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Comment by liendolucas | Hacker News Reader

I remember this era. It was Slackware, Caldera, TurboLinux, Mandrake and lots of hours with `./configure; make && make install` executions, reading Linux magazines and big fat books on getting it up and running (losing "precious" data in the process as well). Seeing scary fsck messages when booting up a PC that wasn't properly shutdown. I also remember that there was WinLinux 2000 for those who where scared having a real linux installed. I can't recall the real reason nor how I heard about Linux at the time, but I'm immensely grateful that I did and with time switched permanently to the open source side.

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Great skill building times!

I bought Redhawks 5.2 or .3 in the big box, bought the Linux Bible and went to town.

Was running Sgi IRIX full time back then. When Linux booted, I had two thoughts!

(Glances at spiffy Sgi Indigo Magic Desktop)

1) Hoo Boy, we have a long way to go

, and

2) YES, a lot is possible today!

Good times.

> ./configure; make && make install

This was what eventually lead me to Gentoo, if I'm going to have to compile some things why not all the things?

And being able to install mpg123 without installing X, that was nice.

I wish I spent that time compiling Gentoo a decade and a half ago farming bitcoins instead. What a waste of time!

Would it be as fun though?

Yea I would have spent it on pizza.

That’s a lot of pizza.

Not at 10k bitcoins per pizza.

I had the opposite, lots of that lead me to Debian instead. It wasn't so much the pain of compiling something once, but the ongoing pain of updating.

> if I'm going to have to compile some things why not all the things?

Time? Compiling the kernel took 10m on a reasonable fast workstation-like PC. It could easily take three times as long on a more budget-friendly PC. And the kernel wasn't the largest package by any means. gcc (wants to be compiled three times) or, shudder, TeX? Very little benefit of compiling that oneself over and over again while a quite substantial cost.

The Red Hat CDs had HOWTOs in them, you could use them to get many things done step by step.

If there was a packaged version you would prefer that, but not a lot of stuff was packaged in RPMs at the time.

When Ubuntu came out and they started sending CDs for free worldwide (kudos to Mark Shuttleworth), that's when the Ubuntu/Debian started dominating.

I miss the era of "startx"!

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