alt Hacker NewsHow was Linux in 1995? Must have been relatively early in its development
I remember reading about it those magazines, but got a love cd much much later
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In some part it was more advanced, I think windos 95 lacked TCP/IP in its first version, as microsoft tried to do a "Novell" on the LAN. To connect to the Internet there were 3rd party applications like trumpetsomething.
At that time there was the Xfree X11 implementation, before the Xorg coming, and you had to create your configuration for your GPU and monitor combination, using scripts or from scratch, the famous Xconfig. I recall the scary warning in the documentation to not mess with your monitor modelines as you could literally burn your CRTs; monitors at that time were already equipped with builtin protections, so wrong config would only result in a black screen, but every time it happened I held my breath.
There were already at that time a lot of different window managers, like FVWM, TWM and at least one or two desktop environments. I think CDE was already available for Linux in 95...
Lots of Xf86config and make config
One of my earlier memories of it back then was that _every single time I recompiled my kernel_ (which was frequent), my LILO bootloader ended up corrupted. There was just a totally broken default in whatever version that was.
SO MANY rescue boots.
Related, it took 8h to compile a kernel with 4MB of RAM. I didn't realize that was slow, honestly. I just thought that's how long it took. When I finally did get more RAM, and the system stopped swapping, and it took 12 minutes to recompile, it blew me away.
Anyway, it was fine. Well more than fine, great. Running a dozen virtual consoles (alt-f1 thru alt-f12) gave me everything i needed; interactive sessions, sessions I left logged into IRC clients, PINE for email, etc.
I didn't have enough RAM to run X Windows until later but once I did, that was a revelation as well. Remote X servers was so much more advanced than stuff we got in Windows/Mac until much much later.