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Comment by Gordonjcp | Hacker News Reader

Second distro I ever used, the first being Lasermoon. Prior to that, I used something that was a Linux 0.9 kernel and a bunch of disk images FTPed from some dude's server in Finland.

Back in the olden days it ran just fine on a Compaq Deskpro 386SX but needed a whopping 4MB of RAM.

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Thanks for sharing! This is the first I've heard of Lasermoon / Linux-FT but it appears that was a popular option back in the day based on these references [0][1][2][3][4][5][6]. How did it compare with Slackware? Or Yggradsil [7] or SLS [8] if you happened to have used those? Also, 4MB doesn't seem like a huge jump from Windows 3.0's minimum required 1MB of RAM or 2MB with Multimedia Extensions [9], but perhaps 4MB was often what common PCs had back in 1991/1992?

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/03/linux_distro_hopping/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26503724

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36682277

[3] https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/61777/Linux-FT/

[4] https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/139

[5] https://www.linux.co.cr/distributions/review/1995/0416.html

[6] https://techmonitor.ai/technology/lasermoon_touts_inexpensiv...

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softlanding_Linux_System

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.0#System_requirement...

> How did it compare with Slackware? Or Yggradsil [7] or SLS [8] if you happened to have used those?

I can't remember what it was like running Ubuntu 12 and that was only ten years ago, Lasermoon was 30...

Everything was command-line, not least because I didn't have enough space to install X. It worked okay. I feel like the compiler might not have been gcc? Not sure. I know that around the late 90s there was gcc and egcs, which was kind of a fork, that re-merged - I used that on Redhat 6, not RHEL6 but Redhat 6, with Gnome, and the K Desktop Environment as an option (the first versions of both!).

I guess I could trail about and see if I could find images of Lasermoon and try to install it, probably on a VM. If you're interested I could make a video, I guess?

Edit: this was the CD! https://archive.org/details/Shop0396

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