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Happy 30th! Now you can legally call the distro oldtimer in Germany.
First distro I ever used. Downloaded it from a BBS onto about 40 floppies. Fun times.
Same, same, still remember the install process, and how hard it was to get x11 working, plus how you ended up with twm after.
And of course having to reboot to escape vim.
and how hard it was to get x11 working
Oh good God. If you really want to test someone’s resolve, sit them down at an old computer with a CRT and no Internet and have them configure X11 from scratch. Seeing that default X11 crosshatch background for the first time was practically orgasmic after the bullshit I went through to make it work.
That’s one of those traumatizing experiences I’d completely blocked from my memory until I read your comment.
Traumatizing experience #2 that just came back to me was getting a winmodem working and connected to my ISP via minicom.
Didn’t do winmodems, that would be a nightmare.
I can’t remember how long it was until xf86config made things slightly easier, yeah, getting modelines at first was basically impossible, I think it was trial and error for hours at least.
I used to go into the Sun lab at my university to download floppy images to take home. Good times.
I remember copying the window manager config files from the Sun workstations and using it on my home computer ( still a 486 if I recall ). What a rush it was just to seeing the screen look the same as those super expensive machines.
Technically second distro I ever installed, but the first one I actually used. I purchased Mandrake when it was based on RedHat, but didn’t get very far with it. In college I inherited always on Internet in my dorm and ran a Slackware webserver, and later fileserver and BitTorrent machine. I tried running Slackware on my laptop but I couldn’t get the battery management to work, but I dual booted for a couple of years.
First distro for me as well.
I remember this from mastadon when i was searching slackware hashtag. Nice, congrats Slackware!
Ah Slackware, the first time that I learned software could damage hardware. It has the option to also configure hsync on your CRT monitor, and if said monitor didn’t correctly validate the range it would permanently fuck it up.
I learned that lesson as a 12 year old in the early 90’s on an original IBM PC 5150 with a 5151 monochrome monitor, fucking with TSR’s in DOS 3.1. It must’ve made the graphics card change timing modes and the monitor immediately blew a fuse. My dad then soldered in a fuseholder so the fuse in the monitor can be replaces as needed.
Out of fear of doing further damage, I did stay away from the particular TSRs that had any relation to changing video timing modes and it didn’t happen again.
X11 used to require very cumbersome MANUAL configuration, where you would specify the exact parameters of your keyboard, mouse, monitor, and other peripherals. If you accidentally ended up overclocking your monitor it would melt. For at least a decade, it has been able to run with no configuration file at all, but in the 90s/early 2000s you had to produce a unique >75 line xorg.conf file for your specific hardware.
