Oh, serendipity!
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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
