I remember my father installing Red Hat Linux on my old 486 machine when we got a Pentium to replace it. It took him ages. I couldn't believe it, and stomped my feet and wailed about how bad it was. Little did I realise that a few decades later every computational device I had would be running some sort of Linux OS. So much of what people take for granted in the latest OSes has been highlighted here beautifully. ESPECIALLY the networking issues. Good work as usual!
This era of Red Hat was just so cool. I dearly love that logo. I dabbled in Linux back in '99, and it was good geeky fun. Now the magic is gone because pretty much just works. That being said, it's my home server/gaming desktop now, and it runs real games. We're not limited to Frozen Bubble and TuxRacer anymore.
I first installed Slackware from a few dozen floppy disks in 1995. In 1996 I got the Infomagic 6 CD Linux collection. I think I tried out Redhat back then but eventually stayed on Slackware. Linux was so powerful back then, with virtual terminals and true multitasking and all the stuff from the Unix world. And if you had a suitable video card you might have been able to tease out video modes from your monitor that were not possible on Windows.
I remember the main issue when I tried this back in the day was I didn't have Ethernet at home, instead was using a PCI 56k modem, which I recall was what was known as a "WinModem" where the hardware was fairly basic and the proprietary Windows driver did all the hard work. I believe it took a LOT of effort and reverse engineering from driver coders to get these working in Linux at all.
Yep, I remember this. I first installed Red Hat 6.2 in about 2001 and had the same problem. Luckily I managed to persuade my (now) mother in law to let me swap my WinModem with her chunky external 56k one.
WinModems were my biggest problem. I missed out on desktop Linux for years because of those cursed things. At least proprietary graphics drivers give you more for your suffering now. And they actually work of course, which was never a given with earlier hardware.
I tried and boy I'm glad I didn't get into Linux back then. Everything was painful and not even stable. My Windows experiences were vastly superior I shit you not. Only around Ubuntu 8.04 Linux desktops began to be semi-usable.
Thank you for this nostalgia hit ! Used RedHat in late 90's on school's server, spent lots of hours learning, letting it overnight to render PoVRay images, compiling whatever picked our teenage attention or simply having a blast with our 256kbps line.
0:32 “They say Linux is complicated that you have to jump into terminal all the time, networking doesn’t work, sound doesn’t work.” Proceeds to jump into terminal after sound doesn’t work, network doesn’t work. At least in 1999 “they” were right about Linux!
Thanks for bringing back the memories. I anticipate waking up screaming in the middle of the night for the next week or two from having nightmares about configuring Linux.
I bet you that thing would even run on a 386 if given enough ram. It took distributions aaaages to finally switch over their x86 binary packages to 586+
I can remember downloading Slackware to a gazillion floppies and installing via command line. If you wanted X windows it was a whole new level of pain and configuration
I am surprised that Red Hat only used one Boot disk in this version. Most distros around that time still had two floppies, in a "Boot" and a separate "Root" disk, before getting to the CD's.
@21:30: Actually you can use 'su' to switch to root user within a normal user login, a bit like 'sudo -i', but have some env configuaration stuff changed I don't know. And you can use the Xconfigurator like in the install steps, just type that long name in. I had my time with this stuff in those times and it wasn't too much fun...
I remember installing, I think it was Slackware... Back in 96 or 97? I installed over and over again trying to get the x configuration correct. Then someone told me that there was a program for configuring it lol. I had a 486 dx4-100 and eventually I got networking working too. That was huge because now I could telnet into the Solaris systems and do my computer science homework instead of walking all the way to the lab. I even set up X display forwarding so I could use fancy graphical apps. This is probably why I never really learned VI or emacs. Nedit for the win lol.
I had an extremely similar experience... Slackware back in '96 or '97. I also reinstalled many times as it was easier than trying to fix wrong installation choices. Many headaches trying to edit the Xf86 config file. It took me forever to figure out there was actually a shortcut hotkey combo to cycle through some of the commonly used example settings, to find one that would get a working desktop, before editing the file to be more specific to my exact hardware. If I recall, the hotkey was Ctrl+Shift+Left/Right Arrows ?
My first Unix was Coherent by Mark Williams Company. It ran on my 386-20 with 4 MB of RAM and a 40MB hard drive and came on about 40 floppies. This would have been about 1990.
I tried installing Red Hat back then. It didn't support my video card, complained that 16 MB of RAM was "very little" (even though it was perfectly fine for Windows 9x at the time), and made me manually sort out the dependencies of all the software it included. No thanks!
@@stargazer7644 I've used Windows 9x in as little as 4 MB of RAM. It was slow, but usable. And it doesn't take up anywhere near 500 MB of hard drive space.
@@DerekLippold Of course it depends on what you're trying to run, but Linux is much lighter weight than Windows. It has always worked great on older hardware that Windows was completely unusable on.
Ah nostalgia. Redhat 5 was the first Redhat I used, but started on Slackware and used Afterstep as my first 'desktop' - more a simple application launcher than the desktop we think of today :D I actually got Slackware on the 'Slackware Unleashed' book at Waterstones - and I loved how Red Hat, SuSE and Mandrake did the big boxes with installation / admin manuals included.
I too started on slackware 0.99. Desktop was dwm I think. Getting X working back then was a challenge due to lack of support for much hardware. Sound worked although could be a bit patchy. It was a time of eagerly awaiting the next kernel release and compiling it to see what support had been included.
@@_chrisr_ oh yes, always compiling the kernel with exactly what you needed and any optimisations for the architecture, those were the days... Sometimes breaking it in the process 😅
Nice video, man! I remember installing Fedora Core 1 and Mandrake on my Athlon Thunderbird, back in the day, from IT magazines that had special numbers with installation guides and nice pressed and colorfull distros CDs. ALSA was prezent, so sound was working out of the box. Some cool stuff were: playing movies with mplayer from text mode, without loading Xserver, or connecting to internet with PPP dialup scripts, or TUX racer and FOOBILIARD with 3d acceleration. I also had a SmoothWall distro running for a while on a Pentium 166 MMX, 32 mb ram, back in the early 2000s. I still have that Pentium 166 MMX PC. That was a fun time to be around!
I wanted to have a more traditional Linux experience, so put Arch on my PC. It only took two attempts to get it working, I was well impressed. Sadly I didn't have to manually compile the kernel, but X did break in amusing and hard to figure out ways to add some spice. But I did forget to set up the bootloader so the machine didn't boot after installing it. 11/10, highly recommend if you have a long weekend and nothing to do.
Wow I don’t miss those days. I remember paying for a commercial sound system since at the time it ”just worked” (although I can’t remember what it was called now). And the days of arcane setting up of X modelines and everything.
The fun times I had with the sndconfig command, and working out refresh rates for screens. If you put in some very silly values you could kill some SVGA monitors for good.
Amazing how similar it is to a modern install and how little has changed. If you think where computers were at 25 years before 1999, the average 90s computer user wouldn't have a clue how to use 1974 computer (and vice versa). I often think the same is true for games. By the late 90s we had 3D accelerated first person shooters. Today we have very similar games that are just a bit faster paced with a bit more detail.
God i remember installing that on servers in my company back in the day. Compaq Proliant 3000 servers. COuld be a pain in the backside to configure with the Compaq raid controllers. Pretty bomb proof too. Managed them using a telnet session from my Nokia 9000 series communicator phone. Usually from a flight to New York or London or Tokyo....
i remember getting this from an APC magazine at a newsagents with my very first job and spent the night installing this on my pentium 75 learning about xorg and the terminal....good times
The 90s was the golden era of Linux and man do I miss it. I feel like so many distros are so polished now that they have no magic. I still prefer distros like arch and even slackware for the fun.
FUN STORY!!! Back in 1999 I was working at a place that was an out source for a lot of companies, Xerox, Sun, SGI, etc. I heard some guys talking about recompiling a kernel and went to talk to them. They were the 1st phone based Red Hat support team in the US. They burned a CD for me and because of that I fell in love with anything other than Windows.
Such great memories from that era of Linux. I would have followed up the fresh install by installing Ximian's Desktop, a more polished and refined version of Gnome 1.4 iirc. RedCarpet was their update tool, and we still have Evolution the mail client etc. Great time.
I used to go to the library and check out the Linux books. There were CD holders in the back of the books with different distros. I don't know why exactly but Mandrake was my favorite distro around 1997-98 when I was about 12. I would only make it a few days on a Linux Desktop before getting frusturated and because I loved WinAmp skins. The good old days...
I remember trying an early version of Red Hat and Mandrake Linux in the early 2000s and my experience was pretty similar to what is in this video. For a PC user that was somewhat seasoned like I was, having used PCs regularly since the 386 era, Linux was a more difficult to setup than Windows but not impossible. Mostly took some patience and the ability to access the internet from another computer. However, for someone who was much less experienced and trying to set it up on their first or only PC, I could see it feeling like it was freaking awful to do at the time! One thing I think really helped people get some decent experience with Linux were downloadable and burnable Live CDs! That way a person could burn a CD, reboot their computer, boot into a Linux environment and play around without having to try to setup a dual boot configuration or blow away an existing Windows install. Especially handy on a family PC.
I can remember trying RedHat back in the day as I bought a pack of CDs with various distributions on. IIRC it was RH5. I can remember winding up in dependency hell (I was new to the Linux game; the closest I had got prior to that was using Xenix via a dumb terminal on a Programming course I did; luckily that meant I already knew vi & could make my way with compiling stuff) I switched to Debian and didn't look back. 🙂 (Although I dabble with Arch now, too)
20:48 I remember that I upgraded my 1997 P2 266 with 48 MB of RAM to a P3 667 with 128 MB in late 1999. While certainly somewhat high end (especially when I added the GeForce DDR), I didn't have extravagant money to put into it, I remember trying to stay close enough to the sweet spot. So 128MB being very expensive and very extravagant in 1999 raises my eyebrows a bit :)
I used RedHat 6.2 Server and Workstation in our computer lab back in uni! It was one of the better, more user-friendly Linux distros, although I really preferred Mandrake and SuSE. Nowadays I prefer Linux Mint for x86/x64 systems and Adelie for my antique PowerPC Macs.
well, back in the day with the old distros the man pages were really good for debugging issues you would run into. with the caveat that you had to read them. 96-99 was probably the peak of linux hardware support too, sometimes you'd get things working in linux easier than in windows with stuff like isdn drivers.
I think the last time I had any kind of problems were when Wayland was fairly new and I was running a mixed DPI setup (laptop with external monitor). To be fair, Windows was also terrible at handling it at the time, with stuff scaling incorrectly, looking "fuzzy" etc.
very good video! Now it is fun to have some retro linux videos. RH 6.1 is excellent! Next time pleaes install a few key software, mp3 player and word processor for ex.
I just found my RH 5.2 voor Alpha last week. Unfortunately I gave away my Alpha 21246 last year as it was gathering dust in the shed. You shall always see ;) So I threw the box out as well.
From experience with old labels in storage, odds are the adhesive on the stickers will have gone by now, either they'll be permanently stuck to the backing or they'll peel off but not stick back on to anything else.
I actually had an older RedHat version. In which you got 8 Cd's to install on a computer. If I recall that it would take over an hour for the install to complete. Course, being new to Redhat and Linux ...I installed everything. Jump ahead to 2024 and I work as a Redhat Systems Administrator. I still use Redhat, but wish IBM would spin it off and make it useable by all.
Running Fedora (and Mint before this for a few years) as my main system. I have been toying with it since the early 2000's, but now, I think it's a very nice replacement possibility, mainly due to the amount of web apps (even though I'm not a fan of their performance). With Fedora I was pleasantly surprised it started updating the bios of my Lenovo laptop, always needed Windows for that. :)
interestingly i installed my first linux ca. 2002, and i believe it was redhat, but it didn’t recognize or install the mouse at all (a standard ps/2 one), and i had to dabble in terminal to make it work. so this wasn’t encouraging
Nothing changed after all those years lol. I have run Linux for a bunch of years as my main system and often it was something very basic that had to be fixed again 😢 Especially after updates.
good old Red Hat was bought by IBM and turned evil. Was a debian user myself in 99. It was not quite as streamlined to get up either. But this era was peak Linux imo. Maybe more 2000-2005. Lots of window managers to choose from etc. The distros has turned a bit more boring over the years. especially now that we loose all those window managers due to wayland. Good video.
the last time I HAD to enter the terminal on linux was to edit some printer configuration files for cups or whatever. Almost everything else is plug and play for the most part. Granted I do optionally enter the terminal to accomplish certain tasks faster than what the GUI can do.
I started with Red Hat (3.something) in 1996, continued with Slack and Debian, but it was not until 2004 and Ubuntu that I didn't have spend hours trying to get X working after a new install. Things "just worked" with Ubuntu (which I later abandoned for Mint).
And actually RedHat6.1 required about 64Megs of RAM (which I didn't have, only 32 SDRAM in my socket7 PC) and it was possible to fill about 2gigs of HDD if installing everything from those CDs.
Only driver problems I have now is that Linux sometimes fails to talk to my fan LEDs. Such a small complaint, and I'm so glad that we're down to these petty problems.
That setup and configuration was relatively easy for a Linux distro at the time. I tried something just before Ubuntu came about and I got lost in the installer
I first installed Linux in 1999 too. It was a freebie CD of Red hat 5.1 from the front of a magazine. That distribution had one choice of graphical interface and that was xfce. Like you say, your distribution must have been one of the first to include gnome, because I remember upgrading xfce to KDE on my red hat 5.1 installation manually late in 1999 and I'd never heard of gnome at that point.
I think 1997 was my first redhat experience. I hated it lol ended up ignoring linux as much as I can and regret it to this day as it's part of my every day work life.
Yeah, for basic things, you don't need to do any terminal work. If you want to do ANYTHING slightly deeper, you need to know your way around the terminal, mate. Whenever I hear people saying "linux is easy", either they are being disingenuous or not telling the whole story.
Well, for me personally it is. :) You can run a lot of modern applications that are required by businesses etc. these days as they are all web apps. I switched to it as my main system and couldn't be happier developing on it. And given the direction Windows is going, I think I'm not completely alone.
@@VincentGroenewold I agree with the direction Windows is going. But this video isn't that far off from how the experience is today. Linux is still only for either the professional or the enthusiast who has plenty of time (and patience) to figure things out. It's not for the average user, until they start focusing. Something simple as running hybrid graphics cards, which is well over 10 years old, is still a big hit or miss. Or the user just magically needs to know to change something at the boot commands. It reminds me of the audio driver in this video. Why isn't that whole extra step not just automated? Running webbased applications isn't really something to be proud of? That can even run on my phone or an old potato.
And just the other day I installed Debian + Ollama and had a llm up and running in less than an hour.. It took longer updating the bios on the motherboard (yes - I had issues)
OMG! Samsung 3Ne, I had it and started with RHL5.1 back in 1998. And its 800x600 was too small to host redhat6.* series picture. Even Xfig from 5.1 didn't fit in there. Nice crisp monitor, but unfortunate resolution for Windows3.1/95 98 didn't fit either.
ohhh enlightenment desktop :) what does it mean when the machine loops through the memory count several times in a row on boot? i've seen machines do that and never quite understood why and when a realtek network adapter misbehaves.... try an intel network adapter realtek drivers do weird things sometimes, and if the auto config is applying a generic network driver ..... well it's something worth ruling out, let's just put it that way
It means the Quick POST option is disabled, Award's standard memory test is a little paranoid and unnecessary on a known-good machine. A different network adaptor probably wouldn't have made any difference since the system is using a generic NE2000 driver.
Redhat 7.2 was my first and yeah the similar story as every one else Had a winmodem, couldn't get online. Later I got a serial modem then a year later we got DSL. Also couldn't get nvidia graphics working beyond basic unaccelerated graphics. Got me stuck on Windows for a while. I full time linux now though.
I was born in 98 so I didn't really get to see this era of Linux firsthand, but something I would like to note is that in my experience messing around on VMs and such Caldera had the most streamlined installation and end user desktop Linux experience of that time period. Corel Linux looks promising too but I haven't quite got it working with a VM yet.
Thanks for leaving out the tedious bits. All these people's videos with a minute of sped up soldering with techno music drives me nuts. It seems to be trend in retro computer videos... a TERRIBLE trend.
Ironically that "graphical mode" setup actually runs in text mode, just styled to look graphical.
I remember my father installing Red Hat Linux on my old 486 machine when we got a Pentium to replace it. It took him ages. I couldn't believe it, and stomped my feet and wailed about how bad it was. Little did I realise that a few decades later every computational device I had would be running some sort of Linux OS. So much of what people take for granted in the latest OSes has been highlighted here beautifully. ESPECIALLY the networking issues. Good work as usual!
This era of Red Hat was just so cool. I dearly love that logo. I dabbled in Linux back in '99, and it was good geeky fun. Now the magic is gone because pretty much just works. That being said, it's my home server/gaming desktop now, and it runs real games. We're not limited to Frozen Bubble and TuxRacer anymore.
I first installed Slackware from a few dozen floppy disks in 1995. In 1996 I got the Infomagic 6 CD Linux collection. I think I tried out Redhat back then but eventually stayed on Slackware.
Linux was so powerful back then, with virtual terminals and true multitasking and all the stuff from the Unix world. And if you had a suitable video card you might have been able to tease out video modes from your monitor that were not possible on Windows.
Same here, that Infomagic collection was fantastic.
I watched your Mac mini eGPU video and after seeing this one, I'm officially subbed. Keep going with weird Linux shenanigans, I love them
To this day, having a Broadcom WiFi chip is still a problem, while Intel stuff works without issue.
I remember the main issue when I tried this back in the day was I didn't have Ethernet at home, instead was using a PCI 56k modem, which I recall was what was known as a "WinModem" where the hardware was fairly basic and the proprietary Windows driver did all the hard work. I believe it took a LOT of effort and reverse engineering from driver coders to get these working in Linux at all.
Yep, I remember this. I first installed Red Hat 6.2 in about 2001 and had the same problem. Luckily I managed to persuade my (now) mother in law to let me swap my WinModem with her chunky external 56k one.
WinModems were my biggest problem. I missed out on desktop Linux for years because of those cursed things. At least proprietary graphics drivers give you more for your suffering now. And they actually work of course, which was never a given with earlier hardware.
I am extremely triggered by the word "Winmodem".
I wish I had done this back then and saved myself twenty years of pain with windows. Linux lifer, now. Mint, Debian mostly.
I tried and boy I'm glad I didn't get into Linux back then. Everything was painful and not even stable. My Windows experiences were vastly superior I shit you not. Only around Ubuntu 8.04 Linux desktops began to be semi-usable.
I got my first RHCE certification on Red Hat Linux 6.1 back in 1999. This brought up a lot of really cool old memories. Thank you.
Thank you for this nostalgia hit ! Used RedHat in late 90's on school's server, spent lots of hours learning, letting it overnight to render PoVRay images, compiling whatever picked our teenage attention or simply having a blast with our 256kbps line.
0:32 “They say Linux is complicated that you have to jump into terminal all the time, networking doesn’t work, sound doesn’t work.” Proceeds to jump into terminal after sound doesn’t work, network doesn’t work. At least in 1999 “they” were right about Linux!
Thanks for bringing back the memories. I anticipate waking up screaming in the middle of the night for the next week or two from having nightmares about configuring Linux.
I have my SUSE 9.0 professional box. It was very nice to get a printed manuals.
I bet you that thing would even run on a 386 if given enough ram. It took distributions aaaages to finally switch over their x86 binary packages to 586+
I can remember downloading Slackware to a gazillion floppies and installing via command line. If you wanted X windows it was a whole new level of pain and configuration
Look the trouble isn't installing Linux, it's what comes afterwards.
Wow this was my first linux distro actually. This video is gonna be great to watch!
I am surprised that Red Hat only used one Boot disk in this version.
Most distros around that time still had two floppies, in a "Boot" and a separate "Root" disk, before getting to the CD's.
@21:30: Actually you can use 'su' to switch to root user within a normal user login, a bit like 'sudo -i', but have some env configuaration stuff changed I don't know. And you can use the Xconfigurator like in the install steps, just type that long name in. I had my time with this stuff in those times and it wasn't too much fun...
Ah yes, I didn't think to try su. Still, not too inconvenient to log in as root. 😁
I remember installing, I think it was Slackware... Back in 96 or 97? I installed over and over again trying to get the x configuration correct. Then someone told me that there was a program for configuring it lol. I had a 486 dx4-100 and eventually I got networking working too. That was huge because now I could telnet into the Solaris systems and do my computer science homework instead of walking all the way to the lab. I even set up X display forwarding so I could use fancy graphical apps. This is probably why I never really learned VI or emacs. Nedit for the win lol.
I had an extremely similar experience... Slackware back in '96 or '97.
I also reinstalled many times as it was easier than trying to fix wrong installation choices.
Many headaches trying to edit the Xf86 config file.
It took me forever to figure out there was actually a shortcut hotkey combo to cycle through some of the commonly used example settings, to find one that would get a working desktop, before editing the file to be more specific to my exact hardware.
If I recall, the hotkey was Ctrl+Shift+Left/Right Arrows ?
so many memories, really nice trip into the past
My first Unix was Coherent by Mark Williams Company. It ran on my 386-20 with 4 MB of RAM and a 40MB hard drive and came on about 40 floppies. This would have been about 1990.
I tried installing Red Hat back then. It didn't support my video card, complained that 16 MB of RAM was "very little" (even though it was perfectly fine for Windows 9x at the time), and made me manually sort out the dependencies of all the software it included. No thanks!
Linux always ran on significantly less hardware than Windows required.
@@stargazer7644 I've used Windows 9x in as little as 4 MB of RAM. It was slow, but usable. And it doesn't take up anywhere near 500 MB of hard drive space.
@@stargazer7644doesn’t mean it would work though lol😅
@@DerekLippold Of course it depends on what you're trying to run, but Linux is much lighter weight than Windows. It has always worked great on older hardware that Windows was completely unusable on.
Ah nostalgia. Redhat 5 was the first Redhat I used, but started on Slackware and used Afterstep as my first 'desktop' - more a simple application launcher than the desktop we think of today :D I actually got Slackware on the 'Slackware Unleashed' book at Waterstones - and I loved how Red Hat, SuSE and Mandrake did the big boxes with installation / admin manuals included.
I too started on slackware 0.99. Desktop was dwm I think. Getting X working back then was a challenge due to lack of support for much hardware. Sound worked although could be a bit patchy. It was a time of eagerly awaiting the next kernel release and compiling it to see what support had been included.
@@_chrisr_ oh yes, always compiling the kernel with exactly what you needed and any optimisations for the architecture, those were the days... Sometimes breaking it in the process 😅
Nice video, man! I remember installing Fedora Core 1 and Mandrake on my Athlon Thunderbird, back in the day, from IT magazines that had special numbers with installation guides and nice pressed and colorfull distros CDs. ALSA was prezent, so sound was working out of the box. Some cool stuff were: playing movies with mplayer from text mode, without loading Xserver, or connecting to internet with PPP dialup scripts, or TUX racer and FOOBILIARD with 3d acceleration. I also had a SmoothWall distro running for a while on a Pentium 166 MMX, 32 mb ram, back in the early 2000s. I still have that Pentium 166 MMX PC. That was a fun time to be around!
I wanted to have a more traditional Linux experience, so put Arch on my PC. It only took two attempts to get it working, I was well impressed. Sadly I didn't have to manually compile the kernel, but X did break in amusing and hard to figure out ways to add some spice. But I did forget to set up the bootloader so the machine didn't boot after installing it. 11/10, highly recommend if you have a long weekend and nothing to do.
It was about this time …..(Oct ‘99) that everyone relying on IT was sweating buckets over whether the world would disappear up its own arse 🙄
Some might argue that it has - just not for the reasons they expected at the time 😅
A lot have!
Wow I don’t miss those days. I remember paying for a commercial sound system since at the time it ”just worked” (although I can’t remember what it was called now). And the days of arcane setting up of X modelines and everything.
Ahh, my first version of Linux. Good times!
Excellent Linuxxing, sir!
The fun times I had with the sndconfig command, and working out refresh rates for screens. If you put in some very silly values you could kill some SVGA monitors for good.
Next time 1995 Slackware? More of a challenge.
Amazing how similar it is to a modern install and how little has changed. If you think where computers were at 25 years before 1999, the average 90s computer user wouldn't have a clue how to use 1974 computer (and vice versa). I often think the same is true for games. By the late 90s we had 3D accelerated first person shooters. Today we have very similar games that are just a bit faster paced with a bit more detail.
Im glad that my first Linux experiences back in early 2000's were on ibm thinkpads so just about everything worked out of the box no issues lol
God i remember installing that on servers in my company back in the day. Compaq Proliant 3000 servers. COuld be a pain in the backside to configure with the Compaq raid controllers. Pretty bomb proof too. Managed them using a telnet session from my Nokia 9000 series communicator phone. Usually from a flight to New York or London or Tokyo....
Red Hat Linux 6.2 was my first Linux. I already have the Stickers.
Red Hat was a PAIN in the A$$ to setup compare to today's Linux distros.!
i remember getting this from an APC magazine at a newsagents with my very first job and spent the night installing this on my pentium 75 learning about xorg and the terminal....good times
The 90s was the golden era of Linux and man do I miss it. I feel like so many distros are so polished now that they have no magic. I still prefer distros like arch and even slackware for the fun.
FUN STORY!!! Back in 1999 I was working at a place that was an out source for a lot of companies, Xerox, Sun, SGI, etc. I heard some guys talking about recompiling a kernel and went to talk to them. They were the 1st phone based Red Hat support team in the US. They burned a CD for me and because of that I fell in love with anything other than Windows.
Such great memories from that era of Linux. I would have followed up the fresh install by installing Ximian's Desktop, a more polished and refined version of Gnome 1.4 iirc. RedCarpet was their update tool, and we still have Evolution the mail client etc. Great time.
I used to go to the library and check out the Linux books. There were CD holders in the back of the books with different distros. I don't know why exactly but Mandrake was my favorite distro around 1997-98 when I was about 12. I would only make it a few days on a Linux Desktop before getting frusturated and because I loved WinAmp skins. The good old days...
I remember trying an early version of Red Hat and Mandrake Linux in the early 2000s and my experience was pretty similar to what is in this video. For a PC user that was somewhat seasoned like I was, having used PCs regularly since the 386 era, Linux was a more difficult to setup than Windows but not impossible. Mostly took some patience and the ability to access the internet from another computer.
However, for someone who was much less experienced and trying to set it up on their first or only PC, I could see it feeling like it was freaking awful to do at the time!
One thing I think really helped people get some decent experience with Linux were downloadable and burnable Live CDs! That way a person could burn a CD, reboot their computer, boot into a Linux environment and play around without having to try to setup a dual boot configuration or blow away an existing Windows install. Especially handy on a family PC.
I can remember trying RedHat back in the day as I bought a pack of CDs with various distributions on. IIRC it was RH5.
I can remember winding up in dependency hell (I was new to the Linux game; the closest I had got prior to that was using Xenix via a dumb terminal on a Programming course I did; luckily that meant I already knew vi & could make my way with compiling stuff)
I switched to Debian and didn't look back. 🙂
(Although I dabble with Arch now, too)
20:48 I remember that I upgraded my 1997 P2 266 with 48 MB of RAM to a P3 667 with 128 MB in late 1999. While certainly somewhat high end (especially when I added the GeForce DDR), I didn't have extravagant money to put into it, I remember trying to stay close enough to the sweet spot. So 128MB being very expensive and very extravagant in 1999 raises my eyebrows a bit :)
I used RedHat 6.2 Server and Workstation in our computer lab back in uni! It was one of the better, more user-friendly Linux distros, although I really preferred Mandrake and SuSE.
Nowadays I prefer Linux Mint for x86/x64 systems and Adelie for my antique PowerPC Macs.
well, back in the day with the old distros the man pages were really good for debugging issues you would run into. with the caveat that you had to read them. 96-99 was probably the peak of linux hardware support too, sometimes you'd get things working in linux easier than in windows with stuff like isdn drivers.
Arguably it's more peak now. It's hardware support is absolutely brilliant now.
I think the last time I had any kind of problems were when Wayland was fairly new and I was running a mixed DPI setup (laptop with external monitor). To be fair, Windows was also terrible at handling it at the time, with stuff scaling incorrectly, looking "fuzzy" etc.
very good video! Now it is fun to have some retro linux videos. RH 6.1 is excellent! Next time pleaes install a few key software, mp3 player and word processor for ex.
Ah big box linux! Love it
I just found my RH 5.2 voor Alpha last week. Unfortunately I gave away my Alpha 21246 last year as it was gathering dust in the shed. You shall always see ;) So I threw the box out as well.
From experience with old labels in storage, odds are the adhesive on the stickers will have gone by now, either they'll be permanently stuck to the backing or they'll peel off but not stick back on to anything else.
I actually had an older RedHat version. In which you got 8 Cd's to install on a computer. If I recall that it would take over an hour for the install to complete. Course, being new to Redhat and Linux ...I installed everything. Jump ahead to 2024 and I work as a Redhat Systems Administrator. I still use Redhat, but wish IBM would spin it off and make it useable by all.
Running Fedora (and Mint before this for a few years) as my main system. I have been toying with it since the early 2000's, but now, I think it's a very nice replacement possibility, mainly due to the amount of web apps (even though I'm not a fan of their performance). With Fedora I was pleasantly surprised it started updating the bios of my Lenovo laptop, always needed Windows for that. :)
interestingly i installed my first linux ca. 2002, and i believe it was redhat, but it didn’t recognize or install the mouse at all (a standard ps/2 one), and i had to dabble in terminal to make it work. so this wasn’t encouraging
Nothing changed after all those years lol.
I have run Linux for a bunch of years as my main system and often it was something very basic that had to be fixed again 😢
Especially after updates.
@@p_mouse8676 😔
@@p_mouse8676 Not my experience these days though, that was definitely the case years ago for me as well.
good old Red Hat was bought by IBM and turned evil. Was a debian user myself in 99. It was not quite as streamlined to get up either. But this era was peak Linux imo. Maybe more 2000-2005. Lots of window managers to choose from etc. The distros has turned a bit more boring over the years. especially now that we loose all those window managers due to wayland.
Good video.
I think it was 1999 when i bought it in my local computer shop. I'm 42 now so it sounds about right
the last time I HAD to enter the terminal on linux was to edit some printer configuration files for cups or whatever. Almost everything else is plug and play for the most part. Granted I do optionally enter the terminal to accomplish certain tasks faster than what the GUI can do.
I started with Red Hat (3.something) in 1996, continued with Slack and Debian, but it was not until 2004 and Ubuntu that I didn't have spend hours trying to get X working after a new install. Things "just worked" with Ubuntu (which I later abandoned for Mint).
I did not expect to see Linux on this channel.
And actually RedHat6.1 required about 64Megs of RAM (which I didn't have, only 32 SDRAM in my socket7 PC) and it was possible to fill about 2gigs of HDD if installing everything from those CDs.
Installing a new OS and ending up with an open case and messing with the hardware, that's just how things went in those days
Only driver problems I have now is that Linux sometimes fails to talk to my fan LEDs. Such a small complaint, and I'm so glad that we're down to these petty problems.
Been running linux for years now, it just works and no bullshit stuff like in windows, manjaro linux is my go to OS
I remember Red Hat 9. I miss the Bluecurve theme
I've never had a good experience (outside of playing light cycles) with linux, chiefly when it's time to try to install literally anything.
Then you must be holding it wrong
My only troubles were PulseAudio and nVidia. Which distro?
btw, i'm using arch watching this video
That setup and configuration was relatively easy for a Linux distro at the time. I tried something just before Ubuntu came about and I got lost in the installer
Oh LInux. I remember doing an install of Red Hat back in the day and what a pain it was. Heck, installing Netware was easier! 🤣🤣🤣
Memories.
I still have the monitor I was using back then. I wrote its sync rates on the bezel in sharpie because of Linux,.
Now I feel old
I first installed Linux in 1999 too. It was a freebie CD of Red hat 5.1 from the front of a magazine.
That distribution had one choice of graphical interface and that was xfce. Like you say, your distribution must have been one of the first to include gnome, because I remember upgrading xfce to KDE on my red hat 5.1 installation manually late in 1999 and I'd never heard of gnome at that point.
I wonder when the first terminal emulator came out so you didn't have to keep dropping to the terminal directly.
I think 1997 was my first redhat experience. I hated it lol ended up ignoring linux as much as I can and regret it to this day as it's part of my every day work life.
Yeah, for basic things, you don't need to do any terminal work. If you want to do ANYTHING slightly deeper, you need to know your way around the terminal, mate. Whenever I hear people saying "linux is easy", either they are being disingenuous or not telling the whole story.
Both can be true
Back in the day people were talking and promising that it WILL be the future.
They are still repeating the same thing so many years later 😂😂
For sure!
Well, for me personally it is. :) You can run a lot of modern applications that are required by businesses etc. these days as they are all web apps. I switched to it as my main system and couldn't be happier developing on it. And given the direction Windows is going, I think I'm not completely alone.
@@VincentGroenewold I agree with the direction Windows is going.
But this video isn't that far off from how the experience is today.
Linux is still only for either the professional or the enthusiast who has plenty of time (and patience) to figure things out.
It's not for the average user, until they start focusing.
Something simple as running hybrid graphics cards, which is well over 10 years old, is still a big hit or miss.
Or the user just magically needs to know to change something at the boot commands.
It reminds me of the audio driver in this video.
Why isn't that whole extra step not just automated?
Running webbased applications isn't really something to be proud of?
That can even run on my phone or an old potato.
And just the other day I installed Debian + Ollama and had a llm up and running in less than an hour.. It took longer updating the bios on the motherboard (yes - I had issues)
OMG! Samsung 3Ne, I had it and started with RHL5.1 back in 1998. And its 800x600 was too small to host redhat6.* series picture. Even Xfig from 5.1 didn't fit in there. Nice crisp monitor, but unfortunate resolution for Windows3.1/95 98 didn't fit either.
ohhh enlightenment desktop :)
what does it mean when the machine loops through the memory count several times in a row on boot? i've seen machines do that and never quite understood why
and when a realtek network adapter misbehaves.... try an intel network adapter
realtek drivers do weird things sometimes, and if the auto config is applying a generic network driver ..... well it's something worth ruling out, let's just put it that way
It means the Quick POST option is disabled, Award's standard memory test is a little paranoid and unnecessary on a known-good machine.
A different network adaptor probably wouldn't have made any difference since the system is using a generic NE2000 driver.
@@firstsurname9893 thanks!
I bought my pc in 1998 and put 256mb in it, a decision I certainly didn’t later regret but yeah, it wasn’t the cheap part of the pc!
Redhat 7.2 was my first and yeah the similar story as every one else Had a winmodem, couldn't get online. Later I got a serial modem then a year later we got DSL. Also couldn't get nvidia graphics working beyond basic unaccelerated graphics. Got me stuck on Windows for a while. I full time linux now though.
I had this version 😂 Never really used it tho!
Why is the logo of a red lizard punching a white triceratops?
Dou you have a 2007 blackbook there by
60 Hz on a crt was painful I remember.
i was more of a SuSE fan back then
Maybe can try S.u.S.E. Linux instead. I never tried S.u.S.E (1999 era) before, but I believe it is much better than Red Hat Linux
I was born in 98 so I didn't really get to see this era of Linux firsthand, but something I would like to note is that in my experience messing around on VMs and such Caldera had the most streamlined installation and end user desktop Linux experience of that time period. Corel Linux looks promising too but I haven't quite got it working with a VM yet.
Don’t laugh. I’m still supporting an Enterprise environment using RHEL 6.
Stickers… scan them so they can reproduced.
old software/hardware don't do well with modern DHCP.
MSI MS-5129
Rigged, you taken smoothest distro in those times
Just what every person needs: clustering for their web servers.
The funniest part about all this is that GNOME from 1999 is still WAY more functional than GNOME from 2024
Thanks for leaving out the tedious bits. All these people's videos with a minute of sped up soldering with techno music drives me nuts. It seems to be trend in retro computer videos... a TERRIBLE trend.