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Comment by kelp | Hacker News Reader

I remember staying up all night downloading Slackware 96 (version 3.0) floppy sets over my 28.8kbps modem. I think I used it for my first 6+ months of home Linux use.

In retrospect it was probably a good thing to learn on because Slackware was so simple but did so little for you. I remember having to read a long HOWTO from the Linux Documentation Project about how to get XFree86 working. Hand crafting /etc/X11/XF86Config, including experimenting to find modelines that worked for my CRT monitor. Learning how to get Apache setup, which was kind of pointless but fun since I was on dialup.

And setting up auto dial up with a PPP session whenever I used anything that needed to get online. That seemed like magic!

Learned a lot there before trying out RedHat (4.x, before Enterprise was a thing) and Debian 1.3 (Bo) and then staying a Debian user for a long time until mostly moving to Ubuntu for server things.

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Handcrafting XF86Config is how I spent my summer of 95. I was in engineering school in India and we have these 486s in the lab running Win 3.1. I took permission from the lab dude to install Linux/X Windows on it. Monitor I had with the 486 was some noname OEM. So naturally the frequencies or whatever in the XF86Config didn't match. For many many weeks I would randomly change numbers in a line and restart. I think it was Ctrl+Fn7 to get to X screen or terminal. Still remember the joy when I got the login screen to show up.

I also started with Slack floppies, but never really thought about how much it taught me. Disk partitions, files systems, permissions, networking, drivers, etc. It really did force learning at least a base level of all aspects of the system.

I have been a generalist for most of my career and that may not have happened without Slackware.

> including experimenting to find modelines that worked for my CRT monitor.

I remember having to muck around with modelines in X11 in the 1990s - but not this century; and even last century, Windows (both 3.x/9x and NT lineages) and OS/2 (I only ever ran 2.0) never required any such esoteric configuration (I don’t even know whether either exposed any INI/registry settings for it.) Why was this such a big (and painful) part of the 90s Linux GUI experience but not for its contemporary GUI competitors?

XFree86 gained EDID autodetect support later than Windows and this makes people remember issues with high-res modes longer (Windows used to have them too early on, Mac was full of custom crap, unix workstations tended to have explicit data available),

Windows around win95/nt tended to come with preselected list (and woe on you if you choose wrong!), which meant that you could just select reasonably close defaults - or if you had fancy display, it might come with windows driver (actually a parameter file) telling the available options.

Also remember that significant majority of Windows users didn't have hi-res displays in the days before windows 95, and if you were ok with standard VGA modes, you didn't have to mess much.

Personally I remember crafting custom modelines because I wanted more than standard EDID data could give me, cranking up refresh rate to ~81Hz at 1152x864 resolution or so (typical setting on the display was 1024x768)

I recently had to look into modelines because of one issue related to high frequency refresh rate display and amdgpu causing some blinking due to VRAM reclocking. Really didn't expect that ever to come up.

In the process I discovered that KWin doesn't yet support setting video modes using modelines in the Wayland session at present.

I think monitors were tested by manufacturers on windows. Also you usually had a no name monitor and you either selected something close to what you had or a generic one and then had to play with xvidtune.

Slackware 3.0 in the mid 90's was where I got started too.

I have an nearly 20 year old system that's been upgraded many times from 10.0, 'grep -c "^Subject: Welcome to Linux" $MAIL' indicates 10 times ;) It's been through several hardware replacements, and now exists as a VM guest, since I took the leap some years ago to Slackware64 (its host, of course) with alienbob's multilib support.

Good to see improved multilib, build from scratch/make world, and still a full 32-bit option.

Slackware 96 was also my first distro on an extremely obsolete 386SX/33 with only 16mb of RAM using X11 & TWM.

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