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Comment by TheLarch | Hacker News Reader

I'm not usually nostalgic but my circa 1994 Slackware CD distro is special.

Incidentally I can't overemphasize how far basic sysadmin skills will get you.

Ah, memories of my Slackware (kernel 1.2.8) CD set. Whatever version of LILO it shipped with munged the lilo.conf, and hence MBR, every time you ran it.

Trial by fire. Good times.

I still remember looking at the screen showing "LIL" at the top. Damn it, what else went wrong this time around?

Or: LILILILILILILILI

Ah, very fond memories indeed. See also: XFree86.conf .

So much time. So much time.

and "what the hell is a modeline?"

+xinerama == GOOD LUCK

And looking forwards to each new kernel release! And trimming it down to the bare essentials to minimize resource usage.

Also I knew the purpose of every process running on my box. Now I am just as bewildered as I am by Windows.

That may be true for desktops, but on a server, you can still run a very clean system. My virtual server has 16 processes running on it, six of them "systemd-something".

Well done! I am mostly referring to the 'bracket' kernel thread processes, which were not there back in the day. I must admit some laziness here, as I could research these in just a few minutes.

I avoid Gnome and KDE for that reason: they involve too many processes.

What am I gonna do with 32,000 kflush processes?

That gives me nostalgic (and frustrated) shivers. What memories!

Sure enough, my first shot at installing Slackware also resulted in LILO trashing my MBR.

I was attempting a dual-boot setup with Windows 95 at the time and, being too inexperienced to recover from the mishap, lost everything in the process. (Although one could argue that nothing of value was lost; Windows 95 was practically unusable.)

I blame both Slack and LILO for traumatizing an impressionable young mind: some 20 years on, I still hesitate whenever I have to deal with a bootloader.

Thankfully, nowadays we can boot by straight-up running the kernel as a UEFI executable[1]. No more MBR/VBR/bootloader song and dance for me.

[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/efi-stub.txt

Man, I would've killed for a CD set of Slackware.

It wouldn't have done me much good, though, as I didn't have a CD drive. I had to try to scroung up enough floppies to write out the "A" and "N" sets.

My hat is off.

Someone pointed out to me recently that the ubiquitous icon for 'save' is the depiction of a floppy drive, which is essentially a skeuomorph (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph).

Well, a floppy disk. But close enough.

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