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I remember when the switch to ELF (and glibc?) was a big topic. There even was a Linux distribution that wanted to keep the old ways as long as possible, even talking about forking the kernel. Mastodon Linux, I think.

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Just make sure you've already compiled pppd to an ELF binary before disabling a.out when recompiling your kernel. Otherwise, after you reboot you'll have no Internet access on your single household computer, and won't be able to download pppd sources or read HOWTOs to help fix it.

Suspiciously specific. :) I've put myself in similar situations, they're some of the best lessons I learned.

I got hit by the glibc breaking make (not a joke) bug once upon a time. To fix it you had to go download make sources and build them from a shell script. Almost as much fun as dpkg breaking in Debian once or twice upon a time.

Hahaha I have recalled 12 year old me's first true Linux fubar

Yes, I remember migrating my Slackware system from a.out to ELF. I think this was 1996?

Thereabouts. I think the libc5 to glibc2 switch was a few years after that.

Last release of Mastodon Linux is 2002, a lot later than I would've thought.

https://www.pell.portland.or.us/~mastodon/

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