Reminiscing Old School Linux 539
t14m4t writes "While the Linux experience has improved dramatically over the years (remember the days of Kernel version 2.0? or even 1.2?), Tech Republic revisits some of the more-fondly-remembered artifacts of the Linux of years past. From the article: 'Of all the admin tools I have used on Linux, the one I thought was the best of the best was linuxconf. From this single interface, you could administer everything — and I mean EVERYTHING — on your Linux box. From the kernel on up, you could take care of anything you needed. With the dumbing down of the Linux operating system (which was actually a necessity for average user acceptance), tools like this have disappeared. It’s too bad. An admin tool like this was ideal for serious administrators and users.'"
I see Linux, I think Linus. Must be the names. (Score:3, Interesting)
When anyone thought of the operating system, they thought of Linus.
As a casual linux user, I believe it to still be the case, regardless of what your fluff might say.
Re:"Dumbing Up" (Score:2, Interesting)
I have 10+ years of experience as a Unix sysadmin, and that article was a serious WTF.
1 - Linuxconf is nothing but old school. I am old school, and I rarely leave my emacs session. Linuxconf was a dumbed down, braindead tool, one of many. Certainly not old school.
2 - Computing is always a challenge, if he has lost that, it's because he stopped looking for new challenges, or maybe all he wanted was a working printer. In any case, I find more challenges now when I have to use one of the automatic-for-the-people distros like Ubuntu, and I ran into something that just doesn't work, and debugging is nearly impossible because everything is done in some crappy non-standard way, using DBs instead of config files, and everything is hidden from the user
3 - WTF. Just WTF.
4 - Install fests where anything but fun. We did them because we had to. Because we were trying to spread the word. We spent an entire saturday giving free tech support to ungrateful idiots, ended the day totally screwed up and tired like we just ran a marathon, then we got drunk and went home. Good ridance.
5 - The author manages to sound like a gay and nerdy twilight fan talking about his heroes. Torvalds is a jerk, if you want to look up to someone, think of RMS, he actually has made countless sacrifices so that we can have all the free software we enjoy everyday, and he actually funded the community that helped Linus get his kernel done, and provided the compiler, tools and the motherfucking rest of the OS.
6 - Last time I checked, I was still running X11 (Xorg) and a WM (Gnome).
7 - Wow, the gayness is back.
8 - The community never wanted games. We wanted GPL games, if anything. Loki was trying to pollute our beautiful environment with privative crap, and it's a good thing it's dead.
9 - I use Chrome with the emacs extension, typing this in emacs. Your editor is still inferior. Enjoy your beeping.
10 - That's probably one of the biggest issues of GNU/Linux. The grand reunification of all the efforts is going to come, eventually, but in the meantime, less distros is a very good thing for everybody.
Re:Pity about the skills decline (Score:4, Interesting)
With powershell I'm not 100% certain that's true any more.
Having true OO based outputs from commands instead of having to split on tabs/pipe characters/etc is much easier, less prone to error, and more portable across upgrades (ps changing its default column order won't break all of your scripts if you're talking to a process object with well defined properties, etc).
Sorry... (Score:1, Interesting)
...but no "serious administrator" would be caught dead using linuxconf.
In fact, the only GUI/TUI admin tool a "serious administrator" would ever use was smit/smitty on AIX, and that's only because the F6 key taught you how to do everything the right way (command line) faster than getting up and walking over to the bookshelf to find the appropriate Redbook.
SAM, admintool, linuxconf, YaST...all anathema to a truly "serious" administrator.
PS: And if you read the above and asked yourself, "What's AIX?" the only thing serious about you is your acne. Now pipe down, and get off my lawn.
Re:Nostalgia ain't what it used to be (Score:2, Interesting)
you didn't have 100devices that actually worked and needed a kernel module and sometimes there own process.
you didn't have 4GB of ram to actually store more processes than a 80x24 screen worth of `ps aux`
you didn't have a network that actually needed those daemons for things to "just work" like avahi/zero-conf which is nice!
your sound subsystem skills suck because I'm using pulseaudio for 3 years now streaming from my laptop to stereo. Only buggy thing was, no shocker here, flash.
dbus is a nice thing design wise and is standardized. just turn it the f*ck on.
If I want, I can still lookup how my computer works with linux, so it's not as windows.
Re:Nostalgia ain't what it used to be (Score:5, Interesting)
I miss when a 266 MHz CPU and 64 MB of RAM was enough to do serious work under Linux.
I miss RHL 6.2. That was as stable and clean an OS as I've used.
Old School Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
Friends that are newcomers to Linux, complain to me all the time about their wireless cards not working, right out of the box. Then I share my first experiences with Linux to put things into perspective.
A friend had bought a copy of Slackware 3.4 [utah.edu] from Walnut Creek CDROM (cdrom.com). We also had to buy a box of 100 floppy disks from the local office-supply Big Box store. You see, there wasn't a lot of manufacturers with BIOS support for booting CDROM disks. In those days you couldn't just hop onto an OEM's website and download the latest BIOS flash image direct from the manufacturer, to get support for CDROM booting.
Even if you could have downloaded BIOS images from the manufacturer, I don't recall any OS installers to bootstrap directly from CDROM, that was still a fairly new idea at the time. Both Windows 95, and Linux distribution installers had to have a floppy bootstrap first, then load an ATAPI driver to read the rest of the installation files from CD.
In those days, if you hadn't bought the CD from Walnut Creek you had to stay up late, downloading floppy images and checksumming the downloaded images on your 14.4 modem. Even if you had bought the CD, you would have to take the time to image that big box of floppy disks. Then you would have to check the disks for consistency (so you wouldn't get interrupted by a bad floppy half-way through the install). So we would trudge on through the night, making floppy sets. The floppy sets break down like this:
So a full install would require you to image 99 floppy disks, not even counting boot and root install disks. So to get a Linux system capable of compiling the Kernel source, and networking with other machines, that would take at least 45 floppy disks individually imaged.
If you want a GUI and some windowed applications, that would be 37 additional floppies. That is 82 floppy disks in all. The first time I installed Linux, I didn't know what to do with it. It was comparable to DOS, or even the OS on my old Commodore. It was just a basic shell, blinking cursor, and the DOS commands I knew, besides "DIR" did not work. It was a proud moment to get the damned thing, installed and booted up. Even if you didn't know what the hell to do with it, once you got to that point.
A year, or two, later at University I could network install RedHat from a local NFS mirror in less than a few hours. Modern day, you can do a full network install in a few minutes. DVD images can be downloaded through bittorrent in less than an hour, and installed. You can even install Linux from a bootable USB flash drive that fits in your pocket.
Most everything works out of the box, from desktop to enterprise-grade server hardware. Most of the wireless cards will work, with a little bit of tweaking and hunting down external firmware. Those new to Linux may not realize, or may simply forget, how far the technology has come in just a few years. Anyone that complains about how "hard" it is to install and use Linux, should try installing from floppy sets to get a little perspective.
Re:Nostalgia ain't what it used to be (Score:5, Interesting)
I miss having a system, that had a decent documentation.
I miss the time when important parts all had man pages.
I miss being able to work my way through a script and not have everything hidden somewhere.
And I miss being able to talk to people about a linux problem and getting a decent answer.
In the good old days I could have a problem and someone would point in a direction, so I could find the answer and learn something in the process.
Now? you either get the old-school answer, which breaks the fancy stuff, because for example you shouldn't meddle with the permissions, fstab, links and mount points, but do some udev stuff...
Or, you get the "click-here-and-reboot", "just-upgrade", or "have--you-tried-reinstalling" kind of experts.
On top of it, documentation is just missing, gvfs writes files I can't read. Data is hidden in some formats only the application designer knows. And I can't modify any of it, because more and more you don't get the answer but a why-would-you-wanna-do-that or that's-against-the-design answer.
Re:Nostalgia ain't what it used to be (Score:5, Interesting)
I miss not having 42 daemons running in the background to do stuff that could simply be a library or utility loaded/run when needed.
Daemons provide shared services with privilege separation, you know, that old school unix thing. /points at sendmail
I miss having the init system being a robust, straight-forward process of calling shell scripts in sequence.
Robust? With uncoupled running & enabled states? In sequence in the good old tradition of single core, single disk unix servers? No response to hung or dead services?
I miss only needing to reboot for kernel updates.
This is a flat out lie. The reason every other OS makes or tells you to reboot for changes to system code to take effect is because neither they nor Linux have any mechanism in place to guarantee all loaded/running code stays consistent with the replaced code on disk.
When the heck did you think a libc patch fully goes into effect? What does "lsof | grep 'path inode'" say on these "no reboot" systems? What do you do with a whole data center that just got openssl patched? Hope for the best?
What do you do, reload every single process on your system to feel better about not rebooting? Although it's theoretically possible - on a small scale, how is that in any way ideal in terms of uptime, stability, security, etc, compared to rebooting?
It's an absolute shame that this myth is allowed to perpetuate.. You yourself mentioned using shared libraries (to access common data I presume, else it would not be a daemon replacement), running processes could wind up with different versions of that library for an indeterminate amount of time. This leaves leaves the shared data in a really FUN state!
I miss having one sound subsystem that never worked, rather than countless sound daemons which never work.
I don't miss screwing around with sound on Linux _at_ _all_
I miss having my immediately-after-logon process list fit in a single 80x25 terminal window.
Whats in your way?
I miss not having everything complain that DBUS isn't running.
If your init system didn't suck it would be [re]running.
I miss the Unix philosophy.
Which one? How to build a good OS 40 years ago?
It seems like Linux is just as good as MS Windows these days. Too bad. I liked it when Linux was an improvement over MS Windows.
Linux really has catching up to do, still, and always. It's pretty obvious to one that isn't completely oblivious to the last fifteen years of OS evolution outside Linux. It has reached the "good enough, cheap, unix-like server OS" goalpost and stood still for lack of leadership or vision.