A Trip Down Distro Memory Lane 238
M-Saunders writes "What did the Linux world look like back in 2000? TuxRadar has republished a distro roundup from Linux Format issue 1, May 2000. Many distros such as SUSE, Mandrake and Red Hat are still around in various incarnations, but a few such as Corel and Definite have fallen by the wayside."
TuxRadar (Score:3, Informative)
At http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Main_Page [linuxformat.co.uk] , they are also attempting to convert the PDF stories into WIKI format. This could be a a valuable repository of technical and historical information.
I support their efforts and release to LFX and an all rights I may hold in any contribution I may have made to LFX. (I was an early contributor and some of my work was not done under their standard contract.)
Re:It was a nightmare for regular users in 2000... (Score:3, Informative)
But that's rather full of exceptions. *IF* the full driver made it to the kernel, and stays in the sources, sure. Then there are things like ath_hal that require a true adventure. .10.5.6 has been around for a while, but with kubuntu, I had to extract and make by hand. I then panicked when a new kernel downloaded on an update--that *used* to be a problem with linux when you had custom modules; they were dependent upon the version of the kernel. Even when a pre-compiled module was available to support hardware, it could require force loading due to version mismatches.
Today, that doesn't seem to be a problem; it kept working with the new version.
(.10.5.6 hasn't made it to FreeBSD yet, either--the work is done, but sam doesn't have enough testing results to commit it yet. I have an alias as root that deletes the directory for ath_hal, then extracts and renames .10.5.6 with sam's patches. [when I update the source, cvs replaces that with the official versions, so I need to repatch each time]). That done, however, it just plain works flawlessly).
hawk
Re:what happened to Corel Linux? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A 'get off my lawn' moment (Score:3, Informative)
I still have my infomagic cds as well. Got them every quarter, and it sure beat trying to download it all via dialup ( or sneaking into the local college's data center with a box of floppies )
Re:It was a nightmare for regular users in 2000... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:check its pulse (Score:1, Informative)
Same here exactly!
The "glitch-free" audio (pulseaudio) glitches all over the place. And the "flicker-free" video flickers whenever I move or scroll a window.
!GRUMP! Check out all the sock puppet blogs that oooohed and awwwwed Fedora 10 release and quoted "glitch-free" and "flicker-free". Now check out the Fedora forums for reality. !/GRUMP!
Fedora QA is AWOL and all my bug reports get killed with "won't-fix" status because the devs have run off to play with something shiny and the version I just installed months ago is not supported anymore.
Six month release cycle kills any hope of actually getting things fixed. I think Ubuntu has it right - a bleeding-edge release *and* a long-term support release. Users can pick their pain threshold.
Like you, I'd pay for a LTS Fedora but I can handle installing some codecs for multimedia. I just can't handle unfixed bugs and half-baked, untested features that persist from release to release.
Although I have been a Fedora user since FC3, Fedora 10 is the straw that broke the camel's back.
Re:It was a nightmare for regular users in 2000... (Score:3, Informative)
Now, however, a Linux distro usually won't run nearly as well as XP will.
Are you *sure*? I have a four, five year old desktop machine that dual boots Win 2k3 and Gentoo Linux. If we ignore the terrible Flash plugin and turn off KDE 4.SVN's Desktop Effects, I find that the Linux system is faster to boot, faster to get me to a ready "desktop", and no slower than Windows at performing tasks in The Gimp and Firefox. Perhaps my experience is atypical.
Also, was 2000's four year old hardware proportionally as slow as 2009's four year old hardware? That is, if you were to plot the CPU and IO performance increase over time from ~1997-2009, would the plot's slope remain relatively constant? (I have no idea, that's why I'm asking.)
Re:SuSE Ruled... (Score:4, Informative)
YaST is a general config utility with modules to handle a large range of hardware and software packages.
You set up Networking with YaST, which boot scripts are started under which runlevels. When YaST is not enough, well - then you edit the config files by hand. No big deal.