had a single floppy and a couple of CDs with professional labels, a well written book, and the rest of the goodness. I took it home, read through the book, put the CD into my computer and within a short time (relatively) I was running Red Hat in its own partitions. Yes, I had to fiddle with the CLI but it was all in the book! Very soon, I had dual boot setup (keep the wife happy) with Linux for me and Windows for her. I gave the tall stack of Slack back, and never looked back again.
Today, I run Kubuntu on my own laptop, and the rest of the family has their own toys. Life is great, thanks to that Thrift Store and the chance encounter with someone's second hand treasure.
I tried installing Red Hat back then. It didn't support my video card, complained that 16 MB of RAM was "very little" (even though it was perfectly fine for Windows 9x at the time), and made me manually sort out the dependencies of all the software it included. No thanks!
Linux always ran on significantly less hardware than Windows required.
@@stargazer7644 I've used Windows 9x in as little as 4 MB of RAM. It was slow, but usable. And it doesn't take up anywhere near 500 MB of hard drive space.
@@stargazer7644doesn’t mean it would work though lol😅
@@DerekLippold Of course it depends on what you're trying to run, but Linux is much lighter weight than Windows. It has always worked great on older hardware that Windows was completely unusable on.
Ah nostalgia. Redhat 5 was the first Redhat I used, but started on Slackware and used Afterstep as my first 'desktop' - more a simple application launcher than the desktop we think of today :D I actually got Slackware on the 'Slackware Unleashed' book at Waterstones - and I loved how Red Hat, SuSE and Mandrake did the big boxes with installation / admin manuals included.
I too started on slackware 0.99. Desktop was dwm I think. Getting X working back then was a challenge due to lack of support for much hardware. Sound worked although could be a bit patchy. It was a time of eagerly awaiting the next kernel release and compiling it to see what support had been included.
@@_chrisr_ oh yes, always compiling the kernel with exactly what you needed and any optimisations for the architecture, those were the days... Sometimes breaking it in the process 😅
First time I found your channel but I love it! Just subbed!
Wow, that's a very well done distro. It's amazing to see they were that well put together even back then. You complained about the partitioning but it reminds me of Gparted so I see no real issue. Since it comes with a manual and troubleshooting apps, it seems to me like a great experience if you're willing to put in a slight bit of effort.
@21:30: Actually you can use 'su' to switch to root user within a normal user login, a bit like 'sudo -i', but have some env configuaration stuff changed I don't know. And you can use the Xconfigurator like in the install steps, just type that long name in. I had my time with this stuff in those times and it wasn't too much fun...
Ah yes, I didn't think to try su. Still, not too inconvenient to log in as root. 😁
Great video. I actually remember buying Redhat 6.1 myself for work or the small business where I was working back then. We used it as a mail server and on command line use as a server it was pretty ok. For graphical configs I was totally lost and not even thought about sounds. If I remember correctlt some friend bought 6.2 for his work and that was already so much improved from 6.1 that it made me jealous. :)
if you are feeling overwhelmed by linux. dont worry. just install arch. its a walk in the park. just flash it to your computer and you are ready to go
Archinstall sure is easy
ew arch is way to hard, try LFS (Linux From Scratch, don't let the name scare you)
Never heard of Linux until many years later after this was released. A pain in the neck to configure back then. The first Linux I've tried was Xubuntu. And now it's my favorite Linux version, on second place it is Linux mint. I grew up with the XFCE desktop. I have P-Pro 200mhz (single cpu) 128mb ram machine in my retro collection, but it doesn't support cd-rom boot. Bios supports up to 8gb harddrive unless you use a controller card. Would've been a fun project for me to try someday, but as I said the bios doesn't support cd-rom boot. Great video and great content on your channel. Just finished watching this video and just subscribed. 🙂
You have to use a boot floppy.
I bet you that thing would even run on a 386 if given enough ram. It took distributions aaaages to finally switch over their x86 binary packages to 586+
Right, but 32MB of 30pin RAM SIMMs during the 386 ERA would have cost you the price of a small car... LOL :)
@@HPPalmtopTube You can technically reach 64 megs with four 30-pin simms so am kinda surprised not more people tinker with custom modules. (Only seen Bits und bolts thus far) Imagine a late 8-slot board! 😂
@@Chriva After some googling I found that an 8MB 30 pin SIMM module cost approx $800 in 1990. Although the 386 was released in 1985, so was already on the market for 5 years in 1990, we're talking of installing the first versions of linux, so let's use 1990 as our date.
32MB = 4x 8MB modules = 4x $800 = $3200, adjusted for inflation would make the 32MB of RAM SIMM modules cost approx $7,719.69 in today's money.
Maybe a bit shy of a new car but $8000 is definately enough to buy a decent used hatchback Toyota nowadays :)
If you were to use 4x 16MB 30 pin SIMM modules and have 64MB total, the price will probably be 2.5x the price for an 8MB module (larger modules were more expensive per MB), so it probably would cost nearly $20K in today's money! :)
That's enough for a very nice used car or a small brand new one! :)
However I don't think 16MB modules were available in 1990, probably a few years later like 1993-94 or so...
This is why a lot of the early 90's SUN (SparcStation) and SGI (Indigo/Indigo2/Indy) workstations were so expensive, as even in 1990 having 32, 64 or even 128MB was pretty usual in those systems. I have an SGI Indigo2 from 1995 that is maxed out with 1GB of 72 pin modules. I bought it a few years ago so it's cheap / retro gear, but having 512MB or 1024MB of RAM in a workstation would have cost the price of a house!
@@Chriva @Chriva After some googling I found that an 8MB 30 pin SIMM module cost approx $800 in 1990. Although the 386 was released in 1985, so was already on the market for 5 years in 1990, we're talking of installing the first versions of linux, so let's use 1990 as our date.
32MB = 4x 8MB modules = 4x $800 = $3200, adjusted for inflation would make the 32MB of RAM SIMM modules cost approx $7,719.69 in today's money.
Maybe a bit shy of a new car but $8000 is definately enough to buy a decent used hatchback Toyota nowadays :)
If you were to use 4x 16MB 30 pin SIMM modules and have 64MB total, the price will probably be 2.5x the price for an 8MB module (larger modules were more expensive per MB), so it probably would cost nearly $20K in today's money! :)
That's enough for a very nice used car or a small brand new one! :)
However I don't think 16MB modules were available in 1990, probably a few years later like 1993-94 or so...
This is why a lot of the early 90's SUN (SparcStation) and SGI (Indigo/Indigo2/Indy) workstations were so expensive, as even in 1990 having 32, 64 or even 128MB was pretty usual in those systems. I have an SGI Indigo2 from 1995 that is maxed out with 1GB of 72 pin modules. I bought it a few years ago so it's cheap / retro gear, but having 512MB or 1024MB of RAM in a workstation would have cost the price of a house!
@@Chriva @Chriva After some googling I found that an 8MB 30 pin SIMM module cost approx $800 in 1990. Although the 386 was released in 1985, so was already on the market for 5 years in 1990, we're talking of installing the first versions of linux, so let's use 1990 as our date.
32MB = 4x 8MB modules = 4x $800 = $3200, adjusted for inflation would make the 32MB of RAM SIMM modules cost approx $7,719.69 in today's money.
Maybe a bit shy of a new car but $8000 is definately enough to buy a decent used hatchback Toyota nowadays :)
If you were to use 4x 16MB 30 pin SIMM modules and have 64MB total, the price will probably be 2.5x the price for an 8MB module (larger modules were more expensive per MB), so it probably would cost nearly $20K in today's money! :)
That's enough for a very nice used car or a small brand new one! :)
However I don't think 16MB modules were available in 1990, probably a few years later like 1993-94 or so...
The floppy image was actually required to be on the disc thanks to El Torito boot specification. This one uses floppy emulation as most did in this era. The standard was never really replaced and we just started using no emulation mode with bootloaders. It could also emulate 2.8mb floppies or a hard drive image.
This is very cool and it brings back a lot of memories. I started out with slackware version 3 and it came in a huge book that included a couple of CDs. I still use slackware to this day and I'm at version 15. I never really got into Windows at all other than work. Prior to slackware I used os2 warp but it was very clear that IBM was no longer going to support it. At the time in '96 , I was not going to dish out $250 for a Windows operating system, so I stumbled across the slackware book at the bookstore and was in the clearance section for roughly $10 $15. I still have it.
I remember getting this exact boxed distro for free at a Redhat funded linux talk with Richard Stahlman as a speaker. Good times.
Thanx for the video. I remember doing this in about 2002. My PC had a Matrox Mystique with Rainbow Runner video capture card.
I am surprised that Red Hat only used one Boot disk in this version.
Most distros around that time still had two floppies, in a "Boot" and a separate "Root" disk, before getting to the CD's.
This PC is from 1995, not from 1999. Typical PC from 1999 is 450MHz+, 64MB+, cd-rom in every PC and so in. So it's totaly fine to see such a sluggishness))
I can remember downloading Slackware to a gazillion floppies and installing via command line. If you wanted X windows it was a whole new level of pain and configuration
Brings back memories... Sort of.
1999 I started using Slackware.
My first Distro was Redhat. Acquired from an old book I bought from my Uni book store at the time.
Excellent Linuxxing, sir!
CD-ROM was not unusual in 1999, we had CD-ROM on all our computers and even a CD-Burner on all our workstations on the computer lab in our middle school in 1994
4:20 you did ask, yes it is still in use, but not by ordinary users anymore, it serves as a back end to more advanced package managers like yum or dnf.
Wow. I almost forgot those things. It looks like it was in another life.
¡Gracias por compartir!
I wish I had done this back then and saved myself twenty years of pain with windows. Linux lifer, now. Mint, Debian mostly.
I tried and boy I'm glad I didn't get into Linux back then. Everything was painful and not even stable. My Windows experiences were vastly superior I shit you not. Only around Ubuntu 8.04 Linux desktops began to be semi-usable.
While I did this for a few years, and it was legitimately better than Windows 98 or Windows ME, I can't honestly say it was better than Windows XP, which is what lured me back to Windows. Without the internet it was all a huge pain, I had to wait for a new version of Mandrake to come to best buy, but with Windows all sorts of new software was available and stores all over town. I run Debian stable these days, because Linux is a much better experience now than it was then, and Microsoft has proven, time and time again that they have no interest in actually improving their product.
@@verablack3137 Yeah. Nowdays Linux is absolute viable system to run and has been for desktops for quite long. Laptops though where really bad experience for quite long. Around was it Ubuntu 18.04 when dual gpu systems where hype on laptops things where quite bad for Linux systems. Things got worked out for next release only to get regression in next. Especially bad since so many network solutions didn't have proper drivers and worked quite poorly. Windows 95 wasn't that good either for sure, but one could at least find the drivers needed to work. But sure enough it was easy to make system settings so that conputer might blue screen. 2000/XP where really good OS's increasing stability. But still every OS has its pros and cons. I currently use set of devices from MacOS, Windows to Linux and can't say one is the ultimate solution. Not even MacOS which by the fanboys talking seemed to be something extraordinary,but finally investing in Macbook and Mini I can't say they're really worth the money invested.
God i remember installing that on servers in my company back in the day. Compaq Proliant 3000 servers. COuld be a pain in the backside to configure with the Compaq raid controllers. Pretty bomb proof too. Managed them using a telnet session from my Nokia 9000 series communicator phone. Usually from a flight to New York or London or Tokyo....
My first Unix was Coherent by Mark Williams Company. It ran on my 386-20 with 4 MB of RAM and a 40MB hard drive and came on about 40 floppies. This would have been about 1990.
Blast from the past! I remember the sound and video configuration being a nightmare back then. And coming from the world of Windows that was kinda strange. I even remember compiling drivers to try to see if the last bleeding stuff worked.. I do not remember the voice of Linus Torvalds. Probably because I never made the sound card work! :D
I remember installing that version of Red hat. All the modes You could choose. It was more difficult/nerdy then 😊
Today few regular users use RHEL, instead they're on Fedora. Also I am getting British LGR vibes from this but for UNIX-like nerds like me 😄 Neat!
Also you say without modern internet this would be a pain, but that's what the phone support was for. It was pretty good from what I hear, still is.
As someone who owns Red Hat 6.2. This video makes me happy :)
aaah yeah good old linux days. i always had problems with sound on every linux distro. dealing with alsa drivers or compiling kernels with sound modules... until i tried freebsd, this changed my life completly. everything was suported and install was simple and straight forward, compiling kernel was a dream, ports were amazing, i never looked back to linux ever again.
I used this version of Red Hat :D what a time to live! I was so excited to have this CD and it felt so cool while everyone else was using windows in the school lol
My first Linux experience was the RedHat 6.0 Education Edition. It came as a study book including the two CD's making it a full install.
Oh gosh this brings back memories and emotions!! 🎉🎉
From experience with old labels in storage, odds are the adhesive on the stickers will have gone by now, either they'll be permanently stuck to the backing or they'll peel off but not stick back on to anything else.
Installed linux on my 1MB 286 in the first half of the 90s. It took two weeks running a 4MB kernal on this machine to recompile the kernel without unnecessary features. The resulting kernel was only 1 MB and it ran fine for a couple of years.
Remember the linux winamp clone, XMMS (I think this what it was called). Until now, I don't know why, but the sound quality was FREAKIN' AWESOME! Running tbe same hardware under Windows 98 or 2000 using Winamp did not come close in comparison. Anyone have any idea why?
ohhh enlightenment desktop :)
what does it mean when the machine loops through the memory count several times in a row on boot? i've seen machines do that and never quite understood why
and when a realtek network adapter misbehaves.... try an intel network adapter
realtek drivers do weird things sometimes, and if the auto config is applying a generic network driver ..... well it's something worth ruling out, let's just put it that way
It means the Quick POST option is disabled, Award's standard memory test is a little paranoid and unnecessary on a known-good machine.
A different network adaptor probably wouldn't have made any difference since the system is using a generic NE2000 driver.
@@firstsurname9893 thanks!
I am a Linuxian from second hour (1991). A bundle of SUSE CDs with all the programs and then burning updates at university :D I remember some processes vividly. I can remember when we as a group looked (hunted) for the first affordable drive you could boot from :D. But I can't remember when it was possible for us. Maybe 1995.
33:02 I need that wallpaper that’s on your Fedora Linux laptop dude, it’s pretty af.
that sound sample is so cool
Could one set up an FTP file server, just with the help of the provided handbooks?
So, where can I find a working PC that includes a CD-Reader and a 5.25 floppy drive?
That was my first Linux! I bought it from one of those bluestar super-computer sales. (They would set up a bunch of vendors flea market style for a weekend. They were fun when they were around) I got it working okay, but at the time it couldn't replace windows for me.
Makes me want to dig out an old Mac and my copy of MKLinux to compare. I also think I have a more generic linux for PPC laying around.
In about 2001 or 2002 I setup put Mandrake on my personal machine, an Intel Triton 75mhz absolutely maxed out with 64mb of ram and an ATI Mach 64, a SCSI controller and a 2GB SCSI drive and a Sound Blaster 16 and it all worked pretty well. Gnome and KDE were both too slow, but running Blackbox I managed to have a very usable system. It all seemed pretty similar to that Red Hat Install, except most things worked if not out of the box, easily solved with the manual. I remember how exciting it was that despite not having internet I had this huge catalog of software for only $50, though I remember being very disappointed in the game selection that Mandrake Linux came with.
Ahh a Tiny man, just like my best mate was. I was/am a Gateway 2000 person. We both used these to use direct dialup to play Quake and Red Alert 🎉😊 the good days and many fond memories.
this was the first linux i installed and used, it was a nightmare having to compile the most basic apps like ICQ chat etc. I went back to windows in a hurry
Next time 1995 Slackware? More of a challenge.
Out of curiosity - how do you capture nice video output from bios/console? Is it running in VM?
I think the disk partitioning tool in this was much nicer than the fdisk I would have used to install Windows 98 in those days
i was so surprised by how painless that sound configuration was
the real challenge is just finding that it exists
How did you do screen recording even when OS was being installed?
so many memories, really nice trip into the past
oh, I am sure I have one or two distros of Linux on CD from around that era... I should do something like this myself and see if it is as smooth as your install was.
And actually RedHat6.1 required about 64Megs of RAM (which I didn't have, only 32 SDRAM in my socket7 PC) and it was possible to fill about 2gigs of HDD if installing everything from those CDs.
That red hat logo is sick af.
And just the other day I installed Debian + Ollama and had a llm up and running in less than an hour.. It took longer updating the bios on the motherboard (yes - I had issues)
This was my first Linux daily driver. Until I couldn't bear the rpm hell anymore and installed Debian.
Funny, i started with all these distrib after sls and slackware with kernel 0.94 pl2, redhat 1.2 etc, all you needed was to avoid windows only crappy modem, graphic cards etc, reducing the choice but a quest. And you better get to compile your oxn kernel to have the only needed drivers and get as much memory available. I loved it
I first installed Linux from the cds I got in a Linux administration book. It was Red Hat 6.0. The blurb on the book said something like "Red Hat 6 is the best Linux distribution available today. How do we know this? Because Linus Torvalds uses it!". Good times!
the last time I HAD to enter the terminal on linux was to edit some printer configuration files for cups or whatever. Almost everything else is plug and play for the most part. Granted I do optionally enter the terminal to accomplish certain tasks faster than what the GUI can do.
Yes my very first Linux I've ever installed... Where have the days gone?
Running Fedora (and Mint before this for a few years) as my main system. I have been toying with it since the early 2000's, but now, I think it's a very nice replacement possibility, mainly due to the amount of web apps (even though I'm not a fan of their performance). With Fedora I was pleasantly surprised it started updating the bios of my Lenovo laptop, always needed Windows for that. :)
Dealing with those issues helped me to become a professional. I started in 2004 though, with Mandrakelinux.
Gnome would have been the WM in this era for sure. I spent a weekend at work downloading the .isos for 6.1 from an unofficial FTP server and ran it for a couple years on a Toshiba Tecra 8000. Worked great.
Such great memories from that era of Linux. I would have followed up the fresh install by installing Ximian's Desktop, a more polished and refined version of Gnome 1.4 iirc. RedCarpet was their update tool, and we still have Evolution the mail client etc. Great time.
I started with Red Hat (3.something) in 1996, continued with Slack and Debian, but it was not until 2004 and Ubuntu that I didn't have spend hours trying to get X working after a new install. Things "just worked" with Ubuntu (which I later abandoned for Mint).
I used to go to the library and check out the Linux books. There were CD holders in the back of the books with different distros. I don't know why exactly but Mandrake was my favorite distro around 1997-98 when I was about 12. I would only make it a few days on a Linux Desktop before getting frusturated and because I loved WinAmp skins. The good old days...
You didn't need to install drivers for a winmodem. IIRC, 1 cdrom to install, 1 cdrom for source code. I actually bought RH 7.2 back in the day and things did not go that smoothly. I think it came with a cdrom for staroffice and some demos as well.
That was my first dual boot Linux. It was fantastic!
I remember trying an early version of Red Hat and Mandrake Linux in the early 2000s and my experience was pretty similar to what is in this video. For a PC user that was somewhat seasoned like I was, having used PCs regularly since the 386 era, Linux was a more difficult to setup than Windows but not impossible. Mostly took some patience and the ability to access the internet from another computer.
However, for someone who was much less experienced and trying to set it up on their first or only PC, I could see it feeling like it was freaking awful to do at the time!
One thing I think really helped people get some decent experience with Linux were downloadable and burnable Live CDs! That way a person could burn a CD, reboot their computer, boot into a Linux environment and play around without having to try to setup a dual boot configuration or blow away an existing Windows install. Especially handy on a family PC.
It was about this time …..(Oct ‘99) that everyone relying on IT was sweating buckets over whether the world would disappear up its own arse 🙄
Some might argue that it has - just not for the reasons they expected at the time 😅
A lot have!
Can you upload the ISO of all CDs ? Thanks in advance.