<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0"><tr><td valign="top"><p dir="ltr"><font size ="2"><font size ="2">Braddock, </font></font></p>
<p dir="ltr"><font size ="2"><font size ="2">Did you take notes? I seem to recall that one of the ideas for the LUG 20th anniversary is to showcase old Linux installs, so we can see how Linux has changed over the years. </font></font></p>
<p dir="ltr"><font size ="2"><font size ="2">My first attempt at installing Linux was Red Hat 7.x. this was probably in 2002 or 2003. I might'very gone for a dual-boot system. I was unable to connect to the Internet. I suspect that it was an Ethernet driver issue as I usually connected via Ethernet in those days. That was the day I acknowledged myself that computer without network connectivity is basically a paperweight to me. </font></font></p>
<p dir="ltr"><u><font size ="2"><font size ="2">Lan</font></font></u></p>
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Braddock Gaskill <braddock@braddock.com>; <br>
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Sgvlug <sgvlug@sgvlug.net>; <br>
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Re: [SGVLUG] Memories of SLS Linux <br>
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Sun, Mar 15, 2015 4:12:04 AM <br>
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<td valign="top"><div dir="ltr">I got SLS Linux 1.05 circa April 1994 installed and running in qemu. It was neat to go through the old process - actually easier than I thought. <div><br clear="none"></div><div>I (eventually) followed a very good guide here: </div><div><a rel="nofollow" shape="rect" target="_blank" href="http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/node/2097">http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/node/2097</a></div><div><br clear="none"></div><div>This is probably the oldest Linux distribution available. There is an earlier SLS 1.03 on biblio, but it appears to be incomplete and fails on installation. I tried VMWare before qemu without success.</div><div><br clear="none"></div><div>It would be an interesting project try to get networking support. You'd either have to SLIP over the emulated serial port, or recompile a very old version of the kernel if the emulated network hardware was by chance
supported in 1994 (which I doubt). </div><div><br clear="none"></div><div>Another interesting project would be getting X windows to work. startx failed out of the box, as I expected. I recall getting X windows running at the time as a very difficult and frustrating process.</div><div><br clear="none"></div><div>But I probably won't go further into this.</div><div><br clear="none"></div><div>-braddock</div></div><div class="yqt3419597038" id="yqt97297"><div class="gmail_extra"><br clear="none"><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Mar 12, 2015 at 10:35 PM, Braddock Gaskill <span dir="ltr"><<a rel="nofollow" shape="rect" ymailto="mailto:braddock@braddock.com" target="_blank" href="javascript:return">braddock@braddock.com</a>></span> wrote:<br clear="none"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><div dir="ltr">James was talking tonight about installing an "old" linux
distribution for fun. It brought me back to my first encounter with Linux, which I thought I'd share. Maybe others can share their experiences.<div><br clear="none"></div><div>The fall of 1993 was the start of my freshman year at college. I spent all the money I'd earned at my first programming job the prior summer on a new 486DX2, even though I had been raised on an Amiga.</div><div><br clear="none"></div><div>MSDOS on the 486 was a bore compared to the Amiga. The DEC Unix workstations in the lab were far more interesting. </div><div><br clear="none"></div><div>My dorm-mate Mark had received a big box of used floppy disks from his mother's work. We went to the computer lab and started downloading SLS Linux from MIT's ftp server. Slowly. One floppy at a time. To speed things up we commandeered half a dozen lab computers at once, looking over our shoulder in case the campus IT department got mad at our flagrant abuse of
machines and precious bandwidth. We were sure we'd get in trouble.</div><div><br clear="none"></div><div>One by one we downloaded all 50 floppy disks of SLS. I still remember the prompt coming up on my freshly installed 486 and thinking I finally had a real machine. Linux was at version 0.99. There was no ethernet in the dorm, we had to run SLIP over a serial line.</div><div><br clear="none"></div><div>I only had 4MB of RAM, which wasn't really enough to run X - although Mark hacked on my computer all night to get the modelines correct to at least start it up. The rule of thumb was you could open one window per megabyte of RAM over 4MB. The next summer I upgraded to 8MB and could even run Mosaic - I recall fondly feeling like I had a real workstation.</div><div><br clear="none"></div><div>I haven't stopped running Linux since. I see there is a vintage copy of SLS on ibiblio, so maybe I'll give it another try.</div><span
class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"></font></span><div><br clear="none"></div><div>-braddock</div></div>
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