Yeah it was, I mean this was still the era where most linux system installers were still command line based. Even when I first dabbled in linux in 2003 most only had a CLI installer and me being a Windows user could not get my head into it. If it were not for Suse or Mepis linux it's unlikely I would still be using linux for as long as I did. I probably would have waited for Ubuntu or Mint.
True, but there was still the dreaded 'RPM Hell'. Oh dear, I feel a bit odd now, just typing those words has just filled me with dread, remorse, sorrow and anger all at the same same time.
@@thingi Yeah dependency hell is why my time with Suse was very short and why I often steered clear of RPM based distros. Seems like it's mostly a thing of the past but openSUSE still has it, though thankfully its nowhere near as bad as it was before. Zypp is vastly superior to what came before it to be sure.
It did. I've used that case before, or one just like it. You attach the PSU to a little rectangular frame and that hooks into the case. Parts like that get lost to the sands of time.
I miss this old concept of a Linux distro just giving you every session manager, window manager and desktop environment under the sun, it was such a fun thing to just go “you know what, I think I’m gonna use Enlightment today” and get a completely different UI Nowadays they have to spin off distros just to make you pick between KDE and Gnome Sure you can just install them yourself but having them available from the get go was such a “yeah Linux is pretty wild, enjoy” move
Yeah it's crazy that there's so many separate multiple gigabyte downloads now just for the sake of a different desktop environment. As well as the ridiculous amount of distros, it's just chaos.
They just can't anymore (I doubt you'd be able to keep the image under 4 gb if you did) nor should they, the less bloat in the live image the better in an age where 99% of people can use the internet, not to mention all the random libraries and multiple applications doing the same thing that will create on an installed system, once the novelty wears off it'll hurt the user experience more than it'll help. There are distros like Endless os which do try to package every software possible for users with poor internet access and their full iso reaches like 17 gb and I don't know whether that includes every major DE too.
@@StefanHundhammer Uh, so if OS disk usage hasn't been an issue for over a decade then what's the problem with a Linux distro being bundled with multiple desktop environments? Your comment literally makes no sense.
My first was Mandrake or later called Mandriva Linux. I installed Mandrake version 9.0 on a windows 98 SE PC and was blown away how awesome KDE looked in comparison to windows 98's UI.
interestingly enough, the first I managed to get working on a PC that came with Vista... Home Basic, was actually Mandriva, since it actually supported the onboard video and sound or something like that from what I recall.
Yep. It went through some name changes, from what I can tell and if I recall correctly. It was originally called Linux Mandrake, then it was renamed to Mandrake Linux, a lawsuit happened (according to a Wikipedia article) that resulted in a quick name change to Mandrakelinux, then the distro merged with Connectiva Linux to become Mandriva Linux, which was then shortened to just Mandriva, if I recall correctly, before eventually being discontinued and spiritually succeeded by OpenMandriva Lx and Mageia.
Afterstep takes me way back. I bought a cheap laptop in the mid 2000s and had SUSE running on it with KDE2, eventually switching to Afterstep, which I used for maybe three months or so before switching back to Ubuntu. It was glorious.
Finally! My favorite out of the distros I’ve tried - although the version I’m running is of course OpenSuSE Tumbleweed, which is pretty much the same distribution with modern features and a modern KDE Plasma desktop installed as the default. You can actually still get the KDE 3.0 desktop as well! Just, don’t go breaking the sound settings like I did.
Which happened on exactly June 22, 1996, The day Quake was released. It's amazing how one game changed the course of CPU History. It also means that 99.99% of DX2's were a completely waste of money, an SX or cheaper/faster alternative with an Overclock was absolutely fine. This hideous chip was released four years after quake... They should hang their head in shame because as you say their chips were bangin' just a few years earlier.
That case looks very familiar. I still have the bracket for mounting that power supply on mine. Maybe get creative with some sheet metal or a 3d printer?
I recognize that case. Gotta love OEM builders. The spot where the PSU goes was a bracket that you screwed the PSU into and then attached to the case. The one I have has 2 screw mounts at the top and two slotted cuts in at the bottom for guiding arms to go into. It's amazing how much variety there was to the case design that uses the exact same faceplate. I have another similar one but it has a removable motherboard tray which is a bit unusual for the cases I have.
My first exposure to linux was SuSe 8.2 purchased with a book from Best Buy. The Via C3 was pretty common in thin clients from that era. I bought a motherboard with a C3 installed for $35. Wasn't a powerhouse, but was great for a file server (running linux)
Speaking of the C3, apperantly early VIA cpus were a mix of IDT and Cyrix designs while NS kept the mediaGX based Geode core before selling it off to AMD in 2003.
0:55, "...my Compaq Presario..." - Maybe six months ago, a new client brought me a Compaq Presario almost exactly like yours for data recovery. Its built-on monitor (can't really call it built-in, because it was basically a monitor whose guts were placed inside a monitor-shaped case extension but then plugged into an ordinary VGA port on the back) didn't work, but by plugging an external monitor into the VGA port, I found that the rest of the computer did. After the data recovery, I ended up listing it in a local vintage computing Facebook group and giving it to someone who wanted it. I kept some good photos of it, though. Cool machine.
Dude that enlightenment desktop unlocked nice memories! First time I disvered it I actually felt this was the future, and ahead of any other desktop. Thanks for the memory dude!
My first experience with Linux was with RedHat 6.2, but Suse 7.0 was my first "love" indeed. It stayed on my desktop for a very long time. And my PC had also a C III !!Thanks for the memories!!
Ah, man I loved SuSE 7. I also got mine from a Barnes and Noble Linux book (Linux Unleashed I think?). It really felt like the future, I was blundering through an older version of Slackware at the time and while it taught me a lot, the ease of use of SuSE 7 was night and day. I still have a soft spot for Slackware so I use it on my laptop these days but SuSE 7 with all the desktop environments, window managers and software bundled with it really solidified my love for that little penguin. Good stuff!
Stuff like this is making me feel dejavu way too often. This and Mandrake were the first Linux media I acquired for starting my adventures of Linux. Feels like it was just yesterday. Man... time flies so fast when you're having fun, seriously. I'm 52 years old now, but feel like I'm still in my 20s & 30s when I watch and see these kind of things. I pronounced it wrong, "soo-see" or "soo-say" is what I was calling it.
I am kind of in love with these older linux distro's. They give you a penguin on boot and a window manager, session manager, desktop and some other things and thats it, no signing up for software or any other installing or updating packages. I love the old look too! And tux is there
Love that you're digging into old linux distros. keep it up! A deeper dive would be fun. Do you ever do streaming or like, druaga1 level all day recordings of messing around with it? Would be neat just to see every game real quick etc.
After Slackware, SuSE was my distro of choice from the late 90's on (mostly because Red Hat did not like my laptop's token ring card at all). Even after Ethernet replaced the token ring, I stuck with SUSE for many years and versions until eventually I switched to a Mac. This video brought back a lot of fond memories of that distro.
At the time, I installed SuSE 7 on an AlphaPC 164SX motherboard in about the same case. It worked fantatically, but many programmes still needed minor adjustments to 64bit. The Windows NT version also worked well, provided that under Linux you removed certain driver files that were 32bit from the NT partition.
Wow - That takes me back! SuSE 7.0 was actually my second successful Linux install. The first one was SuSE 6.0. That version was a bit older obviously. My first try to install Linux was using a distribution on floppy's, where you had to compile your kernel. That was a real PITA, and I never got it working reliable. I was interested in Linux, because I was using a non-Windows system before, namely RiscOS. I was one of the early adapters of the Acorn Archimedes, that was delivered with a OS called Arthur. That one was soon replaced by RiscOS. Anyway - I went from SuSE to Mandrake Linux later on, to finally ending in the present day with Linux Mint Cinnamon.
I still have my boxed version of Suse 8.0 Pro with the CD's inside. I haven't used it in years, but this reminded me of how it was back then. I remember it even ran on a 486/66, though it was happier with a Pentium 3 1K. A lot of good memories. Thanks for the throwback.
As someone that bought a Kyro 2 graphics card back in the day I have an affinity for weird obscure technology. I don't know if it'd suit a Linux distro much to test Kyro or Kyro 2's graphical abilities much, but I have a bunch of memories trying to troubleshoot games back in the day.
SuSE 7.3 DVD was my first, after Red Hat. I didn't have a DVD-rom drive or burner, so I downloaded it over DSL and installed it into a Vmware virtual machine :) Very nostalgic watching this video; 7.3 was 32-bit only and I used it for a couple of years on a 900 MHz AMD Duron with maybe less than 1GB RAM on the hardware
YES! I've been waiting for ages for a proper video about the VIA C3 processor. I recently restored my mom's first Windows PC, which is where I first experienced the "World Wide Web". We got it in early/mid 2001 and had Windows Me pre-installed. I remember it came with a lot of software CDs, such as photo editing software and other utilities ... and it included OpenSUSE, which looked similar to the box you have. I was too young at the time to realize that it was a completely different operating system, and so the box remained untouched forever until I lost after we moved.
If you haven't already, do a video on "Yellow Dog Linux" on one of your vintage beige macs. I tried a few times back in the early '00s but could never get it installed. You needed to side-load it with MacOS or something.
A good friend of mine got YellowDog working quite well on a Powermac back in high school.. I don't think he tried mklinux on a 68k though. Such good times!
My first CPU was a Cyrix 6x86 and my first Linux distro was a SuSE CD from the mid-00s I got with a magazine, so this video is filled with nostalgia for me.
Just saw this video a day after you uploaded, thankfully frogfind worked for my Athlon 700 system just fine! I think I had a similar book to yours when I was a kid, but mine was a for dummies book that included a CD installation of SuSE 6.2, I don't even remember how it came into my possession but I tried it on our family computer and it was pretty fun to play around with!
The 90s were so much fun with the variety of platform combinations available. There were like 4 or 5 different manufacturers making x86 chips. Then you also had computers with chips like the MIPS, DEC Alpha, PowerPC and Sun Sparc on which you could install Linux. Even Windows NT at the time supported a number of different platforms like the DEC Alpha and MIPS.
Soyo was /is a motherboard manufacturer since the early 90's till now. My First Soyo board was a super socket 7. They only make boards in china now and not for the euro market. The last mainstream Soyo board I had was the Soyo Dragon socket 478 which died with pentium 4 presshot cpu.
I use KDE. I was a early devotee was totally blown away by web integration into the desktop -- seriously before it's time. I think I compiled a working version on red hat on my dx4 laptop but I can't remember. My daily driver runs Q4OS.
I had one of those retail SuSE disc distros, I believe i got at Fry's. Installed it on one of my older computers and was amazed at what it could do. Did a presentation in one of my classes explaining the performance differences of different RAID modes, something Windows 98 couldn't do back then.
Soyo are still around (kind-of) their assets were sold off to Mainland China (Guangzhou Shangke Information Technology Co) and their motherboards are still produced today.
Oh man, this brings back some memories 😊 My first distro was mandrake back in ‘02, before switching to gentoo. I remember playing that KDE asteroids game!
Oh wow! This is very nice retro vibe for me. SuSE Linux 7.0 was the first Linux I ever succesfully used. I got a CD-R from a classmate, with some Red Hat version on it but never got it working. I was intrigued by the idea of Linux though so I actually BOUGHT a box set of SuSE 7.0 in the local computer store. Got it running in no time. It was a lot of fun! I still use Linux to this day.
Ah... this brings back a lot of memories. I actually bought a boxed copy of SUSE back in the early 2000's, but I can't remember which version exactly. Bought it from a computer shop somewhere in The Netherlands during my PhD studies there. I wonder where that thing is right now...
One issue with the Barracuda hard drive, make constant backups on an external drive. One person posted on Reddit that their school's computer lab which was with all Barracuda hard drives all went kaput within one week, all 20 computers had to have a replacement hard drive.
I just did a Via C3 Nehemiah 1GHz 440BX build. Overclocked to 1.33GHz. Runs about as fast as a 650 PIII. Great for downclocking using setmul and cache disabling to play older dos games.
The first Linux distro I ever installed was Redhat 5.2. No, not Enterprise 5.3 but Redhat 5.2 released in '98. I remember how hellish it was just getting X running. Man, things have come a long way.
The PC tower uses a standard ATX power supply, but you need a bracket to mount it to the chassis. I do not really know the reason, but it works that way.
i'd forgotten what old linux looked like. i remember my friend's dad showing me his linux pc. only issue he had was that the sound card had zero volume control, it just played everything at max volume or no sound at all.
Yeah, the YAST installer has changed very little since the early late 90s and 2000s, I should know as my first successful Linux install was Suse linux 9.3. However the distro that got me to use linux more full time was Mepis linux 2003.10. Next year will be my 20th anniversary as a linux user making it my most used OS/kernel. Currently, I am rocking Fedora 39 which is in my opinion the best release of Fedora, its incredibly snappy and quick. Last time I used Fedora more long term was with version 20 just before DNF came in and screwed things up. It took that whole time before DNF became anywhere near good IMHO.
Not forgotten for me. I have both a CIII 750 and 866 that my Jetway994 is compatible with. They do have some software compatibility issues - couldn't run CB2003.
Back in the days when you could swap between Desktop environments without everything breaking. Those C3 CPU's were stable enough, but crippled by design. Thanks Sean. 🙂👍
That's fantastic. I've not spent nearly enough time with Linux, honestly. For being that old, those are some beautiful GUI's! I'm working on a video right now about a weird industrial Panel PC, sold as "not working", and the seller claiming it to be a Pentium 4, turns out it's a VIA C3 as well! 🤣It works fine, just didn't have the power button on the correct headers! And my old Daewoo video had the "screw right in to the grill of the power supply" problem when I got it! The previous owner shoved a full ATX power supply in an SFX space lol. The things we do for love. (of retro PC's.) Great video, as always!
Granted it was much smaller and higher clock speed at the time but, I had multiple mini-itx and nano-itx machines back when the Vía chips were common in those boards. I can attest Linux was the best os for that chip.
OMG, SuSE 7 was my first Linux also. I saw YAST2 a lot... the good old days of blowing up my computer so bad I had to reinstall the whole OS because I had no idea wtf I was doing. Got my copy from the SuSE booth at COMDEX Spring 2000 in Chicago.
I used to have a VIA C3 In an old laptop - I remember the CPU badge being a blue top and green bottom, with a yellow affect between the colours, the CPU ran Windows XP fine but it was a VERY VERY VERY VERY hot CPU for a laptop and it made the machine hard to handle
I'm not surprised SuSE had problems with display resolution, as well as that odd tripled screen. I had tried SuSE out over a number of years, and regardless of the year, and which machine it was installed on, it would never look quite right. So this was back in the days when GNOME **didn't** suck.
My first Linux was SuSE 7.x that came in a book as well and I too failed to set up the dual boot at first. I managed to fix that, but it also somehow broke my CD-RW drive permanently! I wrote it off as a coincidence, until now when I saw that your drive also "coincidentally" died while working with this cursed distro...
While I used Debian before that, my proper first Linux was SuSE 7.3 Pro. The books were amazing. Fortunately, at that point I was already on Pentium 4.
Remember when you could go to Walmart and buy a retail box of Linux? I remember in 2000 buying Mandrake and RedHat at the store using my employee discount. I was super pumped when I got the soundcard working and played my limewire MP3s
SuSE Linux was always my most favorite distro to run on all my machines but back in 2000 I did NOT have the honor of using version 7.0 which was the "HAPPY" inbetween version that gave you all the cool desktops and window managers, multimedia apps and tons of graphics to tweak this thing out. It featured the soon to be mainstream Xfree 86 4.x as well as the older xfree86 3.x? I know I could run almost any video card on these versions of Linux with the new Xfree 4.0 cause it used VESA 2 generic drivers so you still had graphics and color, kinda like Windows XP did. It was also more hardware friendly for alot of soundcards and VGA cards out there. I bought my very first SuSE Linux at a computer show back in 2000, and it was version 6.3. Same amount of CDroms and while back then my power went out in the middle of setup and I thought SuSE was not good due to the keyboard not working after the power came back, that I never gave that version a second look and sold it shortly there after. Boy, when I got version 7.1 personal I was in for a real treat! I could ALMOST replace Windows 2000 with this! I did try Mandrake Linux 6 as my first ever Linux distro and it never worked right from git go with the crappy hardware I had back in 1999, so it was not until 2000/2001 that my SuSE Linux adventures really began with 7.1, 7.2(buggy) and finally the Holy grail.. 7.3!! Mind you.. I have version 7.0 in a box, new today. And it is my trophy on my office desk. Again.. What a ride me and my Penguin have had! I now use MX LINUX as my only OS to this day.. No regrets!
Oh wow I also built a few machines with that case brand (they had 4 5.25” bays) and installing Suse Linux on them back when I was in high school. They were meant for my Dad’s lab but we got to borrow them for lan parties
Oh man, the first Linux i installed was SuSE 6.2 also from original cd that i got i don't know where, i was so happy when i got it to finally work (had to swap the GPU like 3 times before i found one that worked and reinstall everything each time), it looked so cool once installed though and so futuristic!
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I wonder if there is a reliable way to emulate that old hardware these days? You’ve given me the urge to play with old distros.
I can only assume that frogfind got hit by the DDOS ransom groups that sell "protection" which is basically "pay us and we'll stop DDOSing your site" it's very common.
I built my buddy his first PC with one of these CPUs and Win98SE. We later bricked the mainboard somehow by installing a firmware update to allow more than 512mb of RAM when we wanted to install Windows 2000. Never rebooted after the new firmware was loaded.
I used to know a person who owned a Cyrix inn that timeline. They offered a good CPU for a dead end socket. Where AMD abandoned things with the K62 3D NOW and Intel with the Pentium III, Cyrix kept offering socker 370 options. Maybe not the best, but the best for a dead end. For the average user performance wasn't bad, but it didn't have the SSE enablers that the AMD/Intel Chips had or the cache. For the basic home user they were surprisingly OK though.
Hey, can you archive an iso of the installation disk i wanted to do a similar thing and this distro looks nice but i can't find it anywhere since i am not in the us
grub rescue my nightmare
It’s everybody’s nightmare on Linux
Hard co-sign. Why would anyone put that on a shirt? Haha. It’s brilliant
YaST2 was such a gamechanger back then. I was a Slackware devotee, but was thoroughly impressed by that strange German disk.
Yeah it was, I mean this was still the era where most linux system installers were still command line based. Even when I first dabbled in linux in 2003 most only had a CLI installer and me being a Windows user could not get my head into it.
If it were not for Suse or Mepis linux it's unlikely I would still be using linux for as long as I did. I probably would have waited for Ubuntu or Mint.
True, but there was still the dreaded 'RPM Hell'. Oh dear, I feel a bit odd now, just typing those words has just filled me with dread, remorse, sorrow and anger all at the same same time.
@@thingi Yeah dependency hell is why my time with Suse was very short and why I often steered clear of RPM based distros. Seems like it's mostly a thing of the past but openSUSE still has it, though thankfully its nowhere near as bad as it was before. Zypp is vastly superior to what came before it to be sure.
When RPM Hell was really a thing package dependency resolvers were not. Debian's introduction of APT changed all that.
I bet that power supply had a mounting bracket it bolted to first. I believe it would hinge into the slots on the side and then swing into position.
Thinking the same. I know my Lian-Li cases have something like this and wonder *if that could be smashed into working here.
It did. I've used that case before, or one just like it. You attach the PSU to a little rectangular frame and that hooks into the case. Parts like that get lost to the sands of time.
You are correct
It did, I have the exact same case with a different front panel.
I miss this old concept of a Linux distro just giving you every session manager, window manager and desktop environment under the sun, it was such a fun thing to just go “you know what, I think I’m gonna use Enlightment today” and get a completely different UI
Nowadays they have to spin off distros just to make you pick between KDE and Gnome
Sure you can just install them yourself but having them available from the get go was such a “yeah Linux is pretty wild, enjoy” move
Yeah it's crazy that there's so many separate multiple gigabyte downloads now just for the sake of a different desktop environment. As well as the ridiculous amount of distros, it's just chaos.
They just can't anymore (I doubt you'd be able to keep the image under 4 gb if you did) nor should they, the less bloat in the live image the better in an age where 99% of people can use the internet, not to mention all the random libraries and multiple applications doing the same thing that will create on an installed system, once the novelty wears off it'll hurt the user experience more than it'll help. There are distros like Endless os which do try to package every software possible for users with poor internet access and their full iso reaches like 17 gb and I don't know whether that includes every major DE too.
I always install almost every DE under the sun
@@StefanHundhammer Uh, so if OS disk usage hasn't been an issue for over a decade then what's the problem with a Linux distro being bundled with multiple desktop environments? Your comment literally makes no sense.
@@StefanHundhammer Now you're being dense, because I never once mentioned SUSE.
The `grub rescue>` T-shirt is really scary
Haha, yeah - maybe he should make an "Input/Output Error" or Busybox prompt t-shirt as well to round out the horror!
Why would you try Linux when even grub is too difficult for you?
My first was Mandrake or later called Mandriva Linux. I installed Mandrake version 9.0 on a windows 98 SE PC and was blown away how awesome KDE looked in comparison to windows 98's UI.
interestingly enough, the first I managed to get working on a PC that came with Vista... Home Basic, was actually Mandriva, since it actually supported the onboard video and sound or something like that from what I recall.
Mandrake was way ahead of its time. It had a nice installer, a beautiful theme, a control panel and much more. Makes me sad that it vanished.
@@ikemkruegerThey are OpenMandriva now.
Yep. It went through some name changes, from what I can tell and if I recall correctly. It was originally called Linux Mandrake, then it was renamed to Mandrake Linux, a lawsuit happened (according to a Wikipedia article) that resulted in a quick name change to Mandrakelinux, then the distro merged with Connectiva Linux to become Mandriva Linux, which was then shortened to just Mandriva, if I recall correctly, before eventually being discontinued and spiritually succeeded by OpenMandriva Lx and Mageia.
RedHat 5.2 (I think it came with a "For Dummies" guide) for me but yeah, Mandrake shortly after that which went much better.
Afterstep takes me way back. I bought a cheap laptop in the mid 2000s and had SUSE running on it with KDE2, eventually switching to Afterstep, which I used for maybe three months or so before switching back to Ubuntu. It was glorious.
Why would anyone feel motivated to run a bot against Frogfind? That just seems meanspirited.
Finally! My favorite out of the distros I’ve tried - although the version I’m running is of course OpenSuSE Tumbleweed, which is pretty much the same distribution with modern features and a modern KDE Plasma desktop installed as the default.
You can actually still get the KDE 3.0 desktop as well! Just, don’t go breaking the sound settings like I did.
My to go Linux back days was Mandrake 8.1 - 8.4
I loved the Cyrix chips - they were an amazing bang for the buck … until people expected their CPU to handle floating point calculations 😂
Which happened on exactly June 22, 1996, The day Quake was released. It's amazing how one game changed the course of CPU History. It also means that 99.99% of DX2's were a completely waste of money, an SX or cheaper/faster alternative with an Overclock was absolutely fine. This hideous chip was released four years after quake... They should hang their head in shame because as you say their chips were bangin' just a few years earlier.
OpenSuse (and by extension Suse) still a really good and underrated distro
Next year is the year of Linux. and always will be.
That case looks very familiar. I still have the bracket for mounting that power supply on mine. Maybe get creative with some sheet metal or a 3d printer?
I recognize that case. Gotta love OEM builders. The spot where the PSU goes was a bracket that you screwed the PSU into and then attached to the case. The one I have has 2 screw mounts at the top and two slotted cuts in at the bottom for guiding arms to go into. It's amazing how much variety there was to the case design that uses the exact same faceplate. I have another similar one but it has a removable motherboard tray which is a bit unusual for the cases I have.
My first exposure to linux was SuSe 8.2 purchased with a book from Best Buy. The Via C3 was pretty common in thin clients from that era. I bought a motherboard with a C3 installed for $35. Wasn't a powerhouse, but was great for a file server (running linux)
Speaking of the C3, apperantly early VIA cpus were a mix of IDT and Cyrix designs while NS kept the mediaGX based Geode core before selling it off to AMD in 2003.
0:55, "...my Compaq Presario..." - Maybe six months ago, a new client brought me a Compaq Presario almost exactly like yours for data recovery. Its built-on monitor (can't really call it built-in, because it was basically a monitor whose guts were placed inside a monitor-shaped case extension but then plugged into an ordinary VGA port on the back) didn't work, but by plugging an external monitor into the VGA port, I found that the rest of the computer did. After the data recovery, I ended up listing it in a local vintage computing Facebook group and giving it to someone who wanted it. I kept some good photos of it, though. Cool machine.
Love this vintage Linux series, please keep em coming lmao
These are a view into my Linux past. I remember taking almost a whole day downloading the Slackware 7 CD ISO on dialup when it was new lol.
Dude that enlightenment desktop unlocked nice memories! First time I disvered it I actually felt this was the future, and ahead of any other desktop. Thanks for the memory dude!
I convinced my mom to buy SuSE Linux 8.2. It was awesome!
What is your daily? Mac os or linux? Which linux distro do you use the most? Great video as always!
My first experience with Linux was with RedHat 6.2, but Suse 7.0 was my first "love" indeed. It stayed on my desktop for a very long time. And my PC had also a C III !!Thanks for the memories!!
I’m loving this retro Linux throwback
Ah, man I loved SuSE 7. I also got mine from a Barnes and Noble Linux book (Linux Unleashed I think?). It really felt like the future, I was blundering through an older version of Slackware at the time and while it taught me a lot, the ease of use of SuSE 7 was night and day. I still have a soft spot for Slackware so I use it on my laptop these days but SuSE 7 with all the desktop environments, window managers and software bundled with it really solidified my love for that little penguin. Good stuff!
Stuff like this is making me feel dejavu way too often. This and Mandrake were the first Linux media I acquired for starting my adventures of Linux. Feels like it was just yesterday. Man... time flies so fast when you're having fun, seriously. I'm 52 years old now, but feel like I'm still in my 20s & 30s when I watch and see these kind of things.
I pronounced it wrong, "soo-see" or "soo-say" is what I was calling it.
I am kind of in love with these older linux distro's. They give you a penguin on boot and a window manager, session manager, desktop and some other things and thats it, no signing up for software or any other installing or updating packages. I love the old look too! And tux is there
Love that you're digging into old linux distros. keep it up! A deeper dive would be fun. Do you ever do streaming or like, druaga1 level all day recordings of messing around with it? Would be neat just to see every game real quick etc.
After Slackware, SuSE was my distro of choice from the late 90's on (mostly because Red Hat did not like my laptop's token ring card at all). Even after Ethernet replaced the token ring, I stuck with SUSE for many years and versions until eventually I switched to a Mac. This video brought back a lot of fond memories of that distro.
Your channel is great. It takes me back to a simpler time. I miss the late 90s - early 00s.
Bringing up some memories with this one. I remember running Mandrake 8.1 with a KDE desktop of that vintage. So much fun
At the time, I installed SuSE 7 on an AlphaPC 164SX motherboard in about the same case. It worked fantatically, but many programmes still needed minor adjustments to 64bit. The Windows NT version also worked well, provided that under Linux you removed certain driver files that were 32bit from the NT partition.
Wow - That takes me back! SuSE 7.0 was actually my second successful Linux install. The first one was SuSE 6.0. That version was a bit older obviously. My first try to install Linux was using a distribution on floppy's, where you had to compile your kernel. That was a real PITA, and I never got it working reliable. I was interested in Linux, because I was using a non-Windows system before, namely RiscOS. I was one of the early adapters of the Acorn Archimedes, that was delivered with a OS called Arthur. That one was soon replaced by RiscOS.
Anyway - I went from SuSE to Mandrake Linux later on, to finally ending in the present day with Linux Mint Cinnamon.
I wish Cyrix survived and was around today. MORE competition and development and innovation is never a bad thing.
Acrually they still exist, they are Zhaoxin processors
As I said, I was excited to see a VIA CPU working, BUT ALSO LINUX!? Christmas came early this year!
I still have my boxed version of Suse 8.0 Pro with the CD's inside. I haven't used it in years, but this reminded me of how it was back then. I remember it even ran on a 486/66, though it was happier with a Pentium 3 1K. A lot of good memories. Thanks for the throwback.
As someone that bought a Kyro 2 graphics card back in the day I have an affinity for weird obscure technology. I don't know if it'd suit a Linux distro much to test Kyro or Kyro 2's graphical abilities much, but I have a bunch of memories trying to troubleshoot games back in the day.
SuSE 7.3 DVD was my first, after Red Hat. I didn't have a DVD-rom drive or burner, so I downloaded it over DSL and installed it into a Vmware virtual machine :) Very nostalgic watching this video; 7.3 was 32-bit only and I used it for a couple of years on a 900 MHz AMD Duron with maybe less than 1GB RAM on the hardware
YES! I've been waiting for ages for a proper video about the VIA C3 processor. I recently restored my mom's first Windows PC, which is where I first experienced the "World Wide Web". We got it in early/mid 2001 and had Windows Me pre-installed. I remember it came with a lot of software CDs, such as photo editing software and other utilities ... and it included OpenSUSE, which looked similar to the box you have. I was too young at the time to realize that it was a completely different operating system, and so the box remained untouched forever until I lost after we moved.
The SOYO name has awaken dormant memories in my head, but not of complete builds, just on listings of custom build PCs as a motherboard manufacturer.
If you haven't already, do a video on "Yellow Dog Linux" on one of your vintage beige macs. I tried a few times back in the early '00s but could never get it installed. You needed to side-load it with MacOS or something.
A good friend of mine got YellowDog working quite well on a Powermac back in high school.. I don't think he tried mklinux on a 68k though. Such good times!
Until he posts that, there are a few videos hew made of installing modern Adelie Linux on old PowerMacs.
why would someone bot your site like that ? people really are bored aren't they ?
My first CPU was a Cyrix 6x86 and my first Linux distro was a SuSE CD from the mid-00s I got with a magazine, so this video is filled with nostalgia for me.
Peak Y2K identified: native napster client bundled with KDE. I'm amazed no one else has commented on it.
This fits for me as like I said in your Red Hat 5.2 video that I have a set of Red Hat 6.2 discs that are also from the year 2000
Wow, thanks Sean. Those desktops were a real flashback. A great trip down memory lane.
Just saw this video a day after you uploaded, thankfully frogfind worked for my Athlon 700 system just fine!
I think I had a similar book to yours when I was a kid, but mine was a for dummies book that included a CD installation of SuSE 6.2, I don't even remember how it came into my possession but I tried it on our family computer and it was pretty fun to play around with!
I have a boxed SuSE 7.2, 8.1 and 9.0. I liked useing them back in the day you got printed manuals.
The 90s were so much fun with the variety of platform combinations available. There were like 4 or 5 different manufacturers making x86 chips. Then you also had computers with chips like the MIPS, DEC Alpha, PowerPC and Sun Sparc on which you could install Linux. Even Windows NT at the time supported a number of different platforms like the DEC Alpha and MIPS.
It is sooo sad that they killed the DEC Alpha in favour of Itanium.
Soyo was /is a motherboard manufacturer since the early 90's till now. My First Soyo board was a super socket 7. They only make boards in china now and not for the euro market. The last mainstream Soyo board I had was the Soyo Dragon socket 478 which died with pentium 4 presshot cpu.
I use KDE. I was a early devotee was totally blown away by web integration into the desktop -- seriously before it's time. I think I compiled a working version on red hat on my dx4 laptop but I can't remember. My daily driver runs Q4OS.
That was a very polished, nice Linux install for back then. Enjoyed that..
I had one of those retail SuSE disc distros, I believe i got at Fry's. Installed it on one of my older computers and was amazed at what it could do. Did a presentation in one of my classes explaining the performance differences of different RAID modes, something Windows 98 couldn't do back then.
Soyo are still around (kind-of) their assets were sold off to Mainland China (Guangzhou Shangke Information Technology Co) and their motherboards are still produced today.
Oh man, this brings back some memories 😊 My first distro was mandrake back in ‘02, before switching to gentoo. I remember playing that KDE asteroids game!
Oh wow! This is very nice retro vibe for me. SuSE Linux 7.0 was the first Linux I ever succesfully used. I got a CD-R from a classmate, with some Red Hat version on it but never got it working. I was intrigued by the idea of Linux though so I actually BOUGHT a box set of SuSE 7.0 in the local computer store. Got it running in no time. It was a lot of fun! I still use Linux to this day.
I remember cutting my teeth on Yggdrasil back in the day. What a throwback. Loved trying all the distros!
Pro tip for not killing disc drives... Use the button and stop pushing them.
I used to believe that. In reality it doesn't matter. If you use a normal amount of force it will not be damaged.
SuSE can do it on my HP Compaq Small form factor from 2008? Even HP mentioned it officially.
Ah... this brings back a lot of memories. I actually bought a boxed copy of SUSE back in the early 2000's, but I can't remember which version exactly. Bought it from a computer shop somewhere in The Netherlands during my PhD studies there. I wonder where that thing is right now...
One issue with the Barracuda hard drive, make constant backups on an external drive. One person posted on Reddit that their school's computer lab which was with all Barracuda hard drives all went kaput within one week, all 20 computers had to have a replacement hard drive.
This video send me back in time, great memories.
I just did a Via C3 Nehemiah 1GHz 440BX build. Overclocked to 1.33GHz. Runs about as fast as a 650 PIII. Great for downclocking using setmul and cache disabling to play older dos games.
The first Linux distro I ever installed was Redhat 5.2. No, not Enterprise 5.3 but Redhat 5.2 released in '98. I remember how hellish it was just getting X running. Man, things have come a long way.
The PC tower uses a standard ATX power supply, but you need a bracket to mount it to the chassis. I do not really know the reason, but it works that way.
i'd forgotten what old linux looked like. i remember my friend's dad showing me his linux pc. only issue he had was that the sound card had zero volume control, it just played everything at max volume or no sound at all.
Yeah, the YAST installer has changed very little since the early late 90s and 2000s, I should know as my first successful Linux install was Suse linux 9.3.
However the distro that got me to use linux more full time was Mepis linux 2003.10.
Next year will be my 20th anniversary as a linux user making it my most used OS/kernel.
Currently, I am rocking Fedora 39 which is in my opinion the best release of Fedora, its incredibly snappy and quick.
Last time I used Fedora more long term was with version 20 just before DNF came in and screwed things up.
It took that whole time before DNF became anywhere near good IMHO.
Not forgotten for me. I have both a CIII 750 and 866 that my Jetway994 is compatible with. They do have some software compatibility issues - couldn't run CB2003.
Back in the days when you could swap between Desktop environments without everything breaking.
Those C3 CPU's were stable enough, but crippled by design. Thanks Sean. 🙂👍
Sean, I know this video is almost a year old, but do you plan on imaging those SuSE 7.0 disks?
I started the hard way 👊... I installed Slackware (I think it was version 3.x), on my IBM Aptiva DX2 80Mhz, around 96 or 97... Good times!
That's fantastic. I've not spent nearly enough time with Linux, honestly. For being that old, those are some beautiful GUI's!
I'm working on a video right now about a weird industrial Panel PC, sold as "not working", and the seller claiming it to be a Pentium 4, turns out it's a VIA C3 as well! 🤣It works fine, just didn't have the power button on the correct headers!
And my old Daewoo video had the "screw right in to the grill of the power supply" problem when I got it!
The previous owner shoved a full ATX power supply in an SFX space lol. The things we do for love. (of retro PC's.)
Great video, as always!
Granted it was much smaller and higher clock speed at the time but, I had multiple mini-itx and nano-itx machines back when the Vía chips were common in those boards. I can attest Linux was the best os for that chip.
OMG, SuSE 7 was my first Linux also. I saw YAST2 a lot... the good old days of blowing up my computer so bad I had to reinstall the whole OS because I had no idea wtf I was doing. Got my copy from the SuSE booth at COMDEX Spring 2000 in Chicago.
I used to have a VIA C3 In an old laptop - I remember the CPU badge being a blue top and green bottom, with a yellow affect between the colours, the CPU ran Windows XP fine but it was a VERY VERY VERY VERY hot CPU for a laptop and it made the machine hard to handle
I'm not surprised SuSE had problems with display resolution, as well as that odd tripled screen. I had tried SuSE out over a number of years, and regardless of the year, and which machine it was installed on, it would never look quite right.
So this was back in the days when GNOME **didn't** suck.
My first Linux was SuSE 7.x that came in a book as well and I too failed to set up the dual boot at first. I managed to fix that, but it also somehow broke my CD-RW drive permanently! I wrote it off as a coincidence, until now when I saw that your drive also "coincidentally" died while working with this cursed distro...
While I used Debian before that, my proper first Linux was SuSE 7.3 Pro. The books were amazing.
Fortunately, at that point I was already on Pentium 4.
Remember when you could go to Walmart and buy a retail box of Linux? I remember in 2000 buying Mandrake and RedHat at the store using my employee discount. I was super pumped when I got the soundcard working and played my limewire MP3s
I still have the suse pin, which came with the boxed professional set, laying around somewhere.
I'd love to see mid 00s Linux when there were a lot of window managers that had a ton of bling!
Enlightenment! all the cool Linux users were into it.
I remember installing sure on my eMac.
The Power Supply mounts with an adapter bracket which is also missing.
SuSE Linux was always my most favorite distro to run on all my machines but back in 2000 I did NOT have the honor of using version 7.0 which was the "HAPPY" inbetween version that gave you all the cool desktops and window managers, multimedia apps and tons of graphics to tweak this thing out. It featured the soon to be mainstream Xfree 86 4.x as well as the older xfree86 3.x? I know I could run almost any video card on these versions of Linux with the new Xfree 4.0 cause it used VESA 2 generic drivers so you still had graphics and color, kinda like Windows XP did. It was also more hardware friendly for alot of soundcards and VGA cards out there. I bought my very first SuSE Linux at a computer show back in 2000, and it was version 6.3. Same amount of CDroms and while back then my power went out in the middle of setup and I thought SuSE was not good due to the keyboard not working after the power came back, that I never gave that version a second look and sold it shortly there after. Boy, when I got version 7.1 personal I was in for a real treat! I could ALMOST replace Windows 2000 with this! I did try Mandrake Linux 6 as my first ever Linux distro and it never worked right from git go with the crappy hardware I had back in 1999, so it was not until 2000/2001 that my SuSE Linux adventures really began with 7.1, 7.2(buggy) and finally the Holy grail.. 7.3!! Mind you.. I have version 7.0 in a box, new today. And it is my trophy on my office desk. Again.. What a ride me and my Penguin have had! I now use MX LINUX as my only OS to this day.. No regrets!
i wish dvd rom days were back., just love the feeling having discs again...but now everything is usb this and usb that
Oh wow I also built a few machines with that case brand (they had 4 5.25” bays) and installing Suse Linux on them back when I was in high school. They were meant for my Dad’s lab but we got to borrow them for lan parties
Oh man, the first Linux i installed was SuSE 6.2 also from original cd that i got i don't know where, i was so happy when i got it to finally work (had to swap the GPU like 3 times before i found one that worked and reinstall everything each time), it looked so cool once installed though and so futuristic!
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I wonder if there is a reliable way to emulate that old hardware these days? You’ve given me the urge to play with old distros.
I've never tried it but you might be able to give PCem a go
That interface matches perfectly today's look of Thunderbird
I can only assume that frogfind got hit by the DDOS ransom groups that sell "protection" which is basically "pay us and we'll stop DDOSing your site"
it's very common.
I built my buddy his first PC with one of these CPUs and Win98SE. We later bricked the mainboard somehow by installing a firmware update to allow more than 512mb of RAM when we wanted to install Windows 2000. Never rebooted after the new firmware was loaded.
lovely video for a sunday afternoon 😌✨
The shape on the cover of the SuSE 7.0 binder is a mathematical surface called Barth's Sextic.
Yay, more right up my alley stuff. :D
I love the old kde looking soooooo much 😊
Getting the gui working with the correct frequency/redolution settings for my CRT was a pain
My first was also Suse. It switched to ubuntu pretty shortly after that. Nowadays alpine or debian or servers and arch on the desktop.
I used to know a person who owned a Cyrix inn that timeline. They offered a good CPU for a dead end socket. Where AMD abandoned things with the K62 3D NOW and Intel with the Pentium III, Cyrix kept offering socker 370 options. Maybe not the best, but the best for a dead end. For the average user performance wasn't bad, but it didn't have the SSE enablers that the AMD/Intel Chips had or the cache.
For the basic home user they were surprisingly OK though.
Hey, can you archive an iso of the installation disk i wanted to do a similar thing and this distro looks nice but i can't find it anywhere since i am not in the us
My earliest installs were Redhat 6.2, Mandrake and Suse ... all on a Cyrix 333;. Takes me back.
While my first exposure to Linux was Red Hat 5.0 - just Red Hat Linux, not RHEL - the first distro I really used as a daily driver was SuSE 5.3.