Oh, serendipity!
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@nina_kali_nina Based on how that sentence is worded, I wonder if Morphix was only used to build the live CD, and not as the base for the entire distribution? But perhaps I'm reading too much into it.
Cool find nonetheless! I wasn't aware of this bit of Ubuntu history, even though Knoppix and Ubuntu were some of my first experiences with Linux.
@dgelessus due to how Morphix is working, the absolute bare minimum would be Morphix-specific kernel modules and INIT. Everything else could come from Ubuntu (or Debian). And it seems that was indeed the path taken. But I still feel like it would've been nice for Ubuntu authors to at least mention that LiveCD was based on Morphix and Knoppix technology.
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@pulkomandy the internet and the acquired expertise mean so much :< my Linux experience got postponed by good 5 years because of a similar issue. In 2001, I had access only to RedHat and Lindows; RedHat refused to boot with 8 megs of RAM (the way to make it boot in low-RAM mode was not explained on the CD); Lindows did not want to co-habitate on the disk with Windows 95 and thus was a non-starter.
@nina_kali_nina I don't remember who put that Corel Linux CD in my hands. Icouldn't have downloaded it myself, it would have taken a lifetime on dialup, and we didn't have a CD burner. I guess one of my parent's friend who was a relatively early Linux adopter gave it to me? But I didn't think of asking for help then (and my parents were annoyed that I removed Windows from the machine with my experiments)
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@pulkomandy @nina_kali_nina my first experience was Slackware off a PC magazine cover-CD in the early 00s and I've never been able to find it
@devlin @pulkomandy any chance of getting your hands on that magazine?
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@nina_kali_nina Amount (and quality) of packaged software is likely the reason why ~50% of computers in my primary school were running Knoppix (to be specific, half of them had Knoppix/W2K, and second half had Mandriva/XP dual-boot). Accessibility features probably also played a role.
@elly most likely, yes. I've been pushing for FOSS at my school, too, and so for some time it was running Edubuntu. Which was nice. Ah, the amount of influence a 14-year-old could sometimes have!
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@nina_kali_nina people don't always believe me when I say I've been daily driving Linux exclusively since 1998 ish.
It really wasn't an ordeal. All PCs kind of sucked back then, at least I knew why mine sucked.
I had a great time using Linux back then, and I still do today.
@hp "It really wasn't an ordeal. All PCs kind of sucked back then, at least I knew why mine sucked.
"That's a great quote
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@nina_kali_nina I don't remember who put that Corel Linux CD in my hands. Icouldn't have downloaded it myself, it would have taken a lifetime on dialup, and we didn't have a CD burner. I guess one of my parent's friend who was a relatively early Linux adopter gave it to me? But I didn't think of asking for help then (and my parents were annoyed that I removed Windows from the machine with my experiments)
@pulkomandy aaah so real
why so real -
@devlin @pulkomandy any chance of getting your hands on that magazine?
@pulkomandy @nina_kali_nina my copy is long gone sadly, and search engines are crap and not forthcoming with assistance
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So, in this thread I just must say a few words about Knoppix. Back in the days, Knoppix was a ground-breaking Linux Live CD that spawned many other Linux Live CDs. It ended up being so influential that it is almost an expectation today for a Linux distribution to have a Live CD/DVD.
Of course, nothing ever stopped people from building a Linux system capable of using a CD disk as its root file system. In fact, one of the early Linux systems, Yggdrasil, did exactly that for the installer CD. So, how Knoppix was different from Yggdrasil or DemoLinux?
The secret sauce was in a special kernel module implementing CD-ROM friendly compressed block device. Without it, the Live CD experience was subpar, and the amount of software that was shipped on the LiveCD was minuscule. Compare 1999's DemoLinux 1.1 shipping Mandrake 6 with basically just Netscape and Gimp, and Knoppix 3.2 that comes with hundreds of tools, _two_ full office suites, and even WINE - all on one CD.
( screenshots 🧵 cont)
@nina_kali_nina ah, dynebolic. I still have idempotent lunux in dyne form running in the basement.
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@hp "It really wasn't an ordeal. All PCs kind of sucked back then, at least I knew why mine sucked.
"That's a great quote
@nina_kali_nina @hp It was kind of an ordeal... Writing modelines for xf86config and chat scripts for your dialup to work, there was a lot of tedium for things that worked out of the box. And on a laptop? Yeah...
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I did not expect a Linux system from 2001 to be that... feature-rich. Bugs aside, it is pretty impressive. Not only Knoppix 2.0's KDE 2 is quite usable, it ships - again - with both KOffice and Open Office, and both Konqueror and Mozilla. There is XMMS, there is GNU IMP, there is even Acrobat Reader 4.0. There's even Python and Java.
Go on, give this ancient (25 years old!) Linux distro a go: https://archive.org/details/LinuxTag - the file you're looking for is linuxtag2001.iso
If you're using Qemu, make sure to set RAM to 256 megs or less, use cirrus VGA, and go through the "expert" mode to configure your keyboard and X11. On 86Box, I recommend emulating Pentium 2 and Cirrus 5446.
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Phew, what a thread it was! I hope you liked it
And if you liked it, please share the love.I think my biggest motivation for this thread was:
- Hey, look, 25 year ago Linux was already pretty great and usable. Imagine what it can do now! The sky is the limit. -
P.S. If you find Knoppix 1.4, please let me know~
@nina_kali_nina
I used it with a 2001 Toshiba Laptop in this ancient times and it worked very well.
I remember the fancy arcade shooter in Galaxians style
