Oldfags, what was installing Linux like in the 90s and early 2000s?

Oldfags, what was installing Linux like in the 90s and early 2000s?

You had to compile it from scratch.

You pop in CD and pray to God your hardware compatible, same as now

pretty much this

Yeah, how the fuck did you survive without internet packages?

rpm was godtier in the 90s

Did you have to install all the dependencies manually?

My first experience was Ubuntu 8.xx, it was interesting and new.

Wasn't to bad I think. Fuckton of CDs in the later years tho.

The position of S.u.S.E. and CD 001 are disturbing.

>implying linux actually exists

It was a lot easier.

Noob distros had a curses based installer interface, like a GUI but without a mouse (same as FreeBSD still has). It's just as easy as a GUI.

Gentoo and stuff like that was still commandline, but that was easier too, because there were less steps.

For example, now when you compile the kernel is there are so many options that you have to do through if you want to optimise it it's unbelievable. There's probably five times as many options now. Even with GUI installers now, there's more stuff you have to decide on. For example: do you want LVM? Do you want to encrypt? Do you want the proprietary drivers? JUST

>pop in the disk
>run the installer
>install it while maybe RTFMing for random things like partitioning depending on the distro
see for the post-installation

it really wasn't that much more difficult than now, these were meant to be used after all, hell I just stuck a mothballed redhat version on shitbox related a couple weeks ago (surprise surprise the NIC wasn't supported so I'm going back to NT4)

It's hilarious, how much stuff the kernel has bundled these days.
It took me some afternoons to get to my now golden config, with twenty minutes build time on my Amd 5350 shitbox.
Guess it'd be nicer, if you could do overlays like gentoo, so there's a ready made desktop config, one for servers and one wtfareyouabout one. Even better if you needn't download ALL THE SOURCE.

cfdisk and fucking with x11 settings

not really all that bad

Early 2000 was pretty much like it is today.
You downloaded the CD image and burned it to a CD instead of writing it to a thump drive.
Back then people also met up in person to Linux user groups (LUGs) where people talked about Linux, helped new users install stuff and shared scripts people wrote.
I didn't know about Linux when it started.

>Oldfags, what was installing Linux like in the 90s and early 2000s?
Mandrake was pretty easy in 2003 for me

>Pop in dis(c|k) and fumble through a poorly designed installer
>After several media changes it's finally ready
>Boot system to X11 crashing
>Try going online to fix it
>Network drivers are missing
Pretty much sums up the early 00s experience for me.

Same as today, it was a lot less compatible with everything though

Also it installed a lot of packages by default due to the less readily available internet. No such thing as minimal installs, or very rare. Debian had like 16 CDs available full of packages, so you could install packages from there, it asked for the CD number when installing a package. Of course the first couple CDs already had the most useful stuff so burning the first 2 and doing a full install was enough in most cases.

If you want to feel what it was like, install Slackware, it hasn't changed at all.

No, it already had dependency resolution back in 2002 but I remember it sucking balls. Lots of package conflicts.

Winmodems (aka, just about all 56k modems) were an absolute pain in the ass all the way up until broadband became ubiquitous.

mid 90s: My very first Linux distro was something that could be installed on a FAT partition and started from DOS. Command line only, I would try random words until I found something.

late 90s: I didn't have the Internet, had to find CDs from computer magazines.
If something broke, or I wanted to do something, I had to try things for hours.
My most recent computer had no appropriate video drivers, so I was running X on a very slow computer, or command line only on the fast one.
Dependency management was either non existant or shitty.
I still spent hours trying various DEs, WMs, and playing with GIMP.
It was mostly Mandrake.

early 2000s: I had a DSL USB modem and it was a nightmare to make it work. I didn't switch to Linux fully until I had a proper Ethernet modem. Video drivers would still suck; Gentoo was actually the only distro where I could install the proprietary nVidia drivers without issues. Debian would often crap out when installing the base system.

Nowadays everything works out of the box with open source drivers.

Slackware and Red Hat back in the day... Hardware support was not good and I can't remember really using it for something useful because of the limitations of my knowledge and hardware support back then. Tried Debian some time later and I fared better with that.

When Ubuntu launched it was like "Dude, that's awesome!", a real revolution compared with what I tried before. Still have a weak spot for it because of that.

Plus, you could request Ubuntu CDs online and they'd send you one anywhere in the world for free!

I've used Linux since about a month after Linus posted his original kernel online, the on to Slackware 1.0 (the original Linux distro), through Debian and many hundreds of others over the years.

Back in the good old days it was pure command line and it sucked.

Now, decades later, it still sucks so nothing has really changed.

Linux - Consistently sucking since 1991

I had my first experience with linux in 2003 I think, as a school project. As I recall the installation process wasn't much different from today. We may have used a boot floppy but people sometimes did that when installing windows too back then. It didn't look as nice as installers do today, and if you wanted a GUI it was a lot more work. I think 2003 was long after you had to have skills to install it. I did know a guy running slackware back then though, that was some demanding shit.