Oh, serendipity!

@nina_kali_nina The fonts and icons were better in those days.

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.

====

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~

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.

====

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 Interestingly, the German Wikipedia article about Morphix has mentioned this for almost 20 years (without a source, of course). Loosely translated:

> The modular concept of Morphix has furthered the development of modular distributions. For instance, the Morphix Live CD served as the basis for the Ubuntu Live CDs.

The German WP article about Ubuntu doesn't mention Knoppix or Morphix either though.

Current version: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphix#Geschichte
First mention: https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Morphix&diff=prev&oldid=28735820

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.

====

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 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.

@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.

@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

@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.

@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)

@devlin @pulkomandy any chance of getting your hands on that magazine?

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)

@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

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.

====

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~