[rescue] Early LINUX distros.

[Jonathan Groll]

On Tue, 15 Mar 2011 08:11:31 +0200, gsm at mendelson.com wrote:
> What you don't see is competing distros, in 1995 when I first got into Linux,
> I bought a CD ROM with 2 or 3 Linux distros (none of them Red Hat) and
> a BSD release. You had to burn floppies to install any of them.

Hmm... I assume this email was written before the morning coffee hit
the blood stream, as even in the late 90s we didn't 'burn' floppies.
Or maybe some of us did, in frustration.

> 
> The hot distro in the late 1990's was Slackware and then behind it, the
> "Y" one I could never spell.
> 
> Debian existed, but was not popular. 
> 

What I remember of dominant late 90s distros is of Red Hat, Mandrake
and SuSE rather than Slackware. And, I thought Yggdraisal was gone by
1995.

> In fact the goal at the time was to create a complete installation
> disk including X Windows on a single 1.4m floppy. 

That reminds me of those QNX demo disks of the time. OS, including
graphical browser all ran off the floppy.

And although not an installer, I was a big fan of Tom's root boot:
http://www.toms.net/rb/


> Red Hat came into common useage when they started releasing CD ROM
> images. By that time fast enough internet connections and CD-ROM burners
> were available so that people would download them and burn them for
> friends.

The gold-plated CD-R disks in 1995 were also expensive. 

I recall getting an early Red Hat distro from the local SunSITE
(remember those?) and remember splitting the archive over a stack of
about 30 (or was it 20?) floppies.

Cheers,
Jonathan
--
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