Oh, serendipity!
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I did not expect a Linux system from 2001 to be that... feature-rich. Bugs aside, it is pretty impressive. Not only Knoppix 2.0's KDE 2 is quite usable, it ships - again - with both KOffice and Open Office, and both Konqueror and Mozilla. There is XMMS, there is GNU IMP, there is even Acrobat Reader 4.0. There's even Python and Java.
Go on, give this ancient (25 years old!) Linux distro a go: https://archive.org/details/LinuxTag - the file you're looking for is linuxtag2001.iso
If you're using Qemu, make sure to set RAM to 256 megs or less, use cirrus VGA, and go through the "expert" mode to configure your keyboard and X11. On 86Box, I recommend emulating Pentium 2 and Cirrus 5446.
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Phew, what a thread it was! I hope you liked it :) And if you liked it, please share the love.
I think my biggest motivation for this thread was:
- Hey, look, 25 year ago Linux was already pretty great and usable. Imagine what it can do now! The sky is the limit. -
P.S. If you find Knoppix 1.4, please let me know~
@nina_kali_nina I love that old KDE aesthetic.
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@pulkomandy the internet and the acquired expertise mean so much :< my Linux experience got postponed by good 5 years because of a similar issue. In 2001, I had access only to RedHat and Lindows; RedHat refused to boot with 8 megs of RAM (the way to make it boot in low-RAM mode was not explained on the CD); Lindows did not want to co-habitate on the disk with Windows 95 and thus was a non-starter.
@pulkomandy @nina_kali_nina my first experience was Slackware off a PC magazine cover-CD in the early 00s and I've never been able to find it
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@nina_kali_nina That’s not surprising at all 🙂 I fully agree with your conclusions at the end of the thread: back in 2004, Knoppix was the only real solution to build live CDs. Its only natural Ubuntu would have gone that way. Ubuntu 4.10 was also the first release and it was SO CLOSE to Debian you could switch a running system between the two distribution without issues.
The alternative was Linux Live (which I *just* discovered they are still around) a set of shell scripts that would pack your current running system onto a CD and overlay SquashFS once booted off the read only medium. They also had support for downloading and overlay “extensions” on top of a running system.
There was a Slackware derivative demoing how Linux Live would work. I ported that setup over to PowerPC since it was around the time I had a lot of fun porting Slackware Linux over to that architecture.
I remember looking into Knoppix for building a live version of Slackware for PPC but their build system was too tightly coupled to Debian tooling for even attempting to make it work.
Linux Live was way easier to port because, well, shell scripts duh. And the only real work was making sure to have the squashfs kernel module and some binaries for the userland bits of squashfs and iso packing.
I think the original Kali Linux, before switching from Slackware to Debian as base system, was the only successful implementation of Linux Live. I don’t remember anything else come remotely close to it.
So when Kali stopped using it, Linux Live was basically forgotten but I’m happy to discover it is still being maintained.
Anyway, thanks for sharing this insight! It was a wonderful trip down memory lane 😄
@sid77 thank you too!
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@nina_kali_nina This is super interesting! In this era I was involved with LinuxCNC, which at the time required a specific patched kernel for real-time activity. We found that shipping a Live CD was pretty important for letting people check their systems' real-time performance before committing to install it.
I was part of a group of people who made the jump from some kind of RedHat-based live image to Ubuntu (6.06 was our first version) with our modifications. I think this was prompted by the end of RedHat and the transition to what became Fedora and RHEL. (there was also the problem that the project's relatoinship with the maintainer who had built the RH-based images was suffering, and nobody else could replicate the RH-based artifacts this maintainer produced, in part because scripts were not being shared. It was a whole drama.)
Anyway, Ubuntu had some degree of support for custom derivative live CDs, which was great! We were able to add packages and even replace the kernel, without a thorough understanding of how it worked under the hood.
In 2006 we were quite excited about the Ubuntu philosophy, just check out page 14 in https://linuxcnc.org/docs/2.0/EMC2_User_Manual.pdf -- Since then, Debian has stayed much more true to my vision of what FOSS should be, compared to Ubuntu.
Luckily, since that time, the ease of building a Debian live image has greatly increased (though they seem to change the underlying technology every release!) which I imagine is in part feedback from these pioneering live Linux distributions, directly and indirectly via Ubuntu. Specialist distributions succeed when they have their best ideas folded back into mainstream distributions, modulo the question of adequate acknowledgement of their contributions.
.. which is why this is some great work right here, rediscovering and acknowledging the relationships and lineage in Linux distributions.
@stylus thank you very much for sharing the insights and memories!
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@nina_kali_nina Google doesn’t work on current browsers either, so
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I did not expect a Linux system from 2001 to be that... feature-rich. Bugs aside, it is pretty impressive. Not only Knoppix 2.0's KDE 2 is quite usable, it ships - again - with both KOffice and Open Office, and both Konqueror and Mozilla. There is XMMS, there is GNU IMP, there is even Acrobat Reader 4.0. There's even Python and Java.
Go on, give this ancient (25 years old!) Linux distro a go: https://archive.org/details/LinuxTag - the file you're looking for is linuxtag2001.iso
If you're using Qemu, make sure to set RAM to 256 megs or less, use cirrus VGA, and go through the "expert" mode to configure your keyboard and X11. On 86Box, I recommend emulating Pentium 2 and Cirrus 5446.
====
Phew, what a thread it was! I hope you liked it :) And if you liked it, please share the love.
I think my biggest motivation for this thread was:
- Hey, look, 25 year ago Linux was already pretty great and usable. Imagine what it can do now! The sky is the limit. -
P.S. If you find Knoppix 1.4, please let me know~
@nina_kali_nina @knoppix95 might be able to help you find a copy of really old knoppix versions!
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@nina_kali_nina I guess that’s not that surprising. What I recall is that Knoppix was the first live CD that really took off because it put a lot of effort into auto-detecting your hardware. We are spoiled these days with hardware that configures itself through well-defined PCI/USB/ACPI/etc. interfaces, but around the turn of the century it was still pretty messy and mostly it was safer to manually configure things. Knoppix was so good at auto-configuration I used as a diagnosis step when troubleshooting hardware. If Knoppix didn’t see it, it was probably broken (obviously there are plenty of exceptions but it was still useful).
That auto-detect engineering (along with the disc compression) is really what set it apart. And I recall it spawned a lot of derivatives.
@bytex64 absolutely, yes. The ALS presentation talks about this, too: https://grumbeer.dyndns.org/ftp/iso/knoppix/knoppix-vortrag-als2000/knoppix.pdf
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@nina_kali_nina I had completely forgotten about the specs being displayed during boot. I saw it every day for years but I hadn't thought about it in decades, I'm not even sure when it stopped being a thing
@_hic_haec_hoc Later Pentium III bioses would often display a splash screen on top of it. However, it was still a thing in some BIOSes for mid 2010s Intel Core CPUs.
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@nina_kali_nina The fonts and icons were better in those days.
@kbm0 sometimes; sometimes not :) Some of the fonts are really difficult to read!
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I did not expect a Linux system from 2001 to be that... feature-rich. Bugs aside, it is pretty impressive. Not only Knoppix 2.0's KDE 2 is quite usable, it ships - again - with both KOffice and Open Office, and both Konqueror and Mozilla. There is XMMS, there is GNU IMP, there is even Acrobat Reader 4.0. There's even Python and Java.
Go on, give this ancient (25 years old!) Linux distro a go: https://archive.org/details/LinuxTag - the file you're looking for is linuxtag2001.iso
If you're using Qemu, make sure to set RAM to 256 megs or less, use cirrus VGA, and go through the "expert" mode to configure your keyboard and X11. On 86Box, I recommend emulating Pentium 2 and Cirrus 5446.
====
Phew, what a thread it was! I hope you liked it :) And if you liked it, please share the love.
I think my biggest motivation for this thread was:
- Hey, look, 25 year ago Linux was already pretty great and usable. Imagine what it can do now! The sky is the limit. -
P.S. If you find Knoppix 1.4, please let me know~
@nina_kali_nina people don't always believe me when I say I've been daily driving Linux exclusively since 1998 ish.
It really wasn't an ordeal. All PCs kind of sucked back then, at least I knew why mine sucked. 😅
I had a great time using Linux back then, and I still do today.
-
I did not expect a Linux system from 2001 to be that... feature-rich. Bugs aside, it is pretty impressive. Not only Knoppix 2.0's KDE 2 is quite usable, it ships - again - with both KOffice and Open Office, and both Konqueror and Mozilla. There is XMMS, there is GNU IMP, there is even Acrobat Reader 4.0. There's even Python and Java.
Go on, give this ancient (25 years old!) Linux distro a go: https://archive.org/details/LinuxTag - the file you're looking for is linuxtag2001.iso
If you're using Qemu, make sure to set RAM to 256 megs or less, use cirrus VGA, and go through the "expert" mode to configure your keyboard and X11. On 86Box, I recommend emulating Pentium 2 and Cirrus 5446.
====
Phew, what a thread it was! I hope you liked it :) And if you liked it, please share the love.
I think my biggest motivation for this thread was:
- Hey, look, 25 year ago Linux was already pretty great and usable. Imagine what it can do now! The sky is the limit. -
P.S. If you find Knoppix 1.4, please let me know~
@nina_kali_nina I really liked the impression from the "old" distros ... even when I used them back then ... It reminds me of time passing by.
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@nina_kali_nina Interestingly, the German Wikipedia article about Morphix has mentioned this for almost 20 years (without a source, of course). Loosely translated:
> The modular concept of Morphix has furthered the development of modular distributions. For instance, the Morphix Live CD served as the basis for the Ubuntu Live CDs.
The German WP article about Ubuntu doesn't mention Knoppix or Morphix either though.
Current version: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphix#Geschichte
First mention: https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Morphix&diff=prev&oldid=28735820@dgelessus this is very nice to know! Interestingly, Bing and Google didn't find anything when I searched for "ubuntu morphix". Multi-language search can give so much leverage...
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I did not expect a Linux system from 2001 to be that... feature-rich. Bugs aside, it is pretty impressive. Not only Knoppix 2.0's KDE 2 is quite usable, it ships - again - with both KOffice and Open Office, and both Konqueror and Mozilla. There is XMMS, there is GNU IMP, there is even Acrobat Reader 4.0. There's even Python and Java.
Go on, give this ancient (25 years old!) Linux distro a go: https://archive.org/details/LinuxTag - the file you're looking for is linuxtag2001.iso
If you're using Qemu, make sure to set RAM to 256 megs or less, use cirrus VGA, and go through the "expert" mode to configure your keyboard and X11. On 86Box, I recommend emulating Pentium 2 and Cirrus 5446.
====
Phew, what a thread it was! I hope you liked it :) And if you liked it, please share the love.
I think my biggest motivation for this thread was:
- Hey, look, 25 year ago Linux was already pretty great and usable. Imagine what it can do now! The sky is the limit. -
P.S. If you find Knoppix 1.4, please let me know~
@nina_kali_nina that's a brilliant thread! I really enjoyed it 💯
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@nina_kali_nina Based on how that sentence is worded, I wonder if Morphix was only used to build the live CD, and not as the base for the entire distribution? But perhaps I'm reading too much into it.
Cool find nonetheless! I wasn't aware of this bit of Ubuntu history, even though Knoppix and Ubuntu were some of my first experiences with Linux.
@dgelessus due to how Morphix is working, the absolute bare minimum would be Morphix-specific kernel modules and INIT. Everything else could come from Ubuntu (or Debian). And it seems that was indeed the path taken. But I still feel like it would've been nice for Ubuntu authors to at least mention that LiveCD was based on Morphix and Knoppix technology.
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@pulkomandy the internet and the acquired expertise mean so much :< my Linux experience got postponed by good 5 years because of a similar issue. In 2001, I had access only to RedHat and Lindows; RedHat refused to boot with 8 megs of RAM (the way to make it boot in low-RAM mode was not explained on the CD); Lindows did not want to co-habitate on the disk with Windows 95 and thus was a non-starter.
@nina_kali_nina I don't remember who put that Corel Linux CD in my hands. Icouldn't have downloaded it myself, it would have taken a lifetime on dialup, and we didn't have a CD burner. I guess one of my parent's friend who was a relatively early Linux adopter gave it to me? But I didn't think of asking for help then (and my parents were annoyed that I removed Windows from the machine with my experiments)
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@pulkomandy @nina_kali_nina my first experience was Slackware off a PC magazine cover-CD in the early 00s and I've never been able to find it
@devlin @pulkomandy any chance of getting your hands on that magazine?
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@elly most likely, yes. I've been pushing for FOSS at my school, too, and so for some time it was running Edubuntu. Which was nice. Ah, the amount of influence a 14-year-old could sometimes have!
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@nina_kali_nina people don't always believe me when I say I've been daily driving Linux exclusively since 1998 ish.
It really wasn't an ordeal. All PCs kind of sucked back then, at least I knew why mine sucked. 😅
I had a great time using Linux back then, and I still do today.
@hp "It really wasn't an ordeal. All PCs kind of sucked back then, at least I knew why mine sucked. 😅"
That's a great quote :D
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@nina_kali_nina I don't remember who put that Corel Linux CD in my hands. Icouldn't have downloaded it myself, it would have taken a lifetime on dialup, and we didn't have a CD burner. I guess one of my parent's friend who was a relatively early Linux adopter gave it to me? But I didn't think of asking for help then (and my parents were annoyed that I removed Windows from the machine with my experiments)
@pulkomandy aaah so real :D why so real
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@devlin @pulkomandy any chance of getting your hands on that magazine?
@pulkomandy @nina_kali_nina my copy is long gone sadly, and search engines are crap and not forthcoming with assistance
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Just visible to Alice unless she accepts the post. And she controls the visibility on her posts.
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@dahukanna
Oh... I need to change my answer. 😅
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@monnier you replied in the wrong thread!
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