Comment by gorkish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gorkish | Hacker News Reader

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I have a fond memory of the original redhat distros involving a closet. Sometime in the mid 90's, I was installing RedHat on an old (even for the time) 486/33 server that we had managed to acquire with the understanding that it be relocated the next day to a closet in another building across campus. Since the machine was actually on a desk, we thought we should do the install before having to move it to a cramped space. The installation ended up taking like 18 hours on that box, and it came time to move before it was finished. So we unplugged the UPS and had a bunch of people walk the thing across campus along with its tiny monochrome monitor still showing the RedHat installer filling up progress bars over and over. It prompted a lot of questions and strange looks. We were worried that the batteries were going to give out, but we made it. The machine carried on dutifully for many years longer than it should have. The Redhat distro along with rpm really made Linux a workable and supportable platform, and they deserve a lot of credit for their efforts.

Its actually APT (apt-get) which made Linux a workable platform because before that we had to manually hunt for package updates (such as RPMs). That was horrific. It is the sole reason I ever went to try (and switch to) Debian, coming from RPM-based distributions.

Yup. I've been using linux/unix since before package managers were common and debian was like a breath of fresh air. Even with RPMs it was generally always just easier to build stuff from source than to deal with RedHat's funky package system. And APT? APT was easy mode, it worked like magic. If you needed something you just installed it and the OS picked up the latest package and all the dependencies and installed all of it for you. It seems trivial today but back when always connected broadband internet was not the norm it was transformative. It took years and years for RedHat to catch up. I still have a sore spot about RedHat because of those earlier experiences.

Things are so much easier now in so many ways. For one it's a lot less common to have a computer that can't access the internet because it doesn't have the right drivers already. For another it's a lot less common to only have one computer (including smartphones) and thus only one way to download stuff. Computers are also way faster so doing anything that requires installing or compiling stuff isn't as big of a time sink.

My first exposure to RedHat and linux was playing with a Toshiba Magnia sg20 internet appliance. I found out I could telnet into it and get root access where it was running RedHad 6. I messed around with it a lot, just learning things and trying to get as many cool console apps on there as I could find. The pain of doing manual package dependency is why I jumped over to Debian (this would have been around 2003 or 2004). Though I do consider the experience I gained in doing manual dependency resolution valuable.

rpmfind.net !

Most likely true. But back in the late 90s, the Red Hat installer was alone a killer feature when compared to other distros, specially for those trying GNU/Linux for the first time.

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