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monkeygirl
n00b
Joined: 08 Feb 2004
Posts: 69
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 Posted: Fri Jan 08, 2021 10:55 am Post subject: |
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| nikolis wrote: | | pentium 4 wanted about 9 hours with the kde3.* |
Pentium 4 back then... whoa... you were a high roller! Some of us plebs were stuck with Celeron and then Atom. Colour me jealous  |
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nikolis
Apprentice
Joined: 21 Aug 2003
Posts: 199
Location: Athens
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| Posted: Fri Jan 08, 2021 11:27 am Post subject: |
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it was my university years  |
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psycho
Guru
Joined: 22 Jun 2007
Posts: 534
Location: New Zealand
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| Posted: Fri Jan 08, 2021 10:06 pm Post subject: |
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| monkeygirl wrote: | | my little netbook was a Harry Potter spell book to strangers (this was when netbooks like VAIO were must haves) |
Yeah, people admired my little VAIO Linux netbook too. As far as I know it's still being used: I gave it to a friend over 15 years ago and when I saw her recently she was running Elementary on it. It's rare for hardware that ancient to look...well, not ancient...but that little VAIO wouldn't look out of place on the shelf today: the ten inch 1366x768 display still looks sharp enough, and the slim silver case and calculator-style silver keyboard were ahead of their time too. It was harder to get laptops fully functional in those days (there always seemed to be, at the very least, a special key or something somewhere that just didn't have any kernel support so didn't generate any events) but as far as I can remember that little VAIO worked 100% because all the special keys (Fn toggles and whatnot) that didn't generate kernel events worked at a hardware level anyway. It had great battery life for that (Linux 2) era...really I don't think I've been happier with any of the more modern laptops I've had since that little Sony. It's a pity they stopped making VAIOs.
| monkeygirl wrote: | | I also remember the HAL/Udev wars... and frankly "F" HAL... it was the worst. |
F both of them...I miss good old mknod. |
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NeddySeagoon
Administrator
Joined: 05 Jul 2003
Posts: 54420
Location: 56N 3W
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| Posted: Fri Jan 08, 2021 11:03 pm Post subject: |
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psycho,
mknod is alive and well. I still run a static /dev on my 2021 Gentoo. :)
There is no auto anything on my main box.
_________________
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NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail. |
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psycho
Guru
Joined: 22 Jun 2007
Posts: 534
Location: New Zealand
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| Posted: Sat Jan 09, 2021 7:49 pm Post subject: |
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| NeddySeagoon wrote: | mknod is alive and well. I still run a static /dev on my 2021 Gentoo.
There is no auto anything on my main box. |
That's genuinely inspiring. I resisted udev for a long time...then the slippery slope began when I surrendered to laziness and started using it once during installs to auto-generate a tidy /dev. It felt like I wasn't *really* abandoning mknod, because I would then backup (the devices I actually needed from) /dev, get rid of udev and continue with something *like* a manually configured system...but of course it was only a quick and slippery slide from there to "well, if I'm using it initially...and I guess it is convenient that it auto-mounts external drives..." (because clicking on something to launch a mount script manually was so hard, especially after all the exhausting work of plugging the actual drive in), and before long my ALSA was buried under layers of PulseAudio and half my systems had abandoned all pretense of self-control and given themselves over to systemd.
I look around now and it's carnage: a depraved orgy of automation...daemons snickering while they do what they want with my system, without consulting me. You, sir, have reminded me that hell is optional. |
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NeddySeagoon
Administrator
Joined: 05 Jul 2003
Posts: 54420
Location: 56N 3W
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| Posted: Sat Jan 09, 2021 8:00 pm Post subject: |
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psycho,
If you want to delve a bit deeper. There is the Old Fashioned Gentoo Install.
I've just pushed my static overlay to github too.
That first link is a bit out of date but its a pointer in the right direction.
_________________
Regards,
NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail. |
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Tony0945
Watchman
Joined: 25 Jul 2006
Posts: 5127
Location: Illinois, USA
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| Posted: Sat Jan 09, 2021 8:02 pm Post subject: |
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| psycho wrote: | | You, sir, have reminded me that hell is optional. |
And paved with good intentions! |
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NeddySeagoon
Administrator
Joined: 05 Jul 2003
Posts: 54420
Location: 56N 3W
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| Posted: Sat Jan 09, 2021 8:10 pm Post subject: |
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psycho,
There is some olde Gentoo which I got from another forums user.
It looks like at 1.2G may be an entire install from 2006.
Feel free to help yourselves.
_________________
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NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
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psycho
Guru
Joined: 22 Jun 2007
Posts: 534
Location: New Zealand
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| Posted: Sun Jan 10, 2021 10:26 pm Post subject: |
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Thank you: this is great. I've often considered doing something like this, but wasn't sure that it would be doable without a ton of work (on recent kernels, xorg and so on), so didn't want to invest a lot of time into it: had no idea it was already done and documented. I'm downloading a stage3 tarball right now to build a udev-free machine. Great too that it also eliminates similar automation that I dislike but that I've come to accept as if it's no longer worth the effort to avoid.
| NeddySeagoon wrote: | | That first link is a bit out of date but its a pointer in the right direction. |
I'll work through it when I get a chance (starting tonight, I hope) and will make a note of anything that needs to be updated. Now that I know it's doable, I'll be interested to see how practical it is (in terms of time involved in manual configuration) for new installs.
I did suggest in an earlier post that my idealistic love of manual configuration (proper UNIX-like systems that simply do what you've told them to do in the config files, as opposed to modern Windows-like Linux desktops that ignore traditional configs because they're so "smart" they assume you're too stupid to edit configs, using their thousands and thousands of lines of extra bug-prone code to do what the developers want rather than what you've specified) might be a bit nostalgic, and challenged by the years of improvements to the automation. For example I despised PulseAudio when it first thrust itself into my desktops, because my ALSA was perfectly configured and PulseAudio did nothing but get in way, wrecking things that were working perfectly before PulseAudio piled on its useless, stupid automation. I have quite a complex audio setup though (with the usual stereo headphone jacks and whatnot, but also HDMI output to an AV receiver that I like to switch quite often between stereo, 5.1, 7.1 or multi-channel stereo via the whole 7.2 speaker setup), so it will be interesting to see if my old ALSA configs/scripts/etc. (which I can probably dig up from an old backup) still do the job. I have to admit that, over the last couple of years now that PulseAudio at least seems to be working properly, I've come grudgingly to admit that it's a very convenient layer of automation for hasty installs, at least: it works "out of the box", sending all the channels exactly where I want them just by selecting the appropriate output from a menu, whereas I remember it took a bit of fiddling to achieve that on raw ALSA (though once it was properly configured it was more reliable than PulseAudio).
We'll see. However long it may take to get it all working, it certainly will be a pleasure to go back to a cleaner, tidier, more predictable system. |
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NeddySeagoon
Administrator
Joined: 05 Jul 2003
Posts: 54420
Location: 56N 3W
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| Posted: Sun Jan 10, 2021 10:54 pm Post subject: |
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psycho,
Rooting around on my live system I've found a copy of Gentoos documentation CVS repository for 2008.
Its all in the GuideXML of the day. I can host it if you want. Not in CVS so you won't be able to do a CVS checkout but you could get it all and wrap it is your own CVS server and do local checkouts if you needed to.
Here's a small sample | Code: | $ wgetpaste docs/htdocs/doc/en/xorg-config.xml
Your paste can be seen here: https://dpaste.com/AUZZKM7WG |
_________________
Regards,
NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail. |
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psycho
Guru
Joined: 22 Jun 2007
Posts: 534
Location: New Zealand
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| Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2021 2:42 am Post subject: |
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| Very much appreciated. I'll see how it goes with what's already online: I keep key configs etc. from old installs for many years, in case of situations like this, and have found some old (and complete, not partial) xorg.conf files and so on. The hardware's different of course but having these old ones as templates should make it fairly easy. I'd prefer to read the latest documentation as I go anyway, as there may be some changes and/or useful new functionality in xorg/alsa/whatever since the last time I set them up manually...so I'll just be using my old files as a starting point, to speed things up. I'm hopeful that with the guide you posted and the decent pile of largely (maybe fully) setup configs I have here already, it won't be a huge mission. I may wind up keeping the end product as my permanent Gentoo. |
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eccerr0r
Watchman
Joined: 01 Jul 2004
Posts: 9709
Location: almost Mile High in the USA
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| Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2021 2:56 am Post subject: |
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If I remember correctly the first Gentoo box I set up was an AthlonXP 2100 with 512MB RAM.
Second box is a Pentium-M 1600 also with 512MB RAM.
512MB RAM was enough back then.
First time I ran into memory problems was after I've upgraded many boxes to 1GB and noticed firefox link stage would chew on RAM.
In terms of emergencies where Gentoo f**ked up, there luckily weren't that many though I never had one on the other distros I used (RH, Slack, SLS, Debian, etc.). Expat from way back when, I don't remember exactly when, was somewhere between 2007 to 2009 I think - caused major breakage on lots of stuff as I recall. But as things have shown, this was not growing pains: in 2020 the pam upgrade was an equally bad of a screwup if not worse.
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Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching? |
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Ralphred
Guru
Joined: 31 Dec 2013
Posts: 509
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| Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2021 8:51 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | How was it using Gentoo in the early 2000s? |
Portage resolved dependencies quicker.
It took me a whole weekend of building to create a headless AMD K4 that served as router/firewall for about 4 years. AFAIK it still works. |
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NeddySeagoon
Administrator
Joined: 05 Jul 2003
Posts: 54420
Location: 56N 3W
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| Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2021 12:14 pm Post subject: |
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Ralphred,
Maybe. There were no subslots then, so portage did a lot less.
Your update then included revdep-rebuild to fix packages broken by the update.
It's difficult to compare.
_________________
Regards,
NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
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Leonardo.b
Guru
Joined: 10 Oct 2020
Posts: 302
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| Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2021 3:34 pm Post subject: |
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| NeddySeagoon wrote: | | I've just pushed my static overlay to github too. |
A good news, thanks. I'm trying to use it somehow. |
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Muso
Veteran
Joined: 22 Oct 2002
Posts: 1052
Location: The Holy city of Honolulu
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| Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2021 7:52 pm Post subject: |
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I came to Gentoo from Sorcerer Linux, and my computer had a 1ghz Duron and enough ram to meet the Sorcerer Linux specs. Gentoo was more polished than Sorcerer, so I stuck with it. We did stage 1 tarballs back then, so we'd bootstrap and start building up the chain. I did like starting from stage 1, though it was time consuming. The worst application to build back than was OpenOffice. That was a beast of a build that would take ages.
The community was vibrant and had a vast array of personalities.
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"You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think" ~ Dorothy Parker
2021 is the year of the Linux Desktop! |
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StaffanP
n00b
Joined: 01 Oct 2002
Posts: 35
Location: Sweden
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| Posted: Thu Jan 28, 2021 7:37 pm Post subject: |
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I started using Gentoo in 2001 or 2002, I don't remember exactly. I believe it was release 1.2. Back then the numbering wasn't related to the current year.
It took about a week to compile everything I wanted on a Pentium II (or was it III?) so in essence it wasn't much slower than it is now. It's just that the programs weren't that big back then.
Installation was the same back then: format a disk, boot a medium, partition, chroot and download stage, although I usually started with stage 2 instead of stage 3 as now. The cool people started at stage 1 but I wanted to save some time.
I was running KDE 2 and I loved it! I have stuck with KDE ever since. I've tried Gnome and other environments over the years but they never sat right with me. KDE it is for me. |
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ferg
Guru
Joined: 15 Nov 2002
Posts: 536
Location: Cambridge, UK
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| Posted: Thu Mar 04, 2021 10:11 am Post subject: |
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I remember coming from OS/2 to Yddraggassil, to Debian to Gentoo sometime in 2002. My profile looks to have existed since November 2002 on these forums so I guess it was then.
I was part of a small town Linux group (in Huddersfield, UK, HUDLUG - no idea if it still exists), and we all moved to Gentoo as it was "so cool" compared to other distros. I do remember it being a breath of fresh air after the "old fashioned" Debian.
I no longer think that, and am running Debian on a few machines now, but my main Linux box is still Gentoo.
In fact due to the lockdown, after about six years of using Linux headless, I've gone back to using it as a workstation.
I do not remember particularly long emerge times. But I think then the expectation was you typed the command, then went and did something else. Now I just look at the terminal with impatience.
_________________
Climb up it, kayak down it + make sure it runs on GNU/Linux
"cease to exist, giving my goodbye, drive my car into the ocean,
you think I'm dead, but i sail away, on a wave of mutilation!" |
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xineg
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 14 Mar 2006
Posts: 115
Location: Australia.
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| Posted: Thu Mar 04, 2021 4:05 pm Post subject: |
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| Juippisi wrote: | Overall using any Linux in the early 2000s was a lot harder. You needed to make your own XFree / xorg config to get graphical interface working. Gentoo took it to a bit higher level, and every update in ~testing could make your X / other programs to not work. But it surely taught you how to deal with these situations and work in the shell, which is advantegous using any distro out there.
Gentoo nowadays is very stable, and overall using any Linux distro is much easier than it was 20 years ago. |
This. I had forgotten the countless hours I spent trying to get dual monitors working circa 2006 with a matrox and an nvidia card, writing countless xorg.conf files. It's interesting that most of the differences we had back then as early gentoers, wasn't really in compiling time it was configuring things which often now are automated. |
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NeddySeagoon
Administrator
Joined: 05 Jul 2003
Posts: 54420
Location: 56N 3W
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| Posted: Thu Mar 04, 2021 7:56 pm Post subject: |
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In the course of trying to get a XP3200+ to power up, I came across my 1.4-rc2 minimal ISO used for my first install.
That 32 bit CPU was the end of the line for my first install that was migrated from a k6-2 through several CPU,s Motherboards and HDDs
The stage3 might still be on the HDD ... if I can get to read them.
_________________
Regards,
NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail. |
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Tony0945
Watchman
Joined: 25 Jul 2006
Posts: 5127
Location: Illinois, USA
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| Posted: Thu Mar 04, 2021 8:25 pm Post subject: |
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| Code: | tony@k6 ~ $ locate stage3
/stage3-i486-20140826.tar.bz2
tony@k6 ~ $ ls -l `locate stage3`
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 175522054 Aug 26 2014 /stage3-i486-20140826.tar.bz2
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How can OP verify that this is genuine? |
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Anon-E-moose
Watchman
Joined: 23 May 2008
Posts: 6103
Location: Dallas area
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| Posted: Thu Mar 04, 2021 9:22 pm Post subject: |
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Just looking through some old cd's.
Disk was labelled 1999, but evidently it had been around since 96.
| Code: | $ ls /mnt/dvd
bin dev dosd dosg dosj home lost+found opt root sex usr vmlinuz.old
boot dosa dose dosh dosk install mnt oracle rr_moved src var vmlinuz.special
cd dosb dosf dosi etc lib op r2 sbin tmp vmlinuz wp8
don@don64 ~ $ file /mnt/dvd/vmlinuz
/mnt/dvd/vmlinuz: Linux kernel x86 boot executable zImage, version 2.0.20 (root@don0) #84 Sat Sep 14 06:54:01 CDT 1996, RO-rootFS, root_dev 0x811, Normal VGA
don@don64 ~ $ dir /mnt/dvd/vmlinuz
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root root 393K Sep 14 1996 /mnt/dvd/vmlinuz |
Couldn't read my gentoo 2008 i686 install disc.
2007 live dvd amd64
| Code: | $ ls /mnt/dvd/*
/mnt/dvd/Getting_Online.txt /mnt/dvd/README.txt /mnt/dvd/gentoo.efimg /mnt/dvd/image.squashfs /mnt/dvd/livecd
/mnt/dvd/docs:
handbook
/mnt/dvd/gentoo.efimg.mountPoint:
efi elilo.efi gentoo gentoo.igz
/mnt/dvd/isolinux:
F2.msg F4.msg F6.msg boot.cat elilo.efi gentoo.igz isolinux.cfg memtest86
F3.msg F5.msg F7.msg boot.msg gentoo isolinux.bin kernels.msg
/mnt/dvd/snapshots:
portage-2007.0.tar.bz2 portage-2007.0.tar.bz2.DIGESTS |
I'm actually surprised some of the old stuff even reads. *gasp argggg amazement*
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PRIME x570-pro, 3700x, 6.1 zen kernel
gcc 13, profile 17.0 (custom bare multilib), openrc, wayland |
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NeddySeagoon
Administrator
Joined: 05 Jul 2003
Posts: 54420
Location: 56N 3W
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| Posted: Thu Mar 04, 2021 9:54 pm Post subject: |
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April 2003, I thought it was April 2002 I started, just after ADSL arrived here.
| Code: | # ls -lR /mnt/cdrom/
/mnt/cdrom/:
total 35223
drwxr-xr-x 2 500 users 2048 Apr 9 2003 gentoo
drwxr-xr-x 2 500 users 4096 Apr 9 2003 isolinux
-rw-r--r-- 1 500 users 36061294 Apr 9 2003 livecd.cloop
/mnt/cdrom/gentoo:
total 10989
-rw-r--r-- 1 500 users 11252054 Apr 9 2003 stage1-x86-1.4_rc4.tar.bz2
/mnt/cdrom/isolinux:
total 21099
-rw-r--r-- 1 500 users 417 Apr 9 2003 add.msg
-r--r--r-- 1 500 users 2048 Apr 9 2003 boot.cat
-rwxr-xr-x 1 500 users 236 Apr 9 2003 boot.msg
-rw-r--r-- 1 500 users 1334379 Apr 9 2003 gentoo
-rw-r--r-- 1 500 users 8479 Apr 9 2003 gentoo.lss
-rwxr-xr-x 1 500 users 1114 Apr 9 2003 help.msg
-rw-r--r-- 1 500 users 1649009 Apr 9 2003 initrd
-rw-r--r-- 1 500 users 5132361 Apr 9 2003 initrd.1024
-rw-r--r-- 1 500 users 5137053 Apr 9 2003 initrd.1280
-rw-r--r-- 1 500 users 1954776 Apr 9 2003 initrd2
-rw-r--r-- 1 500 users 5129210 Apr 9 2003 initrd.800
-rw-r--r-- 1 500 users 9404 Apr 9 2003 isolinux.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 500 users 1141 Apr 9 2003 isolinux.cfg
-rw-r--r-- 1 500 users 80324 Apr 9 2003 memtest
-rw-r--r-- 1 500 users 1162178 Apr 9 2003 smp |
... and the stage1 is included too. :)
_________________
Regards,
NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail. |
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grubber33
n00b
Joined: 27 Aug 2003
Posts: 62
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| Posted: Sun Mar 07, 2021 5:15 pm Post subject: |
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Cool thread, here's some of my memories from 2003 (Pentium II Celeron, 192MB RAM):
- Had to follow install instructions with lynx in a secondary terminal because no smartphones
- Everything took forever to compile (X11 took over 24 hours) but I was convinced it was the way to get the best performance from the system
- Once formatted the Windows partition by accident during a reinstall (sorry mom)
- Went between Fluxbox and Xfce
- Most used packages that I remember were XChat, Mozilla Firebird, XMMS2, gkrellm and aterm with fancy transparency
- Ran Starcraft at below 10fps in wine because I was a "winblows lol" kid at the time who refused to boot into Windows for anything
I do miss the days when Linux was something I wanted to discover and not something that felt somewhat chore-like to set up |
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NeddySeagoon
Administrator
Joined: 05 Jul 2003
Posts: 54420
Location: 56N 3W
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| Posted: Sun Mar 07, 2021 6:23 pm Post subject: |
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With a boot disk and a stage 1 handy, it just has to be done.
I'm having problems finding all the files for an April 2003 x86 install, no surprises there. :)
_________________
Regards,
NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail. |
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