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Comment by weikju | Hacker News Reader

I used it back in 1995 when my PC couldn’t run Win95, and I had Win95-envy. It was really mind-blowing at the time to be able to change the UI of Windows like that.

A little bit later I downloaded 20 or so Slackware floppies and the rest is history…

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Me too :)

I remember that apparently for desktop applications icons to work it had to launch a process just to be each icon so was quite memory intensive. I seem to recall it also requiring “win32s”

My machine would throw a text mode confirmation prompt over the win95 graphical installer when it tried to write the boot sector as boot sector virus protection and this would freeze the system so windows 95 installation never worked.

ohhh win32s... that's another memory from ages past lol

Me too! Calmira, the Q-Basic manual, a trackball, Commander Keen, and tons of a few really worn out floppy disks of shareware.

> I had Win95-envy

Ha, I know the pain, I remember being 10 and (literally) dreaming about 16mb or RAM so I could install it!

I think minimum was 4mb, and it ran ok with 8mb, although expect swapping if you multitask. It certainly ran nicer with 16mb, but you didn't need it.

I installed it on a 486 (DX2!!) with 4MB of RAM. It... worked, kinda. I reverted back to 3.1 a couple days later. The machine was just too slow.

It would be another two years before I could afford something that could run 95. I think I went straight to 98 IIRC.

My computers went from DOS 5 to Windows 98 - never had one with 3.x or 95 (though a friend did).

The jumps were big back then!

"But when I load it up / It says my memory is not enough" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc4JbzPqups

Did you run Slackware from DOS or did you install it properly with a bootloader?

Properly ran it with LILO as the boot loader. Shortly later the "boot from DOS" things started cropping up but I still preferred running them properly.

I hand totally forgotten about that. Wasn’t it called dosfs? It put metadata in files that would show up in DOS when you rebooted.

loadlin was the tool that would boot the kernel (including initrd) from a running DOS system. You might be thinking of umsdos? IIRC, that's the tool that would allow you to actually run Linux from a FAT partition (likely FAT16).

I remember having to boot my first distro from DOS because my sound card (a weird thing that was a combination of modem and sound card) didn't have Linux drivers. I would first load the DOS drivers, then boot Linux from DOS and it would then recognize it as a Sound Blaster.

Same but I got Slackware off a Computer Shopper cover CD ;-)

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