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 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.
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.
Great video. Looks like Red Hat really got it right back then. I first tried installing Linux in 2007 (Debian with KDE desktop). Even then I had to do a lot of faffing about in the terminal and editing config files to get stuff working, like USB support and sound card. Now using Ubuntu Studio 24.04 with KDE, just minor tweaks to get things how I like them!
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
While I did this for a few years, and it was legitimately better than Windows 98 or Windows ME, I can't honestly say it was better than Windows XP, which is what lured me back to Windows. Without the internet it was all a huge pain, I had to wait for a new version of Mandrake to come to best buy, but with Windows all sorts of new software was available and stores all over town. I run Debian stable these days, because Linux is a much better experience now than it was then, and Microsoft has proven, time and time again that they have no interest in actually improving their product.
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 ?
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+
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!
You have to use the terminal once or twice to run a command or two that the manual tells you about. And the sound configuration tool is hardly rocket scientist stuff. Of course, "they" were the same people who whined throughout the 1980s that Unix was really hard to use, that "oh no, you need to run a command to list the current directory" even though in DOS, which was apparently acceptable to the masses, you had to run a command to list the current directory. I installed exactly this version of Red Hat in 1999 from one version of this box set on a Dell laptop. The only problem I remember now was that the Crystal audio hardware didn't like being initialised before some of the other hardware, thanks to the way the stupid, archaic PC architecture was designed. Adding an init script to reinitialise the audio during the boot sequence fixed that. Maybe flippant remarks about the command line come to mind at this point, but then people go on about config.sys and whatever else on DOS, so maybe Linux users might be allowed to customise the boot process as well. Oh, and prior to using this box set with that Dell laptop, I actually installed Red Hat 6.0 over the network using a boot floppy. Even the X server managed to set itself up, as far as I recall, and that involved the fairly esoteric and now largely forgotten NeoMagic video hardware. I can honestly say that setting Red Hat up on that laptop was less annoying and involved less intervention than setting up the officially supported Windows NT 4.0 distribution which my colleagues kept using, regardless of what "they" might have said about the matter.
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 😅
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.
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 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.
This is very cool and it brings back a lot of memories. I started out with slackware version 3 and it came in a huge book that included a couple of CDs. I still use slackware to this day and I'm at version 15. I never really got into Windows at all other than work. Prior to slackware I used os2 warp but it was very clear that IBM was no longer going to support it. At the time in '96 , I was not going to dish out $250 for a Windows operating system, so I stumbled across the slackware book at the bookstore and was in the clearance section for roughly $10 $15. I still have it.
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.
4:20 you did ask, yes it is still in use, but not by ordinary users anymore, it serves as a back end to more advanced package managers like yum or dnf.
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.
Blast from the past! I remember the sound and video configuration being a nightmare back then. And coming from the world of Windows that was kinda strange. I even remember compiling drivers to try to see if the last bleeding stuff worked.. I do not remember the voice of Linus Torvalds. Probably because I never made the sound card work! :D
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.
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.
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.
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.
In about 2001 or 2002 I setup put Mandrake on my personal machine, an Intel Triton 75mhz absolutely maxed out with 64mb of ram and an ATI Mach 64, a SCSI controller and a 2GB SCSI drive and a Sound Blaster 16 and it all worked pretty well. Gnome and KDE were both too slow, but running Blackbox I managed to have a very usable system. It all seemed pretty similar to that Red Hat Install, except most things worked if not out of the box, easily solved with the manual. I remember how exciting it was that despite not having internet I had this huge catalog of software for only $50, though I remember being very disappointed in the game selection that Mandrake Linux came with.
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 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.
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...
Ah yes. Tried Linux in the 90s, RedHat. Spent 3 hours trying to connect to the Internet, and 3 more hours to get the damn thing to play an mp3 file. I liked Windows before, but I really liked Windows after that experience.
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.
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 :)
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 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.
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 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
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)
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.
oh, I am sure I have one or two distros of Linux on CD from around that era... I should do something like this myself and see if it is as smooth as your install was.
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.
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
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.
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.
My first Linux install was on a 486dx4. Some Slackware distro all on floppies. None of that fancy CD-ROM nonsense. Never apologize for setting the com ports straight. Just knowing they were mislabeled would drive me a bit crazy too.
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.
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 can remember wanting to have that RedHat distibution, but it was a bit to pricey for me at that time. I went for the slightly cheaper S.U.S.E. Linux (I cannot remember what version, probably something like 6.2 or later), that also had a nice box and a big book and a startup guide. It was a huge improvement over the HJ Lu's Boot/Root floppies that I used before. This last set of floppies (that I had to download using a 2400 baud modem on a telephone line) was my very first experience with Linux. It was fun, but not as fun as that S.U.S.E. box...
I've a vague memory of installing Red Hat 7.1 on my old Sony Vaio at college in 2004, and it would work for 30 minutes then lock up. Knew nothing about Linux back then so gave up. Tried again with (I think) 7.3, as a dual boot, and never looked back. Gone from 90/10 split on Windows/Linux through to 1/99 Windows/Linux. 1% because I have to admin some Windows machines at work!
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. :)
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.
the neighborhood I live in is unique in that the owner corporation and the local university offered a 10mbit internet connection back when the houses was built in 1995 this led to a bunch of geeks moving in and many of them, me included where early adopters of Linux Redhat 6.1 was the first one I installed on my own but I later went with Debian slink witch was a pain to install compared to Redhat but had better package management once it was installed I got an old computer from one of my coworkers who just had bought a new one it turned out that the motherboard could take up to a 500mhz AMD k6 CPU even though it came with a Pentium 120 i bought one of those as an upgrade and 500mb ram and a used graphics card I had laying around I sapped the mini tower case to an old big tower case and installed 2 scsi HDs of 10gb each and an 1gb IDE drive as boot drive and ran it as an ftp and web server as I was learning HTML and wanted to host my own webpage and some backup files on it it was very noisy and loud For a period of a couple of year I tested all kind of distributions to find a replacement for windows and since 2006 I only run Linux on all my machines at home
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
This would be a kinda outdated system for '99, Pentium 100 is very early 90's. I had a Pentium III-800 with 128Mb of RAM back in '99-2000, and a Pentium II-266 with 32Mb before that. Neither of them were anything special.
@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...
