Redhat Linux 5.2 on 25yr old PC
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- Опубликовано: 9 фев 2025
- #retrocomputing #linux #redhat
This video is about Redhat Linux 5.2 and my 25 yr old Intel Pentium 100Mhz.
I got this boxed Redhat Linux 5.2 lying here and wondered what I would do it ... then I saw this unused business-like boring pentium 100Mhz on my self and thought this could be match made in heaven.
I decided to install Linux on the old PC and re-create my feelings towards Linux that I had when I installed that very same version of Redhat in 1998, most likely on very similar hardware.
Join me on this journey back in time, where we install Redhat 5.2 and play around with window managers like FVWM2, Gnome and Enlightment.
Enjoy......
![Blox Fruits Dragon Rework Update [Full Stream]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/EqDAp8udhm0/mqdefault.jpg)
This was so fun to see, I'm starting to get a bit tired of all the DOS and Windows content out there so it's really fun and refreshing to see some retro Linux instead, and 1998 was right about when I got into Linux myself. I did run Slackware though.
Thx a lot glad you enjoyed . If you’ve got any tips on what would be fun / interesting to see in a future video please let me know ...
Why? Linux is boring as hell. I first tried it around 98/99 as well and hated it from the beginning. Its totally useless. No games support linux on the old machines.
@@macdaniel6029 To each their own, but I feel the same about Windows and DOS. They are boring as hell, while Linux is actually interesting. Sure if games is what you care about you shouldn't run Linux, but for almost everything else, I like it way more.
@@jayminer But what can you actually do with Linux on a Pentium 100? Work? L33T h4xx0ring? DOS/Windows will turn every old computer into a fun gaming machine. With Linux its just obsolete technology. Like an electronic typewriter, just more complicated.
@@macdaniel6029 Well, to me I guess it's mostly about nostalgia at this point. I still think old Linux is way more usable than old Windows on an old computer if you want to play around with it for anything but games, but DOS/Windows for sure is unbeatable when it comes to that. But Linux was great when it comes to networking and lots of that stuff even back then.
Massive nostalgia watching this.
Enlightenment was amazing. I wasted loads of hours playing with ethemes. I've not seen anything today that looks as cool.
That’s the idea ... hope you liked it !
I would still use E16, but for practical reasons Mate is more user friendly.
There is something "early-90s Amiga-ish taken high Res" about it.
@Rob Reynolds Ahhh, Enlightenment! I saw it for the first time back in 2000 with my first ever copy of THE COMPLETE LINUX OPERATING SYSTEM v6.0!(Mandrake Linux 6). That cd set of 3, had All the GUI goodies I still love today! I would be at work, thinking of Ethemes and window managers and Linux, and so anxious and excited to get back home to my apartment to play with Linux some more and discover more..ENLIGHTENMENT!! Sadly, E16 which is still my favorite version of E(early versions crashed ALOT, and the new version is not much better at that now!), is NOT available for Debian and Ubuntu based Linux distros. I had it in Fedora(Redhat), and OpenSUSE, but those distros do not have OTHER apps I love like CDE desktop and so on. Always somethin I tells ya.. LOL! I love Linux, and E and old GNOME desktop was the main reason!! Anybody remember the movie ANTITRUST?? Redhat Linux with Gnome desktop and Enlightenment WM was featured on the computer in the children's day care computer lab scene..
Is enlightenment still around?
*6:21** "Intel Pentium with F0 0F bug" LOL*
"Intel - we deliver you bugged CPUs since 1976"
hehe ... could do a while video series on that alone :)
@@RetroSpector78 yeah, please go ahead and do it. And don't forget about other hilarious bugs like A20 line overflow, FDIV bug, you name it :))
@@RetroSpector78 and unprivileged
CLI
JMP $
instant lock up under multitasking OS, too (until they virtualized the interrupt flag in later 486s, yet Win9x didn't give a shit about that feature hehe)
Bugged on purpose thanks to the friendly folks over at Langley
@@nneeerrrd Win95 didn't give a shit. Sure. Shall i repeet it to my self every time when i where saw windowsnaturalgaybluescreen? Or when that windows shit installed in one localisation can not even read file names in another localisation (Even in windows98 or 2000). :D
Oh man, RedHat 5.x was my first exposure to Unix-like operating systems as a kid. Someone threw out an old 486DX 33MHz machine, and the library had gotten a copy of some Linux reference book with the install CD in the back. We didn't have internet, so when we wanted to install anything that we heard about or saw at the library online we would have to download it and carry it back home via floppies.
RPM Dependency became a special kind of hell when all you had was bicyclenet.
Edit: or was it faster I can't remember
My first Linux came on a multi CD set with roughly six different distributions packaged together by a place called Walnut Creek Software. They were quite famous in the mid 1990s for affordable CD sets of free software by mail order. A colleague suggested RedHat was the easiest one to install.
Hahaha, Bicyclenet. Ain't that shit the truth! Yeah, I remember cursing RPM dependencies back in the day...hasn't really changed much in the modern day lol dependencies are still a pain in the ass if you're not paying attention lol
Honestly, dependencies now are mostly a breeze, unless you are compiling from source or something. I think. I haven't ran Slackware since the early '00s; SuSE's and Fedora's stuff covers it for me.
I do not miss bicyclenet.
Exact thing happens to me my first exposure to Linux was redhat 5.2 today I am using arch
Bicycle dependency repair is probably still faster than a windows 10 update.
You should call the number for customer support and act like you need help installing.
Heyyy! This was my first Linux experience! I still have the manual
@Peyton Canaan looool hacker scam
It was mine too.
Mine too man... I also used to has an old SuSE version in the College computer lab
This brings memories! I used to play with Linux, tried many ones (RH, Caldera, a Brazilian distro called Conectiva)... was always formatting my machine back then!
Yeah ... also kept on remembering stuff here that I totally forgot.
@z3 I remember when it was still called Mandrake Linux. Heck, I might have a boxed copy of a release somewhere....
This very box changed my life and made my career. I begged my mother to get it for me for Christmas when I was 14 in 1998, and spent many sleepless nights getting it up and running on a HP Vectra 486/66N so I could use it to share out the 56k dialup connection with all 4 PCs on the 10BASE-T LAN in the basement. This channel sure brings back memories. Thank you!
When the harddrives are identified by hda instead of sda, you know it's old
SCSI disks showed up as sdX even back then :D As I recall, hdX faded out as SATA AHCI hit.
@@jeffcullen6573 yeah that's true. But I still used good old IDE drives when they phased it out and names all disks sdx
It was the transition to libata.
@@nickwallette6201 That makes sense!
Puppy linux still us HdX, i reckon
This is the version of Linux that got the world's attention. It actually says on the box, ""Systems running Red Hat Linux are able to run continuously for months on end". If you look carefully you'll see it under the "Desktop Environment" paragraph on the back of the box at 0:35. I never forgot that epic brag was actually written on the box. What's awesome is that this old version of Linux looks fantastic on screen even today. Boy do I miss the days when Linux took itself seriously enough to come in boxed versions with epic printed mauals. Nobody even got close to the old days of SUSE Linux - I still have all my complete boxed sets, those are treasures to me now.
My first Linux came with "Teach yourself Linux in 24 Hours" late 90's
And how did those 24hrs go ? :)
@@RetroSpector78 The Display was B&W it needed a driver "Package" and Modem wasn't detected , But Shell environment was great like you I liked the Boot and all the info it was showing I remember VI editor I used it for trying C coding and reading Books from Gutenberg Project.
@@nemoincognito4179 new Linux can do that too by typing a couple commands in the terminal.
I use Linux mint 18.1 mate 64 bit on my PC I built myself and on my Dell laptop that has been upgraded
Yeah mine came with the RH 5.0 :D
@@PT-rg2vo the Book had Redhat Linux that's why I bought it.
This video brings me back sweet memories !
I remember a lot of things those days.
25 years ...
I don't know what to say this kind of feeling.
What a long time i lived...
This was my first install of Linux, had it off a magazine. As you say, it was amazing at the time. Thanks for putting it up, really took me back!
My First Linux was Slackware 3.0 and then Red Hat 4.2
I got my first version of Linux from a magazine as well! It was Redhat 5-something, and I got it from the Swedish PC+ magazine :-)
This brings back so many memories. I bought the boxed version of Red Hat 5.0 and ran it on a Pentium 166 machine back in the day. Spent hours just tweaking it and messing around with different software. My favorite window manager back then was window maker.
Hehe ... happy times !
It's still my favourite today! I also started with linux on a P166, though initially with SuSE and then RH 5.2, later switched to Mandrake, FreeBSD and eventually, when Internet access at home became possible, Gentoo. Still haven't found anything as fast, stable or easy to configure as WindowMaker after all these years...
I love the scrolling boot text in Linux, it's helped me diagnose several bios and hardware setup issues on older systems
Well that brings back a flood of memories. I remember waiting for 5.2 to be released and then I must have done a couple hundred installs when I worked for a server company. We did our development work on Sparc Stations as we waited for the dual Pentium Pro motherboards which was the first Intel machine to challenge the Unix world. You could have also done this install on your Alpha box, we had a number of those too. Thanks!
Cool video😷 My first Red Hat distribution was 7.3 on 800 Mhz Duron and 128 Mb ram. I remember when I compiled the mplayer program and my own 2.4 kernel.
I was extremely proud of myself. Nice memories and nostalgia.
Yeah ... building kernels and modules to support new hardware was always fun.... never worked on the first try :)
Very cool video man! It brings me back some 20 plus years! Great times when I first started with Linux. Keep it up and Thank you for it.
No worries ... glad you enjoyed it !
Linux was fresh and wild back then. So much potential.
Paul Frederick it still is an amazing OS. If you think about how much of the services on the internet depend on it and how it has been embraced by people and organisations it is pretty mind-boggling.
@@RetroSpector78 It is. I still can't look at it the same today as I used to though. A lot has changed between now and then. I can remember getting Infographics Linux CDs that said, "The rebel's OS" on them. It's not that way today with Codes of Conduct in projects. Linux has not gone mainstream but it sure has gone corporate.
Paul Frederick remember those infomagic cd’s. 4 cd and 6 cd sets. Developers resource cd’s. Contained different distros and copies of those popular internet archives. Been searching for those for an upcoming video but lost mine.
Wow.... That Escom PC brings back memories. We had a 486 DX4 100Mhz one that was upgraded many times.
Always had a soft spot that Case :)
I have the exact same box and you have no idea the memories you brought back with your video. I have a picture as proof! This was my first Linux distro and it was amazing back in the day... Thanks for this content...
thank you for giving me a flashback into time with my first redhat,and how crappy hdds was back then
You’re welcome....
I remember buying SUSE back around '97 and beginning my Linux journey, from there I eventually ran Redhat for a while, then Debian, and for years Gentoo. I've used Linux since '97 and will continue to use it for the remainder of my life, today I generally run Debian on servers and Mint on the desktop. Thank you for making this video, it brought back a lot of fond memories.
Wow. SUSE is a Distro maker right?
That machine configuration is very close to my machine when I first installed RH5 back in 1997
This video was preceded by a rigourous hardware selection process :) I did have to replace the 4x cdrom drive because the original one had failed But other than that it is pretty time period correct I think. Hope it brought back some memories.
Not sure why I decided to look up RedHat 5.2 after all this years. It was my first distro back in 1998. Loved the trip down memory lane. Thank you.
Besides all the rest, the voice of author is very therapeutical. I often listen his videos not only to learn but to meditate and calm down!
Warms my heart to hear my own thoughts from someone else :D.
haha ... glad you liked it !
Damn red hat. As a teenager I installed this onto a spare partition and obviously messed up as it partitioned the whole drive back in the day. There went all my games and everything lol.
Think a lot of people had issues with that. When I had my first PC i accidentally deleted config.sys and thought the PC was completely bricked and was unfixable :) that was day 1 of me working with a PC. We’ve come a long way :)
@@RetroSpector78 I think we learn a lot from our mistakes but I just wish they weren't drive busting ones lol.
What a throwback, thanks for this!
My latest slackware one is even a bigger throwback :)
@@RetroSpector78 I watched that one first! That was was definitely before my foray in to Linux as my first distro was slackware 3.5. I loved the coverage of Enlightenment in this RH video. It's nice to see the devs went on to some big roles too.
Really great video .... I love ressucitate really old machines with the ideal Linux for each age ....
Was really fun to do and something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. Some things just don’t translate well in an emulator. For this you need the original hardware, diskdrives, cdroms, hard drive noise, crt monitors and crashing hard drives to get the real experience :)
Thanks for showing this. I have been thinking about Red Hat 5.x these days, and it's nice to see the screens again. The thing I remember the most about these days were trying to get a winmodem to work, and how I managed to get into some kind of rpm dependency hell. I don't remember what computer I had at the time, but I'm pretty sure I didn't have a problem booting from CD. I bought my CDs off of ibiblio instead of the off the shelf, and even bought multiple CDs including ones with extra rpm packages
"Developer tools: FORTRAN" serious business.
Thank you sir for sharing this. My God this was my first Linux ever. Something missing are US Robotic 28.8k external modem with those pppd settings. Englightment with Bluesteel theme with GKRellm and XMMS with matching themes, anime girl wallpaper etc etc this bring back masive memory again thank you.
hehe ... believe me if I could make a modem work on my telephone line to get on the internet I would ... unfortunately that service has been gone for a long time.
@@RetroSpector78 or you can make your own dialin server. Like those old BBS times.
As a Red Hatter, I tip my fedora to you sir! I'll never forgot the day when I first got into Linux and installed RH 5.2 + apache on P133 on a 256K DSL connection. I didn't know much about Linux and security/locking down ports. Needless to say the box was hacked within 2 days! HA!
I've been a Linux developer since I installed Slackware 2.0 in May 1994, almost 26 years ago. I switched to Red Hat 3.0.3 two years later. My computer at that time was an EISA 486 DX2 66 with 12 megabytes of RAM. The system you're building would have been thousands of dollars 25 years ago. 25 years ago most people still used 486 processors.
Yeah ... 25-ish years .... also had a 486dx2 66 at that time but starting mid 1995 you saw lots of advertisements featuring 2500 - 3000 USD pentium 100’s :)
In 1995 I built my first PC from parts I selected and bought myself.
A Cyrix 6x86 P150+ on an Asus P55T2P4 motherboard, with 32MB ram, a Diamond Stealth 64 Video, a Quantum Fireball 1.2 GB disk and a 17" monitor. 4998,90 dutch guilders at the time, this was 6 years before the euro.
I ran OS/2 Warp, and Slackware Linux 3.0 on it.
Ah.. fond memories... I still have the Slackware cd.
bwzes03 still looking for my first linux experience (infomagic 4 cd set containing slackware)
Red Hat Linux 5.2 was probably the first Linux distribution I came into contact with, at least on paper (I stumbled into a book about Linux based on RH 5.2 around the middle of the '00s and I haven't had an internet connection back then, so it was a really interesting read to me, and I still have this book, really worn out from countless reading sessions), but I remember it fondly :)
Thank you for this. Good to RH5 from the install onward, again. Disk druid, hardware probing, got me a bit emotional *sniff*
You also have a rather rare thing these days. An old version of Same Gnome. Look after that, it is hard to come by these days.
Nice video :) Learned alot of new things from your videos. My first contact with Linux was Ubuntu 7.10 and still have the Official Ubuntu CDs.
Thx a lot ... how did you end up stumbling on the channel ? (RUclips recommended it or was it something else ?)
@@RetroSpector78 Good question... LGR maybe or youtube recommended me the channel. I don't remember.
NOSTALGIA! This takes me back to my first Sysadmin Job! I still love WindowMaker!
Sseing this makes me think that I shouldn't have tried to run Knoppix 3.7 with KDE3.3 from CD back in 2003 on my MMX200 with 48MB RAM.
It was still magical nonetheless because it looked so different from Windows yet somehow familiar, I loved it.
Thanks for showing this older release of RedHat.
Wanted to get a hold of my very first linux cd but was unable to find it. Contained an old slackware version.
Brings back a lot of memories of the early days of installing linux. The text editor was so difficult because it was designed to run on a telex machine that would use paper instead of a computer screen so they limited the interface.
Did not know that, and did not expect that in 1998 :)
A trick was to install "mc", the console file manager. Its native text editor is easier than vi :)
Awesome video! My first encounter with Linux was with Red Hat 6.2 in 2000. I overwrote my Windows installation and was quite disappointed to find out that there were no drivers that supported my Rage Mobility GPU 😬 took a whole year to figure out how to get X working with a driver I found online. Learned a lot, though!
Think a lot of people learned a lot while playing around with Linux. Love that fact that you got to learn all of these basic cli commands that are still very useful today (grep, awk, sed,.....)
25 years ago this was very powerful machine, I wish had PC like this in 1995...
That was fascinating. You are 1,000 times smarter than I am.
Thank you very much. I wanted to try Linux back in those days, but I was illiterate and I had no access to a computer, like thousands of other people.
OMG. My very first Linux, May 1999. It was a bear, my Toshiba 105 laptop only worked with pcmcia. But the documentation was good and it helped me make the Linux pcmcia diskette to run the install CD. Good times. You made an interesting point when you said it was a creative time, and I think that was part of the magic. For once, as crappy as fvwm looked on my little laptop, and with no sound card, it was magical to have another operating system. It was the promise that Windows didn't have to be the only thing that I would have to run. I was already fairly well versed in sun Unix, and to have something more like that running on a Windows 95 built laptop, was a promise of good things to come. The next 5 years or so were amazing, before hardware kind of tapped out and in my opinion wasn't quite as fun anymore. I still hope one day something like that comes along again.
This brought me back. I installed RHL 5.2 on a P133 back in 1999. Good times. Enlightenment FTW!
Excellent! Would love some more retro Linux-related content!
Hehe .... feel free to let me know some of the things you would like to see...
Your stash of pc's is like a candy store to me, I discover this video quite late, but thank you, My first Linux Distro was the Red Hat 5.2 "Apollo" and have found memories of it, specially to put to run a S3 Savage 3D "AGP" to work on my Pentium II 233 system, it was quite.. a challenge, but my favorite of them all is Red Hat 6.2 "Zoot", stable, mature and quite potent, at "Zoot" I dropped the S3 savage 3D for a magnificent, high quality, 2D Millenium 2.
Takes me back to childhood. Thank you
You are very welcome ... hope you stick around .. got some other cool retro linux stuff coming.
Hahaha, this brought a veritable wave of memories flooding in; RHL 5.2 was the distro I started on. Bought a copy at an Ocean State Job Lots store back around 2000. Bought several Linux distros from there, actually, including RHL 9. What an experience it was, trying out such an interesting operating system compared to Windows back then. That led me t Ubuntu after RedHat proper went enterprise. I still use Windows primarily, but my lappy is is a Linux notebook. Good times, though. Thanks for bringing some great memories back. I never knew about Enlightenment, though, always used bog standard xWindows. I had no clue what I was doing back then lol
Wow. I have a new appreciation for modern package managers (apt, pacman, dnf, homebrew, chocolatey, etc...). All of those dependencies must have been a bear to keep up to date after going through so much trouble to collect them.
Yeah ... i guess you can compare it to node / javascript package management. Amazing how this managed to work, and developers had the discipline to maintain backwards compatibility and define clear version names.
Don't forget the predecessor of dnf...yum...
@@alexdhall I remember good old yummy. I remember my first Linux was Redhat 7. I remember learning that command could not get the idea sweets out of my head. lol
@@laserspaceninja Red hat was one of my first Linux distros. I later moved over to Mandrake Linux (later called Mandrivia). Ubuntu and other changes to Linux have made things much more easier to setup a Linux desktop these days.
@@alexdhall Yeah! It is amazing how quickly I can spin up an Ubuntu box without any thought. However, I have dabbled in Arch and Gentoo for fun and even that seems a little less problematic because of their respective communities. Just waltz over to wiki or forum and most of your problems have some sort of solution...It is nice to have so many good options.
7:56 ext2 filesystems ... still supported today.
To be honest, I only got to know about Linux in mid-2000s when internet was already a thing and Pentium 4 and DualCore CPUs were released. I didn't knew what Linux was about. So I totally missed it when it was relatively new and really young and it's really fun to see it on old hardware. And it's really cool.
Glad you enjoyed it. My first install was on a 486 ... but it was a very very difficult experience. (Using slackware I think). Had a friend who was very good with Linux. Felt like Chinese to me.
RetroSpector78 yeah! Nowadays Linux in consumer section is really just "next, next, next, done" I even installed Mint on my dad's laptop (he's not that good with computers and didn't need it for more than browsing web, watching youtube and checking email). And he's totally likes it. His worst complaint is that laptop has bad battery life but that's more on cheap battery on lenovo side.
The Enlightenment part of the video brought back memories of me using NPSWPS on OS/2 Warp 3 on a 486DX2/66 in around 1996. Though not to the same extremes. Just using bitmaps for the desktop background on a 486 slowed things down.
Yeah enlightenment was really cool ... blew my mind back in the day.
Oh wow it reminds me when I installed Red Hat 6 on some of the library computers in my high school back in 2000, it was fun :)
This, but with SuSE I bought at a bookstore on a 200Mhz Compaq!
I grew up with SuSE 8.1 on my first own PC.
Brings back so many memories when I had to bring out all 8 CDs to install stuff when you didn't have internet
Yes, suse 6.0 is on the shelf next to me. Should try this again
@@awesomefacepalm After Red Hat 7.2 I ran whatever SuSE was out then for a long time. Up until that PC caught fire and died.
@@1pcfred my PCs has yet to do that 😁 was it a molex to sata?
@@awesomefacepalm it was just a bad PSU I used for too long. In a way it did me a favor. If that PC hadn't died I'd probably still be using it today.
Great channel! Just subscribed! Thanks for this.
You are very welcome ... emjoy....
This was the first version of Linux I used. I installed it on an Escom 486DX2. It still has a better install procedure than a vanilla Arch install!
Outstanding video. I installed that along with OS/2 Warp 3.0 back in the day. Slackware 1.0 was my first linux distro and still run it today. Slackware would be cool video
So, it _was_ your photo on Reddit a few days ago. I knew ithe setup seemed familiar! :D
Yes it was :) hope you enjoyed the video
What I love is the graphic design of the boxes and manuals and CD covers, things that today I think it's almost impossible to find physical new distributions of Linux systems.
That was my first linux distro ran on my 166 mhz no mmx I bought that box in a book shop at the university. It was the coolest operating system I ever seen my favorite wm was enlightment to :) Slackware was better tough once you got the grips of it. And the irc community was the way to learn.
Don’t have good memories of IRC. Some people were happy to help but a lot of them had their head stuck up their arse and weren’t helpful at all towards newbies. Sometimes felt like a very hostile environment. And visited freenode again for this video and hd the impression things haven’t changed all that much :)
@@RetroSpector78 Hi, yes that is true some of them where some what smug.. I guess I was lucky I knew some of them privately and got a good welcome perhaps.I ended up spending lots of time on freenode giving free support.. By 1998 I started norways first and biggest internett/gaming cafe and we arranged install party's as free service to customers wanting to learn.
I forgot how nerve wracking watching Linux load from a floppy was. My machines were always 2nd hand and old... 486 class in 2000 or so. Now I think I’ll dig some parts and try it again!
Yeah I found it to be a lot of fun. Didn’t mind the hard drive crash at all... that’s the way it goes .... reminds you how much patience we had back in the day. Imagine clicking in something now and having to wait 30 seconds before your browser pops up :)
Great video! I’ve read that Escom released some Amiga models after Commodore had gone bankrupt.
They didn't make any new models but they continued producing A1200 and also A4000 (I think).
Looking at the alternate screens during Linux setup was about the only way to learn when it first came out. Having Google at your fingers wasn't a thing yet. Not even Lycos, or any of the earlier search engines. This was a great trip down memory lane.
Unbelievable how we were able to manage without google.... remember reading lots of offline docs, man pages and posting to newsgroups. Such a different model for getting information....
You could always Ask Jeeves
More like this! I absolutely loved this video!
Haha cool ! :) busy editing footage for my “slackware 1.1.2 on a 386” video ... stay tuned for that, please subscribe and tell all your friends ! :)
Yes! Nice praise to Enlightenment, it was really ahead of its time, and I still miss it sometimes 🙂
Transparent borderless terminals anytime, baby !
I had that same box. Drove from Starville MS to Jackson MS to buy it from CompUSA. Spilled Domino's garlic butter on the installation guide and it had a nice garlic smell to it for. years.
Haha :)
I remember installing this thing!! Also Caldera, TurboLinux, Stormix and Slackware around 1998. Corel Linux too with WordPerfect and Corel Photopaint, I never used a non-Linux desktop since then, I remember jumping in my bedroom of joy when I compiled and booted in my first configured kernel, I felt like a total hacker, so thrilling times.
When I read Linux 5.2 in the title I thought of modern kernel and was like WTF? …how?
I have modern Gentoo running on a Pentium II. :-) Takes all day to recompile the kernel. I haven’t gotten it to run on a Pentium though. Tried, panics on boot, tried disabling a few things via boot parameters, still hangs or panics. Gave up.
@@nickwallette6201 Nice.
Yeah, I remember being confused by distro version numbers versus kernel version numbers for my first little while being exposed to Linux.
By the way -- 6:24 -- this is a 2.0.x kernel, and I’m pretty sure the first kernel version I was aware of using was 2.4.something. Though I did later, much later, come across a machine under a lecturer’s desk with an ancient 2.2-based system on it (probably Red Hat) ...
I've got the latest Alpine Linux 3.11.3 (Linux 5.4.6) running pretty much out of the box (had to add libata.dma=0 because of corruption issues with it enabled) on my Pentium 233 MMX. The 32-bit Alpine uses a i586 target. Alpine is light enough that it is actually pretty snappy and packages install rather quickly. Latest xorg even works fine with my Nvidia Riva 128zx.
You can run the latest TinyCore 11.1 with kernel 5.4 on a Pentium. The only thing I'm struggling to get up and running is my AWE32 non-PnP. A PCI sound card should work fine, though.
My first distro was RedHat 7.1, I was blown away by how flexible Linux desktop was.
Awesome review! Thanks so much !!!
You are welcome ... glad you liked it.
ah the first linux version i ever used, got a copy at walmart for 10$, didnt even really have internet back then except for dial-up, first thing i remember was dependency hell, you need package A to install package B, but package A needs package C to be installed first. (or worse when the package A requires package B but package B requires package A, sorta having to force install and ignore dependancies), thank god for package managers (Yum, Apt, and Pacman)
package A needs Package B, but package B needs Package A and the darn app will not install, is STILL and issue if you do not have the $$ to pay for internet! My internet was cut off due to lack of funds, and I tried to install and make Debian 10 work like I wanted with Virtualbox and CDE desktop, and while I had to constantly go to neighbors internet connected lappy to then run up to my non wifi tower to install missing deps, at the end, only CDE desktop installed but virtualbox DID NOT!! Becuase of the scenerior described here. Sadly, like the intel bug , this too is by design.. You need $$ and pay for internet now, if you want to enjoy anything computer or computing based.. REALLY sucks how that is. But I tried to live like it was 2000-2001 again, and now I KNOW and SEE why my Linux experience was so hit and miss, lack of ethernet connected broadband internet.. wifi might as well be dail up if you do not have a card to put in the towers and connect that way. But.. for that retro waay back machine fun, yes, using, old Linux with old PCs that match the era, is an alternative to modern computing and productivity.. A good time waster and strangely. also VERY educational? What a paradox! Love Linux!
My was RHL 3.... Well... Actually was slackware, then RHL.... Back there in '95 or '96.... Can't remember the exactly year.
I downloaded Slackware 7 over a dial up modem. It took me 3 days to get all 128 MB of it. I learned about mget * then.
Good old days !!!.I had Redhat 9 on my desktop, with 2.4 kernel, but upgraded to Kernel 2.6.10..It was fun.
I just recently got a 386sx running the 2.0 kernel with xwin. That was fun, especially since I compiled it from source, on the very machine itself... Stripped of anything and everything possible to minimize its footprint. And it worked okish.. It only took a week to get it running.
all those computers all those software :) .. Once I had a time machine Im going back to the 70s - 80s for sure..
Nostalgic feelings here! Disc Druid was a great tool, I use it when first installed this very system on my well missed pentium 233mHz
Brings back memories. I started with FreeBSD in 1997. I still have my old dual cpu syystem. I wonder if it will still run.
Beware of magic smoke when powering it on ...
@@RetroSpector78
Once you let the magic blue smoke out, it doesn't work any more.
We used to joke the new guys doing their first build. We would solder a 1/4 Watt resistor across the power socket. The look on their face when they put the AC to it was precious.
Good old time, thx for this.
You are very welcome
Watching this video bring me back to 1998. Nice this is one of the powerful OS as per I knew. Good and very nice and reliable.
Thank you for bringing back memories. I still keep this book and CD without the box. Almost thrown it away when de-cluttering 😅.
Started with Slackware 3.2 that came with a book, moved over to Red Hat then Mandrake Linux. Now use Linux Mint and SalixOS.
Brings back memories, my home web server sported Centos 5 back in 2007 :D
Somehow i cannot remember what distro i had back in 2001 when i decided to use my own server for my homepage and some irc bots :/
Thanks for sharing enlightment founders unsung heros
This is why compact flash or sd2ide adaptors are a life saver. Old hdds can die at any moment. Plus they are expensive compared to a CF or SD card. If only someone made some "old hdd sounds emulator", so i could hook it to the hdd led and have it make noises when theres activity :D
Think these sound emulators do exist. You should google them ...
I don't think so... I have over 20 yo hdd and they're still in perfect condition...
@@PiotrK2022
sure, and ive had old hdd that suddenly died with much less than 20 years. I remember a 6GB seagate hdd, of the ones that had the "sea shell" underneath and one time i turned on the machine i was testing and bang, one of the chips suddenly had a crater in it. The motor driver suddenly decided to kill itself.....
Also had issues with the previous hdd, i dont recall the brand but it was a 3GB one, had a bad sectors problem around the middle of the address space, so i suppose it was a two platters hdd and had tarnish in either the center or towards the outer edge.
My cousing also had issues with a 20gb matrox hdd.
Whether or not yours last 20 years is a matter of luck, not a guarantee
On the positive side, i have a 1.2GB conner peripherials that still works relatively ok, it has a few bad sectors spread evenly throughout the disc but not a serious failure like the others.
On the more modern side, i have my 80GB hitachi sata hdd that started having spin up issues at around 65k hours,so i retired it. Guess it still works, but i remember it sometimes took some time to initialize and you could hear it clicking meanwhile.
On the other hand, my 1TBx4 raid5 has about 90k hours on each hdd and none of them has failed so far. Not even visivle changes in the SMART report. (in both cases, my pc remains on 24/7, 99.7% uptime last time i checked)
Your musing about Enlightenment reminded me of buying my first Slackware 6 CD collection in the 90s. Slackware really was a kitchen sink distribution and I didn't know how to use much of it. I was barely able to get X running as a kid.
What I did play with a lot was Litestep. My desktop looked better than that Enlightenment stuff and it was all under Win98! Better yet, setting your shell to Litestep meant you could avoid crashing every few hours due to the explorer.exe memory leak in Win98 which they never fixed!
Not familiar with Litestep... will add it to my list of things to look at.
Well sir, I have subbed. You like the very same window manager that I love to this day! Oh the memories of vintage Linux! I did not have such a good time or success with Linux back in the early 2000-2001, and had to stick to Windows 2000 with Litestep shell and Windowblinds as my window skinner to make Win2K LOOK like Gnome Desktop,Enlightenment themes, and Windowmaker/NeXTSTEP GUI. Only now that Linux is Multimedia and Music production worthy, am I using it full time. No more Windows.. Though I must say, I never tried Linux on such a low spec PC, you seem to have found a happy medium there! And of course.. INTEL is golden for LINUX. I had AMD back in 2000. And LOTS of crashes and errors. 2001 afforded me the luxury of a P2 system and of course, THAT is when LINUX worked.. sort of.. Still no music recording or production but, hours and hours and days and days of computing and GUI interface fun!! Thanks for the video, you are the second person I found on RUclips to install and describe these OLDER Linux distros on actual older hardware, with such clarity, EZNIX would be the other! Love your show!
pianokeyjoe hehe thanks a lot for the nice comment ... got lots more retro linux content planned ... even older than this :)
@@RetroSpector78 Gracias!! Oh I have had my hand into OLD debian and old FreeBSD.. Now THAT is some classic linux/BSD stuff there! When I say old, I mean Debian 1.3 and FreeBSD 4.2
@@pianokeyjoe I'm currently working on a video on Slackware 1.1.2 (1994) :)
Thanks, it was good walk down memory lane.
i do remember redhat 5 nice one. Had a sun sparcstation 4 but couldnt get solaris for it so used redhat that had sparc version at the time and i do remember dependencies with older linux distros, they were awful, wanted something that needed something else to even install and you get that and it too needed something to install and after 37 different packages you still needed something to run something and after that it was time to format and reinstall to get all the errors fixed and start over :)
This brings back memories. Computing was fun then. Tons of variety. Unixes, Linux, even NT on DEC Alphas. Tons of hardware. Now things are a bit boring.
This strikes me very hard, in my case cutting my teeth with TWM and basically no network, just man pages. Never used anything else in my life. Pitty you didn't install emacs. Emacs was THE manual for making everything and understanding what the system was about. Great video.
Super nostalgic. Thank you :)
Oh my... that was exactly how I first experienced Linux! Very clunky! Then tried SuSE, Mandrake, and finally I was recommended to give Debian Sarge a try. I finally could get real work done with Linux! Debian let me down a couple of years later, so was suggested to consider Ubuntu. Ubuntu 7.04 worked where Debian Etch was failing, I was sold! I only went back to Debian to confirm the issue with the Samba packages were resolved.
I purchased this in 1998 and it was my first experience with Linux! I still have the box and all the content.
My first Linux experience was with Ubuntu 6.06 when I first went to college on an old Pentium III laptop I bought third hand for school. After that I used Opensuse on a beat up Pentium IV. After seven years of hell in Windows Land I am using Linux Mint and loving it.
haven't really used much of linux on the desktop myself ... when I started working in 2001 everything was heavily microsoft oriented. In 2011 I jumped ship to Apple. Only in cloud / server environments is where I come into contact with linux. And also enjoy MacOSX as I spend a lot of time in the terminal.
I agree , Enlightenment looked great
I installed 5.2 many times. Red Hat had a great install system compared to many flavors at the time. I was a much younger man then!
I remember buying my first 6-CD set of Linux back in 1998 and neither my crappy SiS nor S3 graphics card had support for it. I could play with the Terminal and barely get a startx running with only the mouse pointer. It was refreshing and the hope of escaping from Windows was there. 20+ years in time now everybody uses Linux in their phones with Android without even knowing it. Gotta Love Open Source.
I just love the chapter name "Impressing Your Friends with RPM".
Very enlightening
That brings back some memories!
Had totally forgotten about Englightenment. As you say, trying to achieve results like those amazing screenshots of ultra cool desktop environments was a big draw of Linux in the late 90s, probably what drew me in and in the process taught me a lot.
Dependency hell as well 😂 It's something we rarely remember now, I'm not a regular Linux user anymore but I have used it occasionally for certain tasks and it's remarkable just how easy everything is now.
Enlightenment indeed .... spent hours browsing through teams and trying to get them installed ... was always something that didn't work ... incompatibilities between versions, alpha quality software / themes ... but still .... when you were able to start something that more or less resembled what you saw in those screenshots you could easily impress your windows 95 buddies :)
I was young playing with those :D Thanks
Hoho!
I remember how I setting up redhat 5.1 on pentium pro computer. This computer has 1.2 G hdd and cd-rom.
It was in 1999 or 2000.