Installing Debian Linux 2.1 From 1999 Was A Painful Experience ...
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- Опубликовано: 23 июл 2024
- In the first video of 2021, I decided looking at a sealed box of Debian Linux 2.1 from 1999 that I found on eBay would be a fun way to set the tone for the new year. Sponsored by VA Linux, this box proudly claims that it's the last Linux you'll ever have to buy, trouts up the advantages of apt-get, and that you would never have to buy software again.
Included in the box was a demo disk of Myth II from Loki Games, offers of StarOffice, and much more, but what I would find in practice is that, at best, most of what was offered was optimistic at best, and downright deceptive at worst from VA Linux. Compounding the issue, VA muddled this release of Debian by only including one of a two CD set, but this glosses over a large number of issues in trying to use Linux in this era, as well as the oddities of Debian in specific.
As compared to almost any other distribution, Debian had a reputation of being somewhat difficult to install (although its admittedly better than Slackware), but what would surprise me the most is that Debian's overall user experience was far less than that of Softlanding Linux System from five years prior.
This doesn't help that Debian is overly complicated and it would take many years of effort (primarily from Ubuntu) that would help smooth out many of the rough end of this product. While this video only goes into the ins and outs of installation, it would show what a miserable experience a user would have, and some of the major mistakes made by VA Linux. It would also show that while Debian has become a cornerstone of many Linux distributions today, it would also have a difficult start and genesis.
Interesting Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
00:57 - The Golden Age of Big Boxed Linux
03:10 - Cutting the Shrink-wrap
05:00 - Dual-booting Discussion, FIPS, and PartitionMagic
06:10 - Starting Installation
07:12 - Disk Partitioning
08:30 - Finding the CD-ROM
09:30 - Second-Stage Installer, tasksel, and dselect
12:00 - Trying to Configure Debian Properly ...
13:50 - Difficulty with gpm ...
15:08 - Debian's origins
16:33 - On The Topic of Dial-Up Networking ...
18:30 - The Single CD Problem
19:20 - Post-Installation Problems
20:05 - Deceptive Packaging from VA Linux/Conclusions
21:50 - Signoff and Thanks
---
NCommander's Socials:
Twitter: / fossfirefighter
Discord: / discord
Blog: casadevall.pro/
Music is from www.epidemicsound.com, with the following tracks used in order:
- Circular Thought - Ethan Sloan
- West of the Soul - River Foxcroft
- Without Purpose - Jon
- Rise of the Velcro - Gabriel Lewis
- Deviation In Time - Johannes Bornlof
- Infernal Machine - Bonnie Grace
- Maze Heist - Max Anson
- Person of Interest - Dream Cave
- At Evenfall - Howard Harper-Barnes
- In the Aftermath - Michael Rothery
- Night Thoughts - Max Anson
- Chasing the Truth - Dream Cave
This video is a corrected upload since the original had broken audio issues. 
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Now installing Arch and Gentoo feels like a walk in the park.
I thought you were kidding before I watched the video. Now that I'm finished watching... Wow. You couldn't have been more accurate.
With Arch there is still a risk of someone kicking you in ta balls during the walk...
@@Psevdonim123 Then saying, Its your fault RTFM.
It is a walk in the park. That’s what Wikis are for
Hi there I have temporary made my desktop PC not work.
I think it is the power supply but that doesn’t matter I’m just gonna pay somebody and get them to repair it.
I have been using Manjaro for some years now and I have been considering watching some of the many RUclips instruction videos on how to get arch Linux up and running and I am sure it will be nothing like the hell I went through in the 90s!
Linus's quote about not using Debian because it was difficult to install last time he tried is making a whole lot more sense now.
Dselect was legend in its obtuseness. I gave it a shot a few times back in the day. It made a monkey out of me.
@@1pcfred I remember people hating it and couldn't remember why. Then I realized, "Hey, that's the screen I could never remember how to exit so I could install everything manually through apt and dpkg!"
@@dycedargselderbrother5353 way back when I ran Slackware and tried Debian from time to time. Debian wouldn't let me install things because they "conflicted" with other packages. When I knew I'd had both installed in Slackware. It always drove me up the wall. Back then dependencies were rough. Though to this day occasionally I'll run into a dependency issue.
@@1pcfred That sounds familiar. I recall using dpkg's --force-all command in situations like that.
@@dycedargselderbrother5353 forcing things just makes me feel a bit funny. There's parts of package management that I haven't really learned. It can all get involved. For the most part lately I don't get that involved myself anymore either. Once I get a few things working I'm good. I just had to do some goofball stuff with Mono to get a program to work. What a mess that all was. Still is in fact. But the program runs so I'm happy.
this is probably why Linus says he can't figure out Debian
1999 was the last time he tried.
That quote from him is starting to make a lot more sense after watching this....
I don't blame him after wathing this.
This could legitamately make someome have a breakdown if it was being installed on their only hardware and they didnt know what to do next. I got my first PC two years later and XP was a cake walk to install without the internet. Can you imagine how many people would have sworn off Linux for life from this experience or just hearing about it?
@@gm2407 I sure would have. This makes me glad I started in 2012-2013ish
even debian these days has pain in the ass installation process and not many things are preconfigured out of the box. i just use another debian-based distros like sparkylinux, mx linux or antix then configure the system afterwards.
So, you're basically buying a book with a free CD...
That was common, e.g. "The Linux Bible" came with Yggdrasil Linux and "Linux Configuration & Installation" by Volkerding & others came with a Slackware CD of course. And so many magazines had double CDs incuded with all sorts of distributions, like Storm Linux and TurboLinux, but also the regular RedHats, SuSEs etc.
Amazingly there are still Linux magazines for sale with distribution DVDs. But sadly, Linux Journal is no more.
No, you're buying a book with a free coaster.
@@thepuzzlemaster64 no, I'm buying a free offer for Staroffice which happens to have some plastic and tree pulp.
@@northof-62 That was exactly how I got my first copies of Red Hat and Mandrake in the early 00’s.
@@krazykat64 nice 😃
My first Linux was a Debian 2.2 "potato" when I was around 17. My middle school IT teacher copied it on 3 CD's for me. I loved it, I could find almost everything in the dselect utility, I've even installed it on a 486 which I built from junk computer parts, and made a router to share the 56k modem with my brother. In those times, there was a free dial-up provider in Hungary, but with limited slots available. It was free between 18:00 and 6:00, so i made a crontab and an automated wvdial script to get the slot every night. That machine had a Digital DEC203 (if I remember) 10mbps ISA network card and 4 MB of RAM, booted from a 120MB hard drive. My main PC was a Celeron 333 MHz with 64MB ram, running Windows NT 4.0 / Debian. I used this distro for copying DRM protected audio CD's for my friends. cdrdao made a "copy-protected-copy" of audio discs with "cactus data shield" or similar protection...
Your main pc sounds like a powerful one for the era, am I right?
@@sam_music555 Pentium II era... 1998-1999... This celeron had less cache than a real Pentium II...
Was it codenamed potato or was that a nickname it developed?
@@OlafoWaffle It was officially called Potato. Debian releases are all named after characters from Toy Story.
nice story
oh my god I feel so vindicated, decades later. 22 years ago I got this exact box and tried, struggling, for hours, to install debian. i got it working eventually because i happened to be friends with one of Debian's core developers, who provided me excellent and thorough support, but it was still a nightmare getting slink up and running. And I thought it was because I was a dumbass. Its shit like this that made me embark on a career in UX design. I may well be a dumbass, but thats not why i had so much trouble with this debian install back in the days of pentiums and giant CRT monitors. great video.
When the install procedure is so shit that you have to know someone skilled w/ this type of stuff and it made you want to pursue a career in UX design. If I got my dad (IT person at trading company who uses Debian Linux often) to do this, he would give up and he's not the type of guy to give up in front of a command line. I installed Debian recently in a VM and I thought it was a pain in the ass w/ GRUB not working and none of the leaders at my computer club knowing how to use GRUB.
It's more easiest to install Slackware
@@garyburke6156 You are not alone. I feel vindicated as well.
I really appreciate how really well is now all documented. Even Gentoo seems much better end-user experiencie than this :/
Feel you there man. Been there. Knoppix was a real revolution for a Debian distro.
Hey, Gentoo is not that hard to install. Usage has a little bit of trial-error, but is actually super easy when you learn the quirks. Documentation is everything for IT stuff.
i use primarily arch and debian, i tried gentoo and i can tell you right now the #1 downside by far is waiting 30 minutes for firefox to compile, 20 minutes for wine to compile, 40 minutes for kernel to compile, etc. on and on every single time there's a major update to something that requires full recompilation. Arch cuts out the compile time for everything that you don't actually need or want to set custom compile time settings for, and the AUR community provides easy scripts to quickly start compiling anything that you do. Also in terms of "bleeding edge" features promoted by both, for some reason Arch seems to often have newer packages than even Gentoo. For example right now the Arch stable kernel package is version 5.10.8, and it's precompiled, while the Gentoo _testing_ kernel package is only 5.10.7. This can seriously matter for uses a bleeding-edge distro is actually useful for, for example, in 2019 I bought the factory-new AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT and Arch was literally the only distro that could use it out of the box, for months, because its more updated kernel and mesa packages actually contained a functional driver for it, while any other distro required 3rd-party driver repository and even then suffered severe issues because only the most bleeding-edge distros were beginning to work around the AMD NAVI FLR hardware bug. On pedantically purist GNU/Linux gaming PC, the bleeding edge matters to compete with the graphics performance and compatibility of the proprietary operating systems and drivers. Run the game server on Debian. It's stable for weeks of uptime and does not need to be updated often.
sure use gentoo if you have AMD Ryzen 3990x or some similar extremely overpowered CPU and can compile the whole operating system in 60 seconds. but software stack for games always becomes more large and bloated so know in the future the compile times gradually increase.
@@tacokoneko Lol, and there I am on my old computer which takes about 3 hours compiling Firefox (for that you have binaries tho if you want, you know.).
Arch is good, but with Gentoo you can enable experimental or specific flags that ain't always enabled by default and allow games to run better, or simply for that specific game that won't do in vanilla...
Oh, and a big plus is the community. I had a terrible experience with the Arch forums.
Oh damn. I avoided Debian like the plague back in the day, now I remember why. That hurt....
me too!
This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
@@NCommander he he 😆
@@NCommander I'm curious about how a version of Slackware from this time period would compare. See if it's easier than SLS or Debian 2.1 or just as much of a nightmare.
@@cubedmelons876 Better. Debian was not meant to be a GUI based distro but a distro focusing on stable packages for servers. Even today it's not ideal to run Debian as a desktop OS (use Mint instead). It's a distro you install on a headless server then ssh into.
Damn am I grateful I was born in a time where GNU/Linux is easy.
To be fair, it was easy if you used good hardware. That's why it was massively adopted on servers. Companies could pay the vendors to modify their programs to accept Linux.
It's nuts how much Linux has improved. I started with Linux around 2004 and it was tricky at times, but manageable. In the 90s you had to be hardcore to use it. In the early 2000s you had to be an enthusiast, Linux was good for every day use, but was still playing catch up to Windows. Now? I'm confident to say that using a distro like Fedora, Ubuntu etc. is a much easier, smoother and pleasant experience than using any version of Windows.
@@dabrams84 Windows has had file previews in explorer since, what, Vista?
I have forced myself to use Linux at home for over a year now, and, even though, I'm a seasoned software engineer and power user, my conclusion is that Linux as a desktop environment has a long way to go before it can be considered user friendly.
@@babyboomertwerkteam5662 its been a thing since Windows 98 FE or SE, pretty sure
@@AndreasToth I'm skeptical that any of that is true. Especially when you don't specify a Linux distro, which in many cases now can really be considered distinct OSes, or desktop environment, or.... Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, i3...? Fedora, Arch, Debian, Gentoo...? If I said Windows doesn't have a user-friendly desktop environment, but was unclear and it was uncertain if I meant Win 3.x, Win95, 98, Me, 2000, 7, 8, 10 or 11 in '24, how would you respond? Probably you would say "you're not really a "software engineer" are you?
It's just simply a miracle that after 22 years in the oven, Debian has gone from a frustrating install experience that involves a lot of know-how about how your computer works and typing in alien-sounding commands to Debian just ending up using Calamares in Debian 11 and providing a "click Next-Next-Next-Install and you're done" install experience.
I have to say I got into Linux at the right time.
Now I understand why linus torvalds never used debian
@homelessWTF He is "Linux" creator, nothing to do with GNU or other operating systems like Android, lol.
Well imagine the level of product specific knowledge required to not hit a road block on using this. One slip and its all ruined.
She turned me into a newt!
I am showing my age here, but I remember install Xenix on a 386 with an MFM HDD, this made the Debian partitioner seem good. To install Xenix (first versions) you needed to calculate the partition heads/cylinders/sectors with a calculator, if you got it even slightly wrong the system would install (taking about 5 hours and 35 floppy disks) then round about the second reboot it would corrupt its hard disk and crash, needing to be installed again from scratch. Over a period of a week I did this 4 or 5 times before I got a working machine.
Haha wow! That is amazing. I suggest watching Pirates of Silicon Valley, and BBS The Documentary if you want more Nostalgia from that era.
Calculating C/H/S was a standard practice on a lot of systems from that era.
I vaguely remember the first time I installed Xenix I answered no to some question right at the end of installation and it hosed the whole setup and I had to do everything all over again. I think it was to do with installing a custom kernel.
Luckily it was only about 10 floppies and 3 hours at that point. Ah the "good" old days.
Considering how easy Linux is these days this is a complete nightmare lol
It really was! Red Hat was one of the easiest distributions, but “xconfigurator” still lacked good autodetection routines. At least, “sndconfig” was more straightforward.
and people think the slackware installer is hard
If you're lucky and don't have a laptop that doesn't want you to install linux
@@celestesimulator6539 "Oh sorry, We've locked up the BIOS firmware because Security Reasons and XYZ mumbo-jumbo reasons." Never seen this happen specifically except for mobile phones, but I've seen other companies do similar things (LOOKIN AT YOU APPLE)
YES, and it really makes you appreciate that fact today eh?!
I've used Debian since version 8 and it's nice to see how far it has come since then. Never had any issues with it that weren't self-inflicted
I started to use Debian around the year 2000. I remember it was super easy to install. Once, I left a Debian installation CD inserted and the monitor disconnected. Someone tried to make the computer work by rebooting and pressing enter a lot of times... Big was my surprise when I discovered she was able to re install Debian by just pressing enter a bunch of times :)
That won't work here, it won't find it's CD :)
Mandrake 7 come out shortly after and was my first experience installing Linux; I'm so glad I didn't have to put up with this.
Mandrake I remember was the first distro I used where X "just worked" to some degree.
@@NCommander Mandrake 6.0 had working X for me out of the box. RedHat 5.2 as well. No more configuring modelines!
Ah Mandrake, long before Ubuntu, it was the first distro that really focused on making installing Linux easy for everyone, I remeber the first time i installed Mandrake, I thought it was magic and stopped using other distro's for many years.
Mandrake then Mandriva served us well for quite a few years for our desktops. We eventually switched to Debian. I never knew old Debian was this bad.
Mandrake 8.0 was my first experience with Linux.
Even Slackware wasn't this unfriendly. OMG!!
It helps that Slackware doesn't pretend to user friendly, but honestly, the hardest part of Slackware install is fdisk :/
@@NCommander it's true, but Slackware 7.x, also from 1999, supplied "cfdisk", so the partitioning would be done in similar fashion.
@ if disk partitioning was the only bit that was rough, it would be a footnote. OS/2 Warp is *way* worse that cfdisk. The only tricky bit is you need to know to make the swap partition.
I actually intended this as a one part video, but the utter trainwreck of installation lead to ... well this. Even then, I have an informal rule not to go past 20 minutes and I still was overtime.
@@NCommander OS/2 2.1 had a unfriendly FDISK too, but when I tested it, even booting that thing was more harder than it should be. I remember disabling the RAM shadowing for my 486 DX-4 be able to run the setup program properly. Don’t worry about the video, I like it. :)
@ I actually was mentally thinking OS/2 2.1 when I wrote that in the script. I only showed 4.52 on screen because that was accurate to the time period.
Thanks for the reminder of just how rough the Linux road was back then.
It's just like driving on the Jersey Turnpike. Either you make it after much pain, or a pothole breaks your suspension.
@@NCommander I got off and took the win2k bypass as long as I could. By the time I got back on most of the work was done.
Installing windows 95, 98 or NT4 weren't exactly a walk in the park either, it was easy enough if you had a name brand machine with a customised install disk for that machine that had all the drivers (and a pile of bloatware), but I remember installing windows 95 off floppy disks on machine after machine until I convinced my manager to let me put the windows cd on a network drive and install it from a netboot disk. I later specialised for many years in producing SOE's for organisations a pre-caned os image that contained all the software drivers and applications pre configured and installed on the os to reduce the time to setup machines for their environment.
But with the "wrong" combination of hardware every os from this era could be painful.
🎵 It's Linux Road, it's a road you go on when you reformaaaaaaat... You'll meet Linus and the GNU.....🎵
GNU/Linux, to be accurate
I wasn't big into this scene at this time, but I imagine this is why Linux User Groups were so popular - people helping each other.
Pretty much. What I remember is usually someone had a CD burner, and we all would download an ISO, and that's how we'd get sets, or someone would go to a place with a T1 line and get it in a few hours.
While I never purchased this particular boxed Debian Linux package, I do remember playing with Debian Linux. But I would usually start with Debian netboot CD and then use the 'dselect' utility to add additional packages. Even managed to dial-up networking running and ran the updates. This was a time when you really had to know what to do ...
Have you considered doing a video on the process of installing the included Myth II demo? I first used Linux in 2010 so the idea of installing anything from a physical optical disc is just alien to me.
Prolly not.
Unreal Tournament 2004 had a linux installer on its disk - I think that is the only time I have ever installed anything off of a disk on Linux, coming into it at a similar time
2010? I was still using physical optical discs for computer stuff well past then. All my computer games as a kid came on discs that had to be inserted to play the game.
Wow, this was probably my first linux experience in 1999. Got a distro from a computer magazine at the time.
Lets just say that i accidentally nuked my partition table and erased everything on my HDD. And as a 13-14 year old kid living in a small place with no Internet, getting Windows 98 install disc was a pain.
Same here. First experience with Linux (pre-y2k) was hell, unfortunately. Somehow I must have given it another chance somewhere along the line as I grow to love it in time. While my primary daily driver remains windows to date, I use Linux extensively and it's my server OS of choice, particularly for cloud-based/vps deployments
As one of my first Linux experiences, this taught be invaluable lessons of how pcs and systems worked, learning all about compiling the kernel, file systems, partitions, packages, X, monitors, graphics cards, servers etc.
It was a very humbling experience which I took as a game, a hobby. What was my surprise when I joined university that my colleagues had no idea about any of this!
When I was a kid in 97-99 somewhere, one of my computer magazines included a Slackware CD. The installation process was identical to this. The questions were extremely hard. Especially since I had never seen Linux before. I remember doing like 5 retries until I finally had a booting graphical system. I noped at how ugly the desktop was. And went back to Windows...
That was me in high school at the time. Remember working on installing for two days, then saying F this once I saw the final product. Took me a decade to try Linux again
@@leland818 Haha exactly. All that hard work to get a super ugly desktop. Now I am moving more and more over to openSUSE Tumbleweed instead of Windows. It's amazing.
@@BenderdickCumbersnatch / I run Windows/Ubuntu/Suse on my desktop and MacOS/Windows/Ubuntu/Suse on laptop.
@@leland818 I compiled the first KDE release. It took me 3 weeks to get that to work. 15 minutes later I was back in my old Window Manager. Mostly because the first release was mostly non-functional, although it looked pretty good. I still think KDE 3.5 was the best DE ever on Linux.
@@1pcfred Haha. Do you remember the X Eyes widget thingy? I remember having those ugly eyes in a window on the Linux desktop and they kept looking at your mouse cursor as it moved around. Pretty sure that was there when I did my first ever install of Linux. It all felt so ugly and tacky. But modern Linux is deliciously beautiful! :)
Hard to imagine that this inconsistent mess of an OS turned into the defacto standard for webservers. I remember using suse linux these days, debian was not really an option prior DSL internet.
i still have suse 6.2 in box around. comes with some cds and a number of floppies....
and a note that the yast2 installer is broken and therefor shouldnt be used
I downloaded Slackware over a dial up connection. All 128 MB of it. Took me like 3 days to do. But I was one of the first DSL customers in my state when it rolled out.
Yeah we've installed Debian 10 and set it all up for school work (I study Network and system administration at uni), which was easy and straight forward.
This would've made me quit
@@SamusLovesMilk overcoming difficulties leads to enlightenment.
@@urugulu1656 Nice. YaST is pretty decent these days. Would love to see that broken boxed one.
Interesting to see, the first Debian version I used was 3.0 Woody, and it was still a bit complicated to install (you still had to manually create the partitions), but much improved over 2.1. When 4.0 Etch finally came out that was when I think it truly became something the average end user could contemplate setting up themselves. It's incredible to think of how quickly Linux developed in the late 90s and early 2000s...
I manually partition to this day. I think defaults are stupid. I guess they'd get you up and running. They're not ever what I want though. The break over point for Debian was Sarge. Although I didn't start running Debian myself until Lenny. I'd tried it early on and had experiences like shown in this video.
The woody 3.0 default kde (I think was 2.2.2, the one with Kandalf) was the best ever desktop enviroment. I miss old kde looked nice and was responsive and fast. Even with 64 Mb ram. Good old days. Anyone with a sanity check would keep a knoppix cd in the drawer just in case. 😅
This is amazing fun.. The memories just piles up, and great to have someone break down the issues and knows the history!
I have to wonder if this release by VA Linux damaged the reputation of Debian, and by how much.
Looking forward to part 2 of this Linux Hellride.
@atomicfro I also use Arch BTW
@@dcfuksurmom I use windows
4:45 Just use “diff -rq” between the contents of the discs to see what’s different.
I started with RedHat 6.0 in late 1999. I always envied Debian users because they had apt and I was wrestling with RPM and its dependency woes. After watching that system installer, I see that I was quite lucky. I was also fortunate to have a generic Acer Open desktop with a hardware dial-up modem. This channel really makes one appreciate how far Linux has come. Keep up the good work!
This brought back a lot of memories of my early days using Linux. Debian was the first Linux I tried to install myself but I never managed to make it through the installation process. Eventually wound up with a Slackware install that I was quite happy with. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
I also was originally stuck with an IBM Mwave modem, which was totally incompatible. (You could hack something together to make the sound card portion work in Linux, but I could never get the modem working.)
I installed Debian Hamm at the time and still use Debian today. Having done multiple apt-get dist-upgrades over the years. But honestly, I think it's important to highlight that the average Windows user at the time also wasn't able to set up things like modems in Windows. And modem manufacturers didn't deliver good manuals and installs or working drivers on Windows, I know because I was asked to help people do such things.
I remember trying out Debian when I first got into Linux, at that point it was Debian 3.0, I remember it being about as easy to use as gentoo. I would later switch to Mac for 10 years but have since come back and am very happy that Debian is now significantly easier to install and use.
" *dpkg-reconfigure does not exist on this version of Debian* "
if i time traveled to year 2000 and couldn't bring any modern GNU/Linux with me not even source code, this is where I delete linux and install windows.
Yeah, I was less than amused when I realized that. The original line in the script was "the manual doesn't mention dpkg-reconfigure", and then I realized *why* it doesn't mention it.
IDK, I'd be happy with a Unix workstation of some description (assuming I could get my hands on one, since they cost $$$$-$$$$$).
I was hardcore in 2000. I'm still hardcore. I don't do Windows! I think I may have been a slacker in 2000? I ran Slackware up until RH 7.1 came out. RH 7.2 was the greatest Linux distro of all time. We almost made it! If RH didn't make up2date subscription history would be different today. Alas it was not meant to be.
The source code probably wouldn't even compile because it would be using compiler features that didn't exist yet...
@@EdKolis you can bring a compiler with you too. You compile a new compiler with an older compiler using a bootstrapping process. In the end the new compiler compiles itself. Coders are pretty clever with stuff like that.
Thank you so much for making these videos. Your channel is a true service to all tech nerds out there. Every video I watch on this channel firmly cements my feet in place as a permanent Windows user. I remember trying Ubuntu in 2014 and it felt about as painful as this. Sure, my mouse worked, but built in wifi and ethernet support is kind of a must-have. Even nowadays, trying to install Ubuntu, Mint, and a variety of other distros have infuriating bugs (like the multi-monitor hotzone/display issues with right click menus) that simply shouldn't exist on a consumer-grade OS these days. I just want to make music, mod/hack games, and create art. Why's that gotta be such a painful process in Linux?
Good video! I chuckle when I hear a contemporary review of a legacy operating system. In today's world when you can google literally anything, this was an era where manpages and the Linux Documentation Project were the main sources of information.
Much of what was mentioned and was deemed "seemingly cryptic" definitely made sense at the time (I speak from experience), but fully admit that it does NOT age well!
This was the era where you needed to manually configure X via the *.conf file, based on your monitors timing settings... autoconfig was sketchy at best.
Perhaps my starting out on Slackware back in the 0.99 days set me up to expect these pratfalls. Much of this is old school, learn-as-you-go type of stuff. It's not clear, but it worked.
I appreciate the SLS callbacks! slackware was the better inheritor of what SLS started out as, IMHO.
Kinda wild what was put out for retail sale back in the day eh?
Same here, plus the Xenix experience. I'd prefer all that to todays web development horrors any day. At least it was fun and made a weird kind of sense. If you're setting your IRQ and I/O addresses with jumpers, at least you know what they are!
My earliest experiences with Linux were around the year 2000, I tried Slackware, Debian and a couple of smaller distros and they were all a nightmare to get running. I had the easiest time with Slackware, just felt like an elongated software install for a DOS app, and I was awful familiar with how to identify my hardware in a menu at that point in my life. I had an incredibly solid and easy to configure 56k hardware modem and still had to dig around in config files for hours to get it working on every single distro. For the vast majority of users in the 56k era who had software modems, getting connected to the internet in Linux was literally impossible though. It really would be a hell of a thing to not find that out until you already formatted your Windows install.
Happy New Year! :) Yes, back then I think I remember you had to be quite motivated to install Linux :) I think I tried a Mandrake version about that era and probably cried a lot of tears of blood trying to install it and eventually abandoned it quite fast. Until Ubuntu 6.10 (and THAT I felt was a huge departure in usability back then).
You still gotta wanna run Linux today. It is easier to install Linux but there are still frustrations as far as software compatibility goes. Linux still is not Windows. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. But some take a dim view of it.
I started using Linux in 2000 on SuSE, and the installation experience was smooth. The Professional version I acquired between 2000 and 2003 have so many and so thick manuals that they can fill a portion of a bookshelf. The installation media came in a large foldable multidisc minipackage inside the box.
Yeah I tried slackware, debian, redhat in the 90's but I ended up using SuSE too. It was just easier to install and use (except when I fried my CRT because I set the refresh rate too high in the xfree86 config). But after a while I got tired of recompiling the kernel on an almost daily basis and then I switched to Mac, and honestly, I revere the experience and knowledge I picked up using Linux, but I will NEVER go back to it as a daily driver.
@@cyberdeth8427 I used Linux at work and home for 15 years. I now use a Mac due to software requirements, but abhor the OS's poor engineering and bugginess. I have to do more maintenance work on it than I ever had to do on Linux. And solving its quirks is genuinely difficult since one is not supposed to do anything under the hood.
@@mechantl0up hmm maybe our requirements are different. I’ve been doing all my software development (c, c++, python, Perl, JavaScript, java, swift, kotlin, dart/flutter and yes even assembly) on my Mac and honestly it’s rock solid. Any extra Linux based software is easily installable using homebrew. Im not going to say it’s not without it’s faults, there’s a few things I guess I would like to get into macOS from Linux, but nothing that would tempt me back to Linux. macOS is at its heart FreeBSD and fully posix compliant.
@@cyberdeth8427 I am not a professional developer. I use my computer for a very wide range of tasks, though, including some light coding work.
People who use Mac laptops and constantly reboot them seem to fare well with the system. But if one tries to keep it running 24/7, problems start to accumulate. Mounting and unmounting USB devices is an Achilles heel for mac OS, instigating memory leaks and suddenly interfering with Bluetooth (!) (requires complicated bluetooth demon resets).
A mac will not always recover from the sleep mode.
The UI also slows down over time, probably because the main kernel task seems unable to release memory it hogs over time. Killing Finder sometimes revigorates the UI. Messing with sound devices can lead to a kernel panic. There can emerge a hung user space process that cannot be killed. Finder can screw up thumbnails (Ds_Store?) between two network mounted shares, resulting in immeasurable confusion. Rsyncing to an USB store can result in the device becoming unmounted mid transit, and so on.
Edit: These issues have been observed on different generation iMacs and mac Minis, and different individual pieces of hardware.
@@mechantl0up I’m sorry to hear that you experienced so many issues. But yeah, I agree OS X isn’t perfect. No OS is. I can only talk about my personal experience. Anyway we all have our motives for choosing what we use. People don’t always have a to agree. A certain level of civil disagreement is good.
Hahaha omg this brings back some long forgotten memories! I first installed Debian in 2000 with a copy from the IT guy at school. I think it took me a week or two to actually get it installed on an old Dell I managed to buy at a car boot sale that was still running Windows 95 :D
If this thing did get successfully installed (a rotsa-ruck experience) did it support upgrades of the OS itself from there? How close to a now-modern Debian would it get?
if you had a cheap way to get upgrades (dial up was expensive) you could theoretically still run this install today and it would be as modern as your last upgrades. I had a debian sid installed and kept it upgraded for over a decade. major upgrades bring major challenges, though, but with debian it was at least possible. the best thing to do: sometimes nothing, until your fellow debian users on the web did not report any desasters anymore. just don't be the first one running into trouble ;-)
I was so pumped when I saw boxed Linux distros for sale at the local Best Buy... I remember buying this release and immediately putting the Debian sticker on my 1996 Dodge Stratus!
This package was awesome, at least for me. I was new to unix-like systems at the time. For one I bought it retail for $15, while Red Hats retail box was $75. So I was glad to see it. The book was pretty good I thought, giving you enough basics of unix, linux and debian to get started. The menus could have been more explanatory but It got me up and running pretty quick. There was enough material between the book and onboard documentation to figure things out. Setting up X was a little scary. I have to admit that I spent a lot of time reconfiguring and even reinstalling as I learned this and that. I finally mastered lilo when grub became the standard. I haven't bothered to master grub. There was abiword. I miss xconq, I wish someone would reimplement and replace svgalib in xconq. That CD was packed with good stuff. If you remember RPM had a reputation of dependency hell at that time.
I remember being baffled why anybody would buy a flashy box with Linux on it. Let alone opening the box and trying.
Nowadays I'm baffled why people won't try Debian, I think I can see the issue now. :)
The mp3 issue was lame!
You're the first person to comment on why I brought that up!
I bought SuSE Linux 6.2 back in 99 and it took me 2 weeks to get X Windows up and running on an old Packard Bell 486sx2 computer. I would almost guarantee my 16 year old self wouldn't of been able to get Debian up and running back then. Can't wait to see the follow up video, subscribed.
Your channel's amazing man!
My first Linux distro was Redhat 6 (or was it 6.2 ?). I was amazed at how advanced it was (as compared to what I was expecting. I learned to link it to my Windows network with SAMBA to share files to and from and was able to print on a windows shared printer. Now just install most any linux distro and that stuff is automatically setup in the install.
Been there, done that. Then I switched to red hat for a couple of years. Anyway, I'm a debian(ish) guy, so I get constantly amaze how far debian distros has advanced. 😊
I love this video, it brings back memories. Corel Linux was my first Debian based distro and I did the install Corel Linux, switch to the Debian stable repositories, switch to the Debian unstable repositories merry go round several times before I got familiar enough with the Debian installer to make it through without getting frustrated and going back to the merry go round.
I did some distro hopping before finding my way to Debian, but I have been running a dual boot Windows and Debian unstable ever since. With a second machine that I use to occasionally take a look at other distributions. Most of the time I run Ubuntu on that one.
Cool video, love these blast from the past videos. That said, this install back in 99 looked like a nightmare.
I remember buying a S3 graphics card just to get X working
I spent an exuberant amount of time trying to get my Diamond Stealth 3D 4000 (S3 Virge GX2) working correctly with XFree86).
This card would hard lock my machine just with the moire 2 xscreensaver module.
What a horrible card. Also, my K6-2 350 would go from 30C to 85C with a full load.
@@DerekWitt and even literally today there is still such things as the AMD FLR hardware bug (AMD NAVI GPU Reset Bug)
@@tacokoneko Oh yeah. Can't believe that's still around.
I too remember specifically buying a Diamong Stealth 64 card so I could get X working. To my dismay I got sold some budget version with an ARK2000 chip instead of the expected S3 chip :( Fortunately xf86_svga did gain ARK2000 support eventually.
Ugh, I remember having to figure out which S3 card I had to make X go. For reasons I will never understand, there was really no VESA support in the box.
Corel Linux was my first experience with Linux... Came in a boxed version with an inflatable penguin mascot! :)
"inflatable penguin mascot" - you know, that phrasing brought up a mental image that I would like lobotomized out of my brain.
My first ever experience of Linux was when I ordered a CD of Debian 1.something back in the mid-90s to have a play around with on a spare machine. Installation and configuration of that was such a horrendous nightmare that I didn't touch the OS again for 10 years!
Oh god. You've just reminded me of the first time I tried to install Red Hat Linux so many years ago. Two days of pure hell and I ended up with a non-functioning computer which |I had to put Windows back onto afterwards. Fortunately, I stuck with it and Ive been using Linux now for about 15 years...
Partition Magic was my goto, mainly because is the mid 90s I was also a OS/2 user. So when I did install FreeBSD 2.0 it was simple to get dual boot going.
OS/2... what a time Warp
You know I wanted this video. I know I wanted this video.
oh god the network... you brought me back the years of pain configuring that old 56k modem I used to have and hours before I could make any sense of networking...
I imagine whoever was packaging that release had a fast connection that users didn't have at home.
As someone who had only switched to Debian with version 8.7 in 2015 (because I outgrew Ubuntu's handholding and wanted to continue installing from DEB packages), there's a lot of features that I seem to take for granted today that seemingly weren't present in early releases.
Debian is da bomb today. But prior to Sarge it was a hot mess. The benefits of DPKG go beyond just installing packages. I couldn't live without apt-file. I love me some dlocate -S too. Debian's packaging system is second to none.
Perfect video, thank you very much!
Heh reminds me of one of my friends buying some big box Linux in 1990's, he was not very computer literate guy, and well was kind of hoodwinked by promises on the box. Well he asked me at that time to help installing it. I was somewhat good with DOS/Windows systems, but...I looked up that manual, readed few chapters and told my friend that me trying install it would probably nuke his Win95, and end up in unusable computer. So I refused. He did not try it himself. Nowadays I have been Linux user for 13 years. But those old ones really were not very user friendly experiences.
My first Linux distro was about a year earlier. It was not Debian, but some "distro" created by a local (German) linux magazine publisher. It came on 6 CDs. The first one contained a boot floppy image, rawrite, and a tar.gz of the "base system", and lots of HOWTOs in text format. The boot floppy would show you a dialog with filtered dmesg output, then ask for the cdrom drive device name (hope you could find it in the dmesg output), mount the CD and load the real "installer" from there. After showing the same dmesg again, it would ask for your hard disk, throw you into cfdisk, ask for the partition number, format it with ext2, unpack the base system onto it and install LILO in the PBR (not MBR). Then an option to write a very simple boot manager to MBR (which lets you pick 1 2 3 or 4 and boots from that partition then). After asking for new root password, it rebooted into the new system.
There was no FIPS, no package selection, no automatic setup of a swap partition (you'd have to edit fstab yourself). The installed software included Midnight Commander, mcedit, joe, vi, some compilers and a very rudimentary X11 system (xf86config, xvidtune, fvwm I remember). It took me some hours and help of another classmate with more Linux experience to get X11 working and compiling my first own kernel.
All the rest of the CDs "only" included source tarballs of various software (I remember KDE 1.0, which took multiple nights to compile). At that time I had to share my PC with my father who used it at daytime, but he used the Windows installed alongside, so I could mess with the Linux.
My first experience with Debian was Debian 3 "Woody" - the whole 8 CD set - when I got to university in 2001. I don't think it was that bad as the video suggests, but it still came with both aptitude and dselect, causing some confusion about package selections. The package configuratons at least informed at the beginning that if you are unsure, you should write down the package name shown in the corner of the screen and choose defaults, to later reconfigure after the installation finished. Yet still the install process (hour-long if you selected many packages) was a mixture of swapping CDs (some CDs have been asked for multiple times), waiting (for unpack/install) and answering questions from configuring. SuSE (which I tried a year earlier) was much more consistent by first asking questions, then copying all the packages (every CD only asked for once), then doing all the install (so you could leave the machine running alone), and then asking questions at the end again (before rebooting).
Thanks, always wanted to know what the previous point release of Debian was like.
Damn it, I don't want to find that funny ...
Debian was a terrible experience at that time - particularly the horrific dselect application - so I stuck with RedHat. It took Ubuntu and its focus on usability before Debian was a pleasure rather than a pain.
The Debian installer that we currently have was released back in 2005 with Sarge. I doubt Ubuntu had much to do with pushing Debian along back in the day. Ubuntu did not have a gui installer until 6.06 when Ubiquity was released, and it was a buggy mess for the first few of releases. I used the text mode (Debian installer) in Ubuntu to avoid Ubiquity's bugs for a couple years. Debian had realized its shortcomings in the installation long before Ubuntu came along and developed a new installer before Ubuntu was popular.
Yeah Ubuntu didn't really make anything more usable, just took away a bunch of the options and added the odd 'helpful' feature. They did make it possible to run newer software with a little more confidence than Debian's Sid. I first installed Debian Woody, and can confirm dselect was awful but you could mostly ignore it by then, and mostly I ran testing after that point as a nice halfway house between stable and unstable, occasionally a package would break things and that was often an adventure to recover from! My brother set up a debian machine as a router around '98 with auto dialling via a serial modem - winmodems were such rubbish, who wanted hardware to use CPU cycles at that time? - anyway it worked really well.
It's good to show contempt for your customers. Just ask Comcast!
Another FIPS user! I had to use PTS Disk Editor once after a Linux install changed the Windows partition's type ID. Thank you for the fun video! I used a big box version of Mandrake Linux to program ROMs with a homemade serial programmer.
Very well made video! Honestly, I can't remember my Linux installation "adventures" from this year (1999) or so, but I do remember that around 1995 (hmm, or was it 1996?) when I first installed Debian (after Slackware, btw). Interestingly I didn't find that particularly hard (well, as far as I remember ... often said that time makes thing appearing better than they really were ... ?), and even nowadays sometimes I use dselect just for the nostalgic feeling ;) But I think I was not typical user anyway, I just wanted a shell that's all, and I was happy to do things, install software, etc, by my own after the installation process achieved some bootable system, with a working shell (and surely no X11) at least. After all, it's always better to do things manually than letting some installer to pick hundreds of packages to install what I don't know the details about. Heck, I was even happy when things didn't work at the first time, so I had the chance to try my rounds. Hey, but time flies, I have no time for such a thing any more unlike in my younger age feeling excited that I can dig into the system with no better things to do ...
However, honestly, I think most problems are caused by people/firms/etc having claims to "advertise" things as the ultimate experience for an average user. I didn't mind that it was hard to install or required knowledge, I always felt I can learn from that (and indeed, my career is started by these kind of experiences, not only this, but including), even if it required many hours for me to figure things out. But certainly, for an average user, even in 1999 it would have been just too much to handle. And nowadays? Well, as I've written above, simply no time to do such a things, but that's another story.
It's possible Debian 1.x was "better", for some degrees of better. This was the first version to incorporate APT, so I have to assume earlier versions had a different install process, but I didn't use Debian personally until 2.2/3.0.
I used Red Hat and Caldera Linux back in 1999-2000. Those product installations were light years ahead of Debian from the day. I did not touch Debian until Etch in 2007 and do not remember it being so awful. Then again, the Debian installer was rewritten back in Sarge, so by the time Etch came around, it was pretty easy. Thanks for the video.
I guess I was spoiled as I only used red hat and caldera openlinux during this time. I never realized how good I had it!
Yeah, similar for me except with SuSE and Corel Linux. This would have been a nightmare coming directly from Windows 98 with no *nix knowledge.
@@PJBonoVox Corel Linux! That’s the other one I forgot about
You bring back memories. I switched from SuSE 5.2 to Debian potato back then. I remember all these questions, but at least I was familiar to some stuff due to SuSE. Also, I had a Windows PC running some NAT software to get internet through BNC network to this box and could still search for help on the internet.
Thankfully it was an ISDN flatrate.
Until this day, I never switched to any other distribution for my primary machine. A quick test of Ubuntu a few years ago on a separate machine, but that's it.
My hosts.conf file on this machine I'm typing dates back to 2006. Only updating and migrating disk images from one computer to another.
My installation at work is even older, from 2004.
Don't know what black magic RUclips used to recommend your channel to me, especially such an old video, but I'm really glad it did.
This was very entertaining and I really enjoy your compelling style.
Subbed. Looking forward to watching more!
My mate Arch Linux told me this is a quite easy way to install Linux
Arch Linux doesn't lie, has great documentation, and has options to fix your mistakes.
@@duncanmurphy8085 laughs in Linux from scratch or gentoo
*looks at his IA64 zx6000 and cries in CLFS*
dselect ... I rememberer being unable to use it. I thought that was because my level of English was poor then, but looks that it's horrible for everyone.
Some experiences are so universal they transcend the language barrier :)
My first Linux install was Debian 1.3 installed from a boat load of floppies. It wasn't for the faint of heart, but that's exactly how I liked it. Dselect for the win! And let me just say if he thought this was user unfriendly, he wouldn't have survived the alternate OS scenes of the 80's and early 90's.
I've been tempted to dig up even older Debian, but that would likely require another kernel patch job like I did on SLS, and that left scars.
that sounds so sad im sorry for your loss
its so funny to see this old software because it shows the original place the software was developed, Sunnyvale, California... where I grew up.... the street address is very familiar as I knew that city like the back of my hand.... Thank you for the memories! love the video!
Lol I forget about wvdial and rawrite. That and calling this vintage is making me feel old
+1
This is the kind of Linux I cut my teeth on back in the early 2000's and it's no wonder why I still hate it with the fire of a thousand suns! I remember being SO frustrated!!! I tried it recently and I'm surprised at how easily it installs. I remember when Ubuntu came out and the Linux community shunned it because, "it wasn't difficult enough to use!" meaning that you couldn't use and install the whole thing and run it from the command line. I feel like that attitude exists today and they wonder why there's no widespread adoption! Sorry, I don't mean to rant....
Ubuntu contains a lot of bloatware like the snapstore, which an average linux user doesn't need.
This makes me so glad I got into Linux in the mid to late 2010s, the biggest thing I ever had to worry about was if the distro’s installer came with the WiFi card drivers I needed
I would like to install Kerigrid, it's based around Debian 9... But I'm having trouble getting all the updates and patches for Deb9 set up.. what do I need to download and where do I put it and how do I configure updates for local install for real old versions of Debian?
Also, can you help me find Kerigrid?
1:30 the box claims "The last Linux OS You will ever need to buy"
Not "The last Linux OS You will ever need".
Buy is a key word. Except you didn't need to buy that one either....
"The last time you will ever try Linux" would be a better tagline.:D
@@BenderdickCumbersnatch I tried one Linux distro in the mid/late 90's. I think it was a RedHat CD attached to a computer magazine. I was kind of cured from trying, a few years after that.
I had some attempts in the early 00's, with some guiding/suggestions from fellow students, but kind of gave up.
Then I tried Ubuntu on VirtualBox in early 10's, but I still felt like I needed Windows for my main Computer.
During 2020, we experienced how boring it is to stay home too long. I figured, why not have a look at an unusable computer, where Windows has crashed. And did not have a Windows-key for it.
I was curious about trying to install Chrome OS, by following some guides on RUclips, but I ran into driver issues with display and mouse. Then I decided to try out Mint. And I have figured it can serve as my main computer, but still having my Windows Laptop on the side, using Synegy Desktop, to control both using a single mouse/keyboard.
@@thorbjrnhellehaven5766 Haha damn we are extremely similar and the same age too.
I wrote this in a separate message: "When I was a kid in 97-99 somewhere, one of my computer magazines included a Slackware CD. The installation process was identical to this. The questions were extremely hard. Especially since I had never seen Linux before. I remember doing like 5 retries until I finally had a booting graphical system. I noped at how ugly the desktop was. And went back to Windows..."
After that I tried Ubuntu in VirtualBox in the early 10's, but it felt like an awful GUI and I wouldn't want it as my main desktop. I also tried Linux Mint (ew) and Elementary OS (ew).
In late 2020 during the pandemic, I heard about a programming-focused OS that makes it super easy and convenient to do software development. Of course it's not just for programming. It's just that it specializes in adding a lot of easily installed programming tools that would be complex on other distros, such as tensorflow and CUDA.
It's called Pop!_OS. I installed it and holy sh-t it's the first time I ever think Linux has looked beautiful. They have their own shell that looks great and is extremely productive with keyboard-controlled window tiling. And they have a built-in graphical software store with flatpak support which is the best software distribution system Linux has to offer now (it's up-to-date software unlike the distro repositories, and the software is sandboxed and runs without root; you can use the app "Flatseal" to check/edit what permissions each app has).
I've finally switched. Windows 10 feels kludgy in comparison to the Pop!_OS graphical shell. Try it in a VM if you aren't convinced. It's leagues above Mint and Ubuntu. I know there's distro wars etc and I may trigger some people, but this is my opinion as someone who appreciates both art (ran Mac OS from 2008-2019) and rapid keyboard controls (professional vim user lol). Pop!_OS is like a desktop environment that gets out of your way and speeds up work, with workspaces and window tiling and full keyboard control.
It's amazing. Check the demo videos on their site.
@@BenderdickCumbersnatch I am quite happy with Mint, but maybe Pop! is even better, I'll give it a try. Most software I use is either native or quickly installed in Mint, I am still pretty fresh using Linux, and have not settled on everything. I still have some rare cases, where I haven't bothered to find a replacement for Windows software. I use Wine for some software.
Just unwraped a USB-stick, and labeled "Pop!", to make a bootable device.
@@BenderdickCumbersnatch First attempt with Pop!OS failed. I did not get both screens, one connected to Intel GPU and one to NVIDIA GPU, this worked right out of the box with Mint, I'll have to try another time I think.
This really brings home how much work has gone into Debian to make it the quality product it is.
I've run almost nothing but Debian for the past 10 years. If there was something better out there I'd be using it. I love me some apt though.
@@1pcfred it’s not just the os even if it was the best it has 0 available software to the point it’s not worth using over anything else. Linuix is best used as a hobby for enthusiasts not a main full time os
@@PanosPitsi Linux has all of the software that I need. I am just a hobby enthusiast though. Linux has been my main full time OS for 26 years now too. What software is Linux missing that professionals like you need?
@@1pcfred oh yeah also when it comes to gaming linuix literally emulates windows’ libraries through proton so I don’t see the point of not using a windows machine instead. For me linuix is just a hobby , from time to time I install linuix on an external ssd and play around with settings , I’ve been doing his since I was 14 believe it or not now I’m 18!
@@PanosPitsi that is not how the games I play on Linux work. I compile them natively against Linux libraries or I don't play them. I have no time for any developers that do not support my OS platform of choice. Life ain't fair and neither am I.
I think I installed Linux for the first time around 1999. It was a Suse distribution on 6 CDs. There was also a very exotic variant on a medium called DVD
When you have never used vi and must use it to manually configure X, it's a nice moment of pleasure :)
I was happy to discover mc later.
My first Linux was RH 5.1,I think in 1997/98. I still use Linux daily today, but on Debian.
Back then I knew about joe and made sure I installed it. vi and I still don't see eye to eye. I can live with nano though.
I have 2 comments.
1) Can you send this over to Druaga1 please 🤣
2) Why was a Debian distro shouting about APT on the box installing pacman?
It wasn't that bad, back in the day we had to compile kernels with the CDROM controllers to install from them so Debian install wasn't that bad, yeah it was somehow painful so we tried to make backups after a good install of course. X was a pain in every distro in those days.
At 11:07, the instructions do not say to skip the [A]ccess and [U]pdate steps... they say that you should skip the [S]elect step. Then *USE* the [A] and [U] options, then proceed directly to [I]nstall AFTERWARDS. Was this just so commonly misread that the official guidebooks *assumed* people misread it?
My first linux install was Mandrake 5.3. It surprisingly went very smooth for me and connecting to dial-up was also effortless. What fascinated me most was how much more responsive linux was over Windows 95 and my dial-up was a bit faster as well. On Windows I would cap out at 4-5 Kbps, but Linux would give me 7-9Kbps. I was living the life back then.
It's good to know that being openly hostile to users, to the point where I think it hates them, is a long-standing Linux tradition.
I wonder if it'll ever not be the case.
it started being usable quite a long time ago
@@cilian8462 Aah good old linux-induced blindness.
@@Asdayasman it's really okay now
@@cilian8462 But that's the thing, it's not. Imagine if I came out with a new kind of car that was cheaper but you had to torque all the bolts down to exact spec before every drive, and if you did it wrong one time, the engine would blow up and delete all your cat photos. Torqueing bolts to spec is not hard, but the competitor on the market doesn't need you to do that, and if you go and do it anyway, it's not going to be catastrophic for a minor mistake.
Linux is shit for the regular person because Windows is so much easier, and equipped with such thicker oven gloves.
Ah yes the time before debian-installer was made
When gentoo was easier than debian
Well, installing Gentoo has always been a one command sorta thing. It's just a long command :)
I also installed Gentoo in 2000. It was great until you found out you needed a USE flag you didn't know about and spend the weekend recompiling everything to install that one thing you needed. Gentoo did develop some of the best documentation though, and was useful in troubleshooting Linux problems regardless of the distro.
They were about the same difficulty to install from my recollection. Debian was certainly faster once you knew the process.
Gentoo wasn't even made yet.
also, Slackware just because of the configuration process. There are people who think that the Ncurses installer is tough, but oh boy. Back then, I was absolutely Bamboozled by SlackBuilds and why XYZ subdirectory had to be in ABC spot, and kept mistaking the slackbuilds for the source code, Whatever went wrong, did so. At least my Wireless card worked on that one machine out of the box, for God save the one who wanted Broadcom drivers on a 2016 distribution... (my last tangle with this was in Netrunner Twenty, where they literally just DIDN'T WORK no matter what directions you follow. support has gotten better, WAY better, but still.).
Just as a side note, I seem to be making a lot of these comments.
@@mecrumbly429___4 its a joke
@@mecrumbly429___4 Correct. My bad. Installed Gentoo in 2000, and it was more complex than installing Debian 2.1/2.2 of the same era.
Your mention of winmodems brought back all of the memories from my first experiences with Linux. After trying for days and failing to download Red Hat 7.1 (I think) over dial-up, I bought a copy of Linux for Dummies specifically because it included CDs for Red Hat 7.0. I managed to get a dual boot set up with Windows 98SE, only to find that my modem wasn't going to get me anywhere in Linux. Fortunately the Prodigy Internet service I had at the time required no special software, so I eventually tracked down a compatible modem on eBay and things worked quite well. Good times.
I think my one attempt at setting up a winmodem ended up playing music on the phone line. It wasn't pretty.
@@NCommanderwhat? playing music on the winmodem? I have plenty of those!!. How the hell ???
How did you do the appearance of /tmp/credits in nano? It doesn't look like it is typed manually. Thanks!
So, dirty secret is I type it in before hand, start recording, then hold backspace, and then reverse the video so it looks like I'm typing it in :).
Otherwise it takes 10-20 takes to do it.
I've been using GNU/Linux since the earliest days and I think you are being overly critical. Everybody knew in those days that nothing worked until the 3 release and lets be honest GNU/Linux would never have taken off if not for Debian. Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake, and other distributions looked promising, but Debian is what underlies every significant desktop usable distribution today. Don't even get me started about rolling distributions and how unusable they are-even so-called stable ones that mostly have easy to use installers and work afterward. I have within a period of maybe a month had multiple major breakages due to updates in Manjaro for instance. Supposedly the best most stable easy to use Arch fork. While Debian is definitely by far better off on your server than on your desktop the core remains the best basis for any usable desktop distribution to this day.
Agreed. Debian and Slackware were notoriously hard to install back in those days and having crappy desktop class hardware like winmodems certainly did not help - I specifically bought a USRobotics 56.6K modem because I hated winmodems even on Windows! - but once you got them installed, it was a breeze to keep them going. But I'll concede that Debian was definitely not a good choice for people trying out Linux for the first time back then as it required quite a bit of Linux knowledge to get it installed and to troubleshoot whenever problems arrived. RedHat was certainly much more friendly at that point in time.
The main complain is not against debian.
The problem is putting Disc 1 in a box, throw in a book with conflicting instruction and add a game disc on front of the page, making the appearance that Debian 2.1 (with half the packages missing) was ready for consumers.
Label it as "debian is best for software developers and web servers" and fair enough.
@@sarowie Fair enough. I still think it was a bit over the top though given the context and time period. But anyhow. It is what it is.
I'm just an Linux noob but that's just awful
Very nice! I love Linuxes, old and new, and I have a zoopark of Virtual machines for Virtualbox, but nothing this old. The oldest Debian that I actually used is 3.1 from 2005, up to modern Debian 11, which is a lot easier to install and configure
well Mr Commander i think your a brave man to look at these old linux systems, you have patience and persistence which I don't have, so I thank you and applaud your efforts. i have always like the idea of trying an system but I think I will stay away from this, I will look for the 2.2 version someone says it is better, again Thank you
Me at the start of the video: it can't be that bad.
Me now: how is this even possible to sell something that is basically can't be used?
Ok so here's a spoiler so watch out: if you came here to see how did 20 years old debian look like you simply won't see it here! Why would something like this ever been made let alone sold in a box?
I was worried the video title was a bit clickbaity, but is it clickbait if it accurately describes the state of affairs :)
@@NCommander Well the description is in fact quite accurate, it reflects what's on the video. It's just me expecting to see the GUI or something, I mean when you see a title like "installing an ancient piece of software" you get interested to see how would it look, but hey I guess the point you've got to with the installation is pretty much what most of people got too so this is how this thing look xD
I just can't imagine why would anyone make such a complicated install script? It feels like only the guy that made it can successfully get a fully functioning OS after going through it
It's all about context man, back in the day there were better installers but plenty of struggles everywhere else anyway. Debian was great with updates and package management but the install was difficult, we were used to have documentation around to work around any difficulties, and of course forums and linux user groups were plenty because of them.
Thanks for reminding me of LILO, XF86Config and the likes. I was just 13 yo in 1999 when I started playing around with Linux and FreeBSD, and can very well relate to the winmodem-hell and other frustrations you mentioned in this video!
That's where I started my Linux journey. Got a Debian 2.1 CD from a friend. Still using Debian to this day. ❤️
I'm really glad I got into Debian after dselect was thrown onto the back burner and no longer a standard part of the install process. I started with the "sarge" release and even installing that again in a VM was pretty straightforward enough.