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Didn't you love those classic '90s "Linux installation reports"?

Pepinno

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Do you remember those "Linux installation reports" people used to share in the interwebs, in the mid-late '90s, when HTML was in its infancy, content was king, enthusiasm was high, fancy formating was frowned upon, and using cookies was considered a privacy-invading intrusion?


http://www.sleske.name/versa/index.html.en


I remember I used to love them. And I still do whenever I find a surviving one still kept on-line... :D
 
Funny page from 2007. I love it how he just assumes that everybody in the world knows exactly what his favourite consumer item looks like - and may even be contemplating buying one! After five pages of results on Google, I still don't know what a Versa 550D looks like - although I'm now very familiar with the look of the appropriate AC adapter.

Edit: I just noticed the page was first posted 2001, although it was edited in 2007.
 
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Funny page from 2007.

The page is from 2001, and was last edited in 2007.

I love it how he just assumes that everybody in the world knows exactly what his favourite consumer item looks like

You are missing the point here. Those "Linux installation reports" were aimed at fellow linux users which did happen to own the same laptop model into which you had already successfully installed Linux. Back in the day, installing Linux was not an easy task, so when you finally got your IrDA, your XWindow, your PCMCIA, your ZIP drive, your sound card, and your network card working properly, and you were a "pioneer" in doing so with your laptop model, then it was "customary" to document your configuration, your tricks, your compile options, your boot strings, so than other linux users could go straight into using the same laptop model with linux benefiting from your previous research.

So, that web page was destined to people who already owned that make of laptop, not to the Internet at large. It was specialized content, and very useful at that.
 
You are missing the point here. Those "Linux installation reports" were aimed at fellow linux users which did happen to own the same laptop model into which you had already successfully installed Linux. Back in the day, installing Linux was not an easy task, . .

I guess I am - sorry. I think I was on a different planet in 2001. :) Ten years is nothing in my world though. I do remember a couple of years earlier ('94) trying to make sense of the Linux floppies I had downloaded off a BBS. During the next couple of years I was scratching my head over instructions that people were giving which didn't work for me. I see the sense in machine (and distro) specific instructions but I wasn't lucky enough to come across any of those that worked for me - probably since store bought computers were not part of my world (still aren't). The enthusiasm was amazing in those early years though.
 
Those "Linux installation reports" were aimed at fellow linux users which did happen to own the same laptop model into which you had already successfully installed Linux.
Yep. And it's still useful, I've been looking for a new netbook for a while now and for every one I check out I search the net for other people's experiences w.r.t. running Linux on it.

Back in the day, installing Linux was not an easy task, so when you finally got your IrDA, your XWindow, your PCMCIA, your ZIP drive, your sound card, and your network card working properly, and you were a "pioneer" in doing so with your laptop model, then it was "customary" to document your configuration, your tricks, your compile options, your boot strings, so than other linux users could go straight into using the same laptop model with linux benefiting from your previous research.

Actually I don't see much difference between yesteryear and today, it wasn't particularly difficult to install Linux back then, or at least not much more difficult than today. It was always a question of:
a) having Linux kernel support for all the hardware (drivers etc.
b) finding out what type of hardware your computer has in the first place so that you can check out a).
It's been like this for nearly twenty years now.. the first few months were slightly more tricky, but since mid-1992 it's been mostly like today: Figure out which hardware you have, compile in the drivers you need for your kernel. Build and install. I still do exactly that.

There are two changes that can be considered enhancements to this process:
1) Loadable drivers were introduced in the early nineties.
2) Which makes it feasible to have an install tool (as well as runtime tools) that will try to figure out what hardware you have, and load the drivers for you.

Laptops were always and still are the most tricky ones, because they keep changing hardware all the time. The worst ones I've used are the Fujitsu-Siemens laptops, not because they are more difficult to get running than others, it's because the exact same model number can have completely different hardware. It looks like they just built the things from whatever random batch of networking chipsets etc. they had got their hands on this month. So checking on the net if that's a laptop which will work well for your Linux installation ins't easy. Or you install one, buy another (like in an office environment) and find that the internals are quite different.

Incidentally, the most tricky operating system installation I've ever done was installing an off-the-shelf version of Windows XP on an old HP laptop. It had been running Windows 98 or something before, and then the owner (my niece) bought Windows XP and had her geek friend installing it. That messed up everything (he had completely ignored that those laptops _need_ that special HP sleep/restore partition, and scratched it. And it didn't work anyway), so she came to me. I had to track down a bunch of obscure HP-specific drivers to get it working. Never had that much trouble with a Linux installation, after all, either the driver is there somewhere in the Linux kernel source or you can as well not bother (unless it's wi-fi, because that's usually pretty easy to get working with ndiswrapper and Windows drivers).

Back to those installation report pages: What they were really useful for was to tell you what hardware those laptops have, and if there's a driver for it. That information (what hardware) is almost never part of the technical description you find in those places where you can buy the thing. This is as true now as it was back in 2001 or earlier.

-Tor
 
Actually I don't see much difference between yesteryear and today, it wasn't particularly difficult to install Linux back then, or at least not much more difficult than today. It was always a question of:
a) having Linux kernel support for all the hardware (drivers etc.
b) finding out what type of hardware your computer has in the first place so that you can check out a).

It's one thing to just install Linux into something, and quite another thing to get that something's audio, modem, NIC, wifi and PCMCIA slot working fine and at its full capacity.

Loadable drivers were introduced in the early nineties.
It's my recollection loadable modules came with Linux kernel v2.0, and that was born in 1996, which is not exactly "early nineties".

I do remember having to compile a monolitic linux kernel version 1.2 in 1995, to get my pocket ethernet adapter (hooked to the paralell port) working with Slackware 3.0 on a 386 laptop (which, incidentally, I very much now regret having thrown away when it's 3.5" floppy drive died, I didn't even bother trying to clean it, oh shame!).
 
Funny page from 2007. I love it how he just assumes that everybody in the world knows exactly what his favourite consumer item looks like - and may even be contemplating buying one! After five pages of results on Google, I still don't know what a Versa 550D looks like - although I'm now very familiar with the look of the appropriate AC adapter.

Edit: I just noticed the page was first posted 2001, although it was edited in 2007.

I always check eBay for product images first. In fact, there's one of those laptops up for auction right now.
 
The original Slackware 3.0 installer was pure evil. If you made a mistake, you couldn't backtrack on the installer... ugh. You had to start over from scratch.

As for hardware, Linux support used to be pretty awful. Things got really bad when host-driven devices like Win modems came out. I made a habit of always buying "intelligent" hardware that was Linux supported, even if I didn't use the OS. Why? Because the "real" hardware stuff was always faster and more stable to use, and it likely wouldn't be abandoned by driver support in newer operating systems.
 
It was a good effort. I wouldn't even consider running anything in X with anything less than 32megs of ram. Personally I'd have used WindowMaker as the front end. Posting your results was very common. Back then seeing a Linux mag in a book store wasn't common as it is today though.

I'm with you njroadfan on the "real hardware" stance. Driver model changes between OS variants didn't help either. I had a sound card out of an HP that only had drivers for MS Windows 95. No matter what I tried I had no luck getting it to work in Win98FE or higher. No luck with other OSs either. Substituted it with a generic ESS card in the end. That card has worked with every OS I've thrown at it.

Here's a guy reminising about Slackware 3.5 http://blog.nielshorn.net/2008/10/older-slackware-versions-i/
 
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It's my recollection loadable modules came with Linux kernel v2.0, and that was born in 1996, which is not exactly "early nineties".
The idea of loadable modules came from Peter MacDonald with his SLS distribution (so being able to dynamically load drivers was something that appealed to distros, right from the start - IIRC Linus wasn't particularly interested at the time). So, with SLS 1.05 from 1994 came a modularized Linux 1.0 kernel. I would have to dig down into comp.os.linux archives but if my memory doesn't fail me those modularization patches were posted on comp.os.linux by Peter MacDonald some time before SLS 1.05 came out. I'm not sure how much earlier. SLS 1.05 was announced in April 1994.

-Tor
 
I mentioned this in other threads before but the biggest hurdle I ended up with (coming in a bit later in the game) was at the time finding a distro that still ran on a 486. I believe linux wise I was only able to get Slackware, Debian and TurboLinux to install on my 486. All the others had dropped support for older processors and required Pentium and above. That was certainly disappointing IMO.
 
I mentioned this in other threads before but the biggest hurdle I ended up with (coming in a bit later in the game) was at the time finding a distro that still ran on a 486. I believe linux wise I was only able to get Slackware, Debian and TurboLinux to install on my 486.

Well, if you have access to Debian, then you are set. You shouldn't need much more than that, unles you wanted to do Linux-distro-tourism, which I conceed it is fun to do sometimes.
 
Here is a nice Linux installation report, dated 1996 (so just before the 2.0 kernel was born and with it the mainstream support for loadable modules), for the laptop Texas Instruments TravelMate 4000, using Linux kernel version 1.2.8 and the Slackware distribution:

http://www.kenharker.com/linux-tm4000m/toc.html

Pretty nifty, if you ask me.
 
Old Linux install seems to be a pain, I've been trying to get Caldera Open Linux Lite 1.2 to install for ages, but it just refuses to install on anything I've tried that can boot from a CD (pretty much 286 and newer). Reason: "Warning: Architecture not i386"...come on, these i686's as you see them can run that code, just work for once (when I get my 486 to boot from a CD lets see if it installs).
 
Run it on a VM then. Commercially packaged linux distros -Coral, RedHat, SuSe-et al, provided a floppy as part of the package specifically for those systems, and there where a lot, that would'nt boot from cd.
 
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From what I recall Caldera came into the game pretty late and had a GUI installer and a bunch of other stuff that made it really easy but not very linux like. It was sorta like Lindows where they made it cover up all the real things going on with splash screens. That was my opinion of it at least. A friend liked it and to give them some probably deserved credit opposed to the grumpy old CLI review the install (if it worked) was quite easy. Still that was one of those that probably wouldn't support older processors like you're experiencing. Try finding an older copy of TurboLinux, that worked pretty well for me and they were even bundled with Linksys network cards for a while. Debian, Slackware (as noted above) probably also might still support older chips too which is quite a nice feature. That way you aren't always running hugely vulnerable software on the net and you might be able to get it up to date on older hardware if you keep the GUI features off. That's why I enjoyed FreeBSD quite a bit. Lots of software for it and unlike Redhat, when I went through all the trouble and time to customize my install to not do the resource intensive GUI it actually didn't, Redhat just kinda patted my pretty little head and installed it anyway thinking it knew better (apparently I missed 1 application with a requirement for X or X fonts and it went ahead and corrected me by installing KDE and all the bloat).

To the comment of bootable CD, there was usually a bootable floppy image on the CD that would jump to the cd-rom for older system support.

What WOULD be interesting is the newest/current distros that could be installed on vintage gear. That might be a cool blog for someone with a bunch of spare time.
 
I got OpenLinux Lite 1.3(?) here, and have installed it no problem on actual hardware. It worked fine back in 1996 on my P133 at the time. Virtual Machines and old distros have a lot of issues, particularly with XFree86. The SVGA XServer doesn't work right with the emulated VBE video on qemu or VirtualBox. It simply locks up on Virtual PC with its emulated S3 Trio. I never understood why some VMs went with generic VBE video support and didn't emulate an actual video chipset. VBE2.0/3.0 was NEVER supported right by most software products or video cards to begin with!
 
Maybe it's just picky. Is it installed on an i686 machine? Probably OT but would it be useful to create a list of the last versions of Linux distros, Debian and Slackware aside, that actually did support i386, or more specifically 386 or 486s were listed as the minimum system requirements.


Ok some I know that do:
SuSe 7.2
RH 6/6.2 and Mandrake variants although they state 586 up.
DSL 4
Turbo Linux 6
The above mentioned Open Linux 1.x

I'm sure there's more. Of course there's a few floppy based ones.

I've ran Red Hat 6.2 fine in MSs vPC successfully which I find ironic.

I did start a thread on Linux on 486s a while back http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?21848-Linux-on-their-486-class-machines/
 
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