As someone who really only started using Linux daily in the past 5 years, it's pretty incredible seeing these desktop environments and applications and how they've started and evolved (so many familiar names, yet they've grown up so much)
My first linux distro was Red Hat, I think version 7.2, somewhere in 2001. Messed it up really quickly, reinstalled and then reinstalled again :P. Now, 20+ years later, Linux is the key ingredient of my professional career as a dev. You brought some memories back, Rees :)
7.2 was also my first and yeah similar experience. I never got to properly use it either because I had a winmodem. I'd just kinda mess around with it and poke around with this or that once in a while but yeah i never got much out of it. First really usable linuxes i used was fedora core 2, sabayon and early ubuntu.
RH 6.1 "Cartman" was my first linux. I had a beige monster with a K6-2 at 500 MHz. 64MB ram, ATI video card (1600x1200 on a 19" CRT), sound blaster, etc. That PC remains burned into my memory as the fastest computer I've ever used. It was BLAZING fast. Netscape would launch in under one second. We also were lucky to get broadband around the same time, and this PC plus truly fast internet was just something else. It felt so powerful. Compilers, programs, speed. Man you are really bringing back the feels with this video. I of course eventually added Afterstep with transparent terminals, XMMS, and so on. Thank you for making this video!
I had Redhat 6.1 at the time from the front of a magazine. I installed both KDE and Gnome, and used the AfterStep desktop and a mixture of applications.
This was a nostalgia trip. I started out on a Red Hat of this vintage and moved quickly on to Mandrake which was all in on GNOME. My recollection of the time was different to yours, on one side there was the "poisoned" KDE (by virtue of the QT license being restrictive outside of KDE usage), and the ideologically pure GNOME which was just getting better week by week. Those were exciting times.
I thought KDE 1 was pretty well put together, but I felt that GNOME had a better terminal and was generally more flexible in ways that I appreciated at the time. But when KDE 2 came out, I think it surpassed GNOME 2, which had become more restrictive in various ways. It was from that era that the legend of KDE being ultra-configurable/complicated and GNOME being more streamlined emerged. Of course, the Qt licence situation was resolved in short order, but the GTK/Qt schism had already established itself in the different desktop environments by then, with each camp introducing their own frameworks and component systems.
@@paul_boddie Now we're truly through the looking glass: GNOME somehow becomes slower even as it removes features every release, and their dominance of the GTK project means that even software outside the GNOME project is forced to conform to their ideas. I think we're at the "extinguish" phase of the three E's everyone was afraid of in the 90s, only this time the call is coming from inside the house.
@@kyle8952 Agreed. The usability of GNOME applications is increasingly poor. They made all of their applications behave like mobile "apps", eliminated application menus and meaningful title bars, somehow repurposing title bars for mobile-like controls along with the ubiquitous "burger menu". Does Apple even do that to their Mac applications? I was evaluating music players yesterday and found Lollypop which is a prime example of this. It behaves like it is running on a phone, starting up with a performative animation. There's no indication of how to actually operate the thing. The home button in the title bar (or whatever they call it now) shows a menu that occupies the entire width of the window, and the options lead to simple screens with a rather low information density. And those screens only show something useful once you've actually persuaded the thing to index the content, because they couldn't possibly let the user just load a playlist or music file. However, the "burger menu", permitting configuration of the music collection and stopping it from wanting to index all of my files, only works under certain circumstances, completely opaque to the user. Sometimes the button remains selected but doesn't open any dialogue. Meanwhile, I found Clementine and Strawberry for Plasma (KDE) which are relatively sane. They have normal menus and their windows have title bars instead of a parody of bad consumer electronics. Track information is presented alongside collections and other options. No need to cram a mobile experience into a window when there is enough space even on my modest display. And it isn't like any significant number of people are using GNOME on mobile, anyway. As for the threat of corporate interests, the video covers Red Hat's longstanding support for GNOME which may have been beneficial initially, but over time, some very strange priorities were indulged by Red Hat and not only in relation to GNOME. And it isn't like the desktop was so important in revenue terms for Red Hat, ultimately. Had it remained a concern, however, I would hope that some of the more damaging influences would have been reined in or even banished.
@@kyle8952 For what it's worth, I replied to your comment broadly agreeing while giving an example of an application that demonstrates the harmful mobile-first "design" trends of modern GNOME. Sadly, someone must have been offended and so the comment seems to have been deleted. Can't have anything but unceasing applause and rave reviews, I guess. Personally, I find the way that various people appointed themselves as usability and "design" experts, while persistently imitating Apple's products, to be broadly offensive to the discipline of human computer interaction. For instance, tiny grey-on-grey icons might appeal to their limited sense of aesthetics, but such choices degrade accessibility and make operation frustrating to certain kinds of user, bordering on excluding such users altogether. Maybe saying all of that is offensive to someone out there, too, already reaching for the report button to get this comment deleted. Then I hope that as they use their own technology, or technology with the same aesthetic priorities, in the coming years and decades, they come to appreciate how offensive it was to disregard accessibility and the experiences of their users.
Fun fact about the two KDE text editors: modern Plasma desktop (currently at 6.2) has two editors: Kate and KWrite. While KWrite is just Notepade-like simple text editor with just handful of features (like syntax ighlighting, minimap, bar with encoding info and settings), Kate is more like a full blown IDE with project management, git integration, LSPs, command palette etc. Well looks like that was the idea, but very early on they weren't much different. AFAIK they now use the same core for handling basics, which wasn't always the case.
I imagine if he dug in to the menus there probably were a few more doodads in the advanced editor, but yeah i imagine even that advanced editor wasn't even as advanced as the basic editor today.
The laptop I am using now is the first machine I have owned that does not have a second partition on it to run Linux when I had the urge. Not because I don't love Linux but because the HD is just to small to allow for it. I have another laptop beside my chair that is just Ubuntu and I used it when I have the desire to run the system I learned to love. I was introduced in 1994 to Unix and have loved it ever since. We were given accounts on a server in college that we could log into to use Unix in the computer labs so we could play around and learn the system. I fell in love with it back then and still use it in many situations.
A common thing people tend to mix up are text editors vs. word processors vs. simple IDEs. gEdit is a barebones text editor, emacs is obviously an IDE, and gnotepad+ is a word processor. They all have different purposes. I saw this everywhere when Microsoft deprecated and removed WordPad, people kept saying "UsE nOtEpAd."
Very interesting video, it's funny to see how "jank" old Linux was, lol. I started using linux around 2006, so things were significantly more developed by then :))
There's something wonderful walking down memory lane (although it was 5.2 for me) watching this on RHEL 9. Late 90s Red Hat Linux had a profound impact on me and my career
From what I've read of this time period and before, most people were really excited about Linux because it gave them the opportunity to get the power of UNIX very inexpensively, without having to pay crazy prices to the workstation vendors. Microsoft Windows didn't ship with a compiler or a very good command line or way to automate creating and building software, but Linux did, and developers and especially the scientific programming community was very happy to get their hands on it.
I glad to see content like this, there is not much thorough videos exploring vintage versions of Linux. Linux today is super easy to install and use, but the older versions even at the start of century were a bit rough around the edges. One of the things I also noticed about retro Linux distro's, unlike Windows, you can't get them to install or easily install in virtual machines. You really have to find compatible hardware to get a full picture experience of what it was like. So, thank you for doing this and hope you explore even earlier versions.
At a guess, I'd say your XFree86 colour depth is not right for LinCity, and your mouse issues in those other games are probably due to your SVGAlib configuration. And I don't think you actually started a new game with FreeCiv, just connected to the server. I am also very curious if it is the full version of Krillo on that disc or just the demo, although it seems to be too demanding for your hardware regardless. Really nice to see someone else exploring these old Linux games again.
My brother apparently had a copy of Red Hat Linux 6.1 Professional so I was able to confirm that the version of Krilo that is packaged is indeed just a demo: "This special demo version contains 15 levels."
43:46 "I've never owned a Commodore 64!" Um, don't look on the shelf behind you then 😄 In all seriousness though, another great video, keep this stuff coming!!!
31:10 Could have simply disabled "HTML View" in View menu to get rid of single click and directories showing up as hyperlinks instead of disabling underlining of hyperlinks. ;)
An interesting idea for a video imo would be to try installing old retail Linux ports of various games on period correct Linux. There were a number of them back in the day, SimCity 3000 for example.
Gnome stones was a clone of Boulder Dash on DOS!! :D :D :D😃 My first experience with Red Hat was Red Hat 9 in about 2003. It seemed to just break all by itself while I thought I was just doing things normally! Then shortly after that I went for the much newer and more polished Fedora Core. I remember seeing Red Hat for sale in Staples though in about 1998
17:41 Oh god I miss when you could make the windows granite and all kinds of wild themes. I hate modern theming. KDE has been less bad though since at the VERY LEAST I could redefine the colors of things. But it's all just the same bare, flat slop everyone else is pushing.
Note, the Gnome file manager, called GNU Midnight Commander, is not the Midnight Commander. Completely different projects, by different teams and codebase, that just share the name. Gnome renamed / rewrote the file manager few years later, and called it Nautilus.
Cool vid. And though at that time I was already a Debian convert, it occurs to me that your display was running in 16bit for some reason. Maybe the graphic card or a configuration issue, but I think the reason for the graphic weirdness is because it is expecting a 32bt palette. That being said, with futzing around with the Xconfig file and modelines, it is not something I would wish to revisit. Props for trying it, though, and you should look at a SuSE Linux version from around that time (6.x) to compare. It could be quite illuminating
With regard to the KDE file manager, kfm, the style it was probably aiming for was the then-current browser-like behaviour of Windows 98's file explorer, which is why "HTML" mode is indicated. Moreover, kfm actually acted as a Web browser and could show local and remote Web pages. I would guess that the reason it doesn't load sites for you from those shortcuts, giving errors about a lack of support, may be down to missing URL handlers, presumably available in a package you haven't installed. It certainly worked back in the day on this version of Red Hat. Given that you used the Acorn Electron, I'm surprised that you didn't recognise Thrust since it was originally released for the Beeb and Electron, only later being ported to the C64. You should get your Electron out and give it a spin: it's a decent version of the game. I had - and still have - the basic version of this box set. Other distributions offered things like proprietary X servers and productivity applications with their deluxe editions.
> With regard to the KDE file manager, kfm, the style it was probably aiming for was the then-current browser-like behaviour of Windows 98's file explorer Maybe in looks, but the single click crap put me right off KDE back in the day, and it hung around way too long as a default.
Loved this blast from the past. What about trying to install Linux on an even older 486? My first install was on a 486/66 with kernel 0.99-pl6 from some form of slackware distribution off floppies. I had to hand edit the dot-clock entries in X for my monitor.
Well my first Redhat was RH 6 or so. Still use 7.3 to this day. Where I work we have a RH 7.3 system still in production. I really laugh when I hear so many say "linux is too hard to install" or "Linux isnt user friendly". Mate, back when I started it was easy to install and relatively user friendly. The most I had to do was correctly configure X windows for my card and monitor while distro hopping, X windows then auto-probed everything soon after and well its never been simpler. My very FIRST GNU/Linux boot was a floppy distro I wrote to a floppy disc at school and then my first proper install was Definite Linux as provided on the cover of the UK's first Linux magazine. I still have that magazine and still have that distro and will re-install it at some point. On a Ryzen :D Right now I use Debian 11 on a Ryzen. I hate Gnome 3 and KDA, the direction they went was totally wrong in my opinion. Cant stand such UI's. I stuck mostly to XFCE after Gnome 3 came out but about 6 years ago I decided to roll back to an old friend, what I see as the pinnacle of UI development that appeals to my usage as well as to my idea on look and feel. I've moved back to Window Maker. It's gorgeous, has 3D widgets, none of that flat UI junk, and I doubt I'll ever use anything else, well apart from on laptops where I seem to have stuck to XFCE.
Yeah I think you may not have installed all that's required for KDE. Today I install DEs through rpm groups. Finding which individual software to install is a nightmare.
I don't have good nostalgia for Linux from those days. Many people would complain about Windows "DLL hell" in the late 1990s but RedHat based distributions that used RPM were no better. If you stuck to software bundled with the release, you'd generally be ok but as soon as you started to bring in other, newer versions, I found that the installation would quickly be broken with incompatible library versions and dependencies. The ext2 filesystem was also pretty fragile so if you needed to hard power off or force a reboot for some reason, you'd need to pray that fsck would be clean and not have broken inodes. It got better within a few years with Debian dpkg, ext3 filesystem, and other advancements but Linux in 1999 was simply not good as a desktop, end user OS.
> I don't have good nostalgia for Linux from those days. Many people would complain about Windows "DLL hell" in the late 1990s but RedHat based distributions that used RPM were no better. Dependency hell was always a headache on RPM systems and even Slackware. But I stumbled on to Debian at an Expo and managed with no experience of it at all to install it onto a bespoke PC and Editor of a Linux machine had there.Not only getting it up and running on a desktop but able to be connected to the internet as well. I was blown way how simple it was to do and understood dselect intuitively and with minimal help from the Debian boys who were in the next booth. I have been a Debian convert ever since. Ahem years now.
I was only made aware of the guh-nome pronunciation when the gnome team assterted it on social media in recent years? I thought it was a pretty recent development/change. I'm still not saying it
Really cool. I used many of these programs in the day. I think Linux 6.1 would be used on a bit more modern machine than Pentium 100. Pentium 2 / Celeron would be a norm by the time, and quite a lot of Pentium 3 too. Minimum you will see even on desktop at the time, would be something like 64MB of ram, and most computers actually having 128MB. And GPU with 8MB or 16MB of video memory. One of the reasons you also see a lot of graphical issues, might be because it looks you are using 16bit video mode, where 24 or 32 bit would be a norm for a system like that. Some games requiring a root is probably not true. It is possible some of them require access to games directory, which is owned by group games, but maybe your user do not have that permission / is not in that group.
As someone who really only started using Linux daily in the past 5 years, it's pretty incredible seeing these desktop environments and applications and how they've started and evolved (so many familiar names, yet they've grown up so much)
_Every_ year has been "the year of Linux on the desktop" since at least 2003.
And probably will be forever. Or until the Linux greybeards notice they are spending too much time on fragmented efforts.
@@evefavretto Yeah, and? They are free to spend their time on their project, not on some control freak's pet project.
Daed OS, need brAIN.
This but unironically
Like what LGR said, I think we're in the decade of desktop Linux
My first linux distro was Red Hat, I think version 7.2, somewhere in 2001. Messed it up really quickly, reinstalled and then reinstalled again :P. Now, 20+ years later, Linux is the key ingredient of my professional career as a dev. You brought some memories back, Rees :)
7.2 was also my first and yeah similar experience. I never got to properly use it either because I had a winmodem. I'd just kinda mess around with it and poke around with this or that once in a while but yeah i never got much out of it. First really usable linuxes i used was fedora core 2, sabayon and early ubuntu.
RH 6.1 "Cartman" was my first linux. I had a beige monster with a K6-2 at 500 MHz. 64MB ram, ATI video card (1600x1200 on a 19" CRT), sound blaster, etc. That PC remains burned into my memory as the fastest computer I've ever used. It was BLAZING fast. Netscape would launch in under one second. We also were lucky to get broadband around the same time, and this PC plus truly fast internet was just something else. It felt so powerful. Compilers, programs, speed. Man you are really bringing back the feels with this video. I of course eventually added Afterstep with transparent terminals, XMMS, and so on. Thank you for making this video!
I had Redhat 6.1 at the time from the front of a magazine. I installed both KDE and Gnome, and used the AfterStep desktop and a mixture of applications.
Man. I remember so much of this. I bought a red hat package deal like this in 98 or 99. So many memories.
It is wonderful AND scary that I now start to have nostalgia about my oldest Linux setups. Great video!
This was a nostalgia trip. I started out on a Red Hat of this vintage and moved quickly on to Mandrake which was all in on GNOME. My recollection of the time was different to yours, on one side there was the "poisoned" KDE (by virtue of the QT license being restrictive outside of KDE usage), and the ideologically pure GNOME which was just getting better week by week.
Those were exciting times.
I thought KDE 1 was pretty well put together, but I felt that GNOME had a better terminal and was generally more flexible in ways that I appreciated at the time. But when KDE 2 came out, I think it surpassed GNOME 2, which had become more restrictive in various ways. It was from that era that the legend of KDE being ultra-configurable/complicated and GNOME being more streamlined emerged.
Of course, the Qt licence situation was resolved in short order, but the GTK/Qt schism had already established itself in the different desktop environments by then, with each camp introducing their own frameworks and component systems.
@@paul_boddie Now we're truly through the looking glass: GNOME somehow becomes slower even as it removes features every release, and their dominance of the GTK project means that even software outside the GNOME project is forced to conform to their ideas. I think we're at the "extinguish" phase of the three E's everyone was afraid of in the 90s, only this time the call is coming from inside the house.
@@kyle8952 Agreed. The usability of GNOME applications is increasingly poor. They made all of their applications behave like mobile "apps", eliminated application menus and meaningful title bars, somehow repurposing title bars for mobile-like controls along with the ubiquitous "burger menu". Does Apple even do that to their Mac applications?
I was evaluating music players yesterday and found Lollypop which is a prime example of this. It behaves like it is running on a phone, starting up with a performative animation. There's no indication of how to actually operate the thing. The home button in the title bar (or whatever they call it now) shows a menu that occupies the entire width of the window, and the options lead to simple screens with a rather low information density.
And those screens only show something useful once you've actually persuaded the thing to index the content, because they couldn't possibly let the user just load a playlist or music file. However, the "burger menu", permitting configuration of the music collection and stopping it from wanting to index all of my files, only works under certain circumstances, completely opaque to the user. Sometimes the button remains selected but doesn't open any dialogue.
Meanwhile, I found Clementine and Strawberry for Plasma (KDE) which are relatively sane. They have normal menus and their windows have title bars instead of a parody of bad consumer electronics. Track information is presented alongside collections and other options. No need to cram a mobile experience into a window when there is enough space even on my modest display. And it isn't like any significant number of people are using GNOME on mobile, anyway.
As for the threat of corporate interests, the video covers Red Hat's longstanding support for GNOME which may have been beneficial initially, but over time, some very strange priorities were indulged by Red Hat and not only in relation to GNOME. And it isn't like the desktop was so important in revenue terms for Red Hat, ultimately. Had it remained a concern, however, I would hope that some of the more damaging influences would have been reined in or even banished.
@@kyle8952 For what it's worth, I replied to your comment broadly agreeing while giving an example of an application that demonstrates the harmful mobile-first "design" trends of modern GNOME. Sadly, someone must have been offended and so the comment seems to have been deleted. Can't have anything but unceasing applause and rave reviews, I guess.
Personally, I find the way that various people appointed themselves as usability and "design" experts, while persistently imitating Apple's products, to be broadly offensive to the discipline of human computer interaction. For instance, tiny grey-on-grey icons might appeal to their limited sense of aesthetics, but such choices degrade accessibility and make operation frustrating to certain kinds of user, bordering on excluding such users altogether.
Maybe saying all of that is offensive to someone out there, too, already reaching for the report button to get this comment deleted. Then I hope that as they use their own technology, or technology with the same aesthetic priorities, in the coming years and decades, they come to appreciate how offensive it was to disregard accessibility and the experiences of their users.
Fun fact about the two KDE text editors: modern Plasma desktop (currently at 6.2) has two editors: Kate and KWrite. While KWrite is just Notepade-like simple text editor with just handful of features (like syntax ighlighting, minimap, bar with encoding info and settings), Kate is more like a full blown IDE with project management, git integration, LSPs, command palette etc. Well looks like that was the idea, but very early on they weren't much different. AFAIK they now use the same core for handling basics, which wasn't always the case.
I imagine if he dug in to the menus there probably were a few more doodads in the advanced editor, but yeah i imagine even that advanced editor wasn't even as advanced as the basic editor today.
The laptop I am using now is the first machine I have owned that does not have a second partition on it to run Linux when I had the urge. Not because I don't love Linux but because the HD is just to small to allow for it. I have another laptop beside my chair that is just Ubuntu and I used it when I have the desire to run the system I learned to love. I was introduced in 1994 to Unix and have loved it ever since. We were given accounts on a server in college that we could log into to use Unix in the computer labs so we could play around and learn the system. I fell in love with it back then and still use it in many situations.
A common thing people tend to mix up are text editors vs. word processors vs. simple IDEs. gEdit is a barebones text editor, emacs is obviously an IDE, and gnotepad+ is a word processor. They all have different purposes. I saw this everywhere when Microsoft deprecated and removed WordPad, people kept saying "UsE nOtEpAd."
I think he knows the difference, but which one is which? They look rather similar unlike WordPad and Notepad
Very interesting video, it's funny to see how "jank" old Linux was, lol. I started using linux around 2006, so things were significantly more developed by then :))
There's something wonderful walking down memory lane (although it was 5.2 for me) watching this on RHEL 9. Late 90s Red Hat Linux had a profound impact on me and my career
From what I've read of this time period and before, most people were really excited about Linux because it gave them the opportunity to get the power of UNIX very inexpensively, without having to pay crazy prices to the workstation vendors. Microsoft Windows didn't ship with a compiler or a very good command line or way to automate creating and building software, but Linux did, and developers and especially the scientific programming community was very happy to get their hands on it.
I glad to see content like this, there is not much thorough videos exploring vintage versions of Linux. Linux today is super easy to install and use, but the older versions even at the start of century were a bit rough around the edges. One of the things I also noticed about retro Linux distro's, unlike Windows, you can't get them to install or easily install in virtual machines. You really have to find compatible hardware to get a full picture experience of what it was like. So, thank you for doing this and hope you explore even earlier versions.
30:30 Your moon joke got a good chuckle out of me. :)
Corel Linux was my first. Now I run Linux on my MacBook Pro 2009 and it’s been given a new life ! Love it, everything works as it should
Please make more of these I am hooked :)
At a guess, I'd say your XFree86 colour depth is not right for LinCity, and your mouse issues in those other games are probably due to your SVGAlib configuration. And I don't think you actually started a new game with FreeCiv, just connected to the server. I am also very curious if it is the full version of Krillo on that disc or just the demo, although it seems to be too demanding for your hardware regardless. Really nice to see someone else exploring these old Linux games again.
My brother apparently had a copy of Red Hat Linux 6.1 Professional so I was able to confirm that the version of Krilo that is packaged is indeed just a demo: "This special demo version contains 15 levels."
Yeah, desktop, icons and Xbill all looked 16bit to me.
You'd need 12 extensions with modern Gnome to have all the functionality in the first release.
43:46 "I've never owned a Commodore 64!" Um, don't look on the shelf behind you then 😄
In all seriousness though, another great video, keep this stuff coming!!!
I tip my fedora to you, sir
31:10 Could have simply disabled "HTML View" in View menu to get rid of single click and directories showing up as hyperlinks instead of disabling underlining of hyperlinks. ;)
Holy crap, that specific version of Linux is the first one I used, when I was 10!
An interesting idea for a video imo would be to try installing old retail Linux ports of various games on period correct Linux. There were a number of them back in the day, SimCity 3000 for example.
🤘🤘
Thank you. I see a common thread here, between SeaBed, Subarashiki Hibi, Umineko, and MYTH.
I couldn’t help smiling when you pronounced gnome with the silent g. In fact, I do so with gnu as well - just pronouncing it like the animal.
Gnome stones was a clone of Boulder Dash on DOS!! :D :D :D😃
My first experience with Red Hat was Red Hat 9 in about 2003. It seemed to just break all by itself while I thought I was just doing things normally! Then shortly after that I went for the much newer and more polished Fedora Core. I remember seeing Red Hat for sale in Staples though in about 1998
17:41 Oh god I miss when you could make the windows granite and all kinds of wild themes. I hate modern theming. KDE has been less bad though since at the VERY LEAST I could redefine the colors of things. But it's all just the same bare, flat slop everyone else is pushing.
Note, the Gnome file manager, called GNU Midnight Commander, is not the Midnight Commander. Completely different projects, by different teams and codebase, that just share the name. Gnome renamed / rewrote the file manager few years later, and called it Nautilus.
Cool vid. And though at that time I was already a Debian convert, it occurs to me that your display was running in 16bit for some reason. Maybe the graphic card or a configuration issue, but I think the reason for the graphic weirdness is because it is expecting a 32bt palette. That being said, with futzing around with the Xconfig file and modelines, it is not something I would wish to revisit.
Props for trying it, though, and you should look at a SuSE Linux version from around that time (6.x) to compare. It could be quite illuminating
Started with the exact same distro, on a machine deemed too slow to run Win98, and it ran perfectly.
I was today years old when I figured out the old Gnome logo was a G and not just a foot
With regard to the KDE file manager, kfm, the style it was probably aiming for was the then-current browser-like behaviour of Windows 98's file explorer, which is why "HTML" mode is indicated. Moreover, kfm actually acted as a Web browser and could show local and remote Web pages. I would guess that the reason it doesn't load sites for you from those shortcuts, giving errors about a lack of support, may be down to missing URL handlers, presumably available in a package you haven't installed. It certainly worked back in the day on this version of Red Hat.
Given that you used the Acorn Electron, I'm surprised that you didn't recognise Thrust since it was originally released for the Beeb and Electron, only later being ported to the C64. You should get your Electron out and give it a spin: it's a decent version of the game.
I had - and still have - the basic version of this box set. Other distributions offered things like proprietary X servers and productivity applications with their deluxe editions.
> With regard to the KDE file manager, kfm, the style it was probably aiming for was the then-current browser-like behaviour of Windows 98's file explorer
Maybe in looks, but the single click crap put me right off KDE back in the day, and it hung around way too long as a default.
Yay it's here wonder if he mentions enlightenment
yay
I bought Slackware and a Linux book in this time period but never installed it. Good times.
When switching over from UNIX in the 90's to Linux, this was my first version of Linux. I HATED IT! So glad when Mint came out! 😀
Loved this blast from the past. What about trying to install Linux on an even older 486? My first install was on a 486/66 with kernel 0.99-pl6 from some form of slackware distribution off floppies. I had to hand edit the dot-clock entries in X for my monitor.
Well my first Redhat was RH 6 or so.
Still use 7.3 to this day. Where I work we have a RH 7.3 system still in production. I really laugh when I hear so many say "linux is too hard to install" or "Linux isnt user friendly". Mate, back when I started it was easy to install and relatively user friendly. The most I had to do was correctly configure X windows for my card and monitor while distro hopping, X windows then auto-probed everything soon after and well its never been simpler.
My very FIRST GNU/Linux boot was a floppy distro I wrote to a floppy disc at school and then my first proper install was Definite Linux as provided on the cover of the UK's first Linux magazine. I still have that magazine and still have that distro and will re-install it at some point. On a Ryzen :D
Right now I use Debian 11 on a Ryzen. I hate Gnome 3 and KDA, the direction they went was totally wrong in my opinion. Cant stand such UI's. I stuck mostly to XFCE after Gnome 3 came out but about 6 years ago I decided to roll back to an old friend, what I see as the pinnacle of UI development that appeals to my usage as well as to my idea on look and feel.
I've moved back to Window Maker. It's gorgeous, has 3D widgets, none of that flat UI junk, and I doubt I'll ever use anything else, well apart from on laptops where I seem to have stuck to XFCE.
One of the ultimates.
Krilo looks like a lost CDi game
41:30 it appears to be a clone of rogue, youre basically an explorer/miner where you find gold and fight monsters
Another fun fact: the "horrible single click default setting" was only changed in KDE to double click THIS YEAR (2024)
and i changed it back single click supremacy 💪
Boy, Red Hat certainly has confusing versioning. I use Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 which came out 17 years later...
The problems with KDE might have issues with the graphics engine used (x11 contra gnome).
Yeah I think you may not have installed all that's required for KDE. Today I install DEs through rpm groups. Finding which individual software to install is a nightmare.
I don't have good nostalgia for Linux from those days. Many people would complain about Windows "DLL hell" in the late 1990s but RedHat based distributions that used RPM were no better. If you stuck to software bundled with the release, you'd generally be ok but as soon as you started to bring in other, newer versions, I found that the installation would quickly be broken with incompatible library versions and dependencies. The ext2 filesystem was also pretty fragile so if you needed to hard power off or force a reboot for some reason, you'd need to pray that fsck would be clean and not have broken inodes. It got better within a few years with Debian dpkg, ext3 filesystem, and other advancements but Linux in 1999 was simply not good as a desktop, end user OS.
> I don't have good nostalgia for Linux from those days. Many people would complain about Windows "DLL hell" in the late 1990s but RedHat based distributions that used RPM were no better.
Dependency hell was always a headache on RPM systems and even Slackware. But I stumbled on to Debian at an Expo and managed with no experience of it at all to install it onto a bespoke PC and Editor of a Linux machine had there.Not only getting it up and running on a desktop but able to be connected to the internet as well. I was blown way how simple it was to do and understood dselect intuitively and with minimal help from the Debian boys who were in the next booth. I have been a Debian convert ever since. Ahem years now.
I was only made aware of the guh-nome pronunciation when the gnome team assterted it on social media in recent years? I thought it was a pretty recent development/change. I'm still not saying it
Really cool. I used many of these programs in the day. I think Linux 6.1 would be used on a bit more modern machine than Pentium 100. Pentium 2 / Celeron would be a norm by the time, and quite a lot of Pentium 3 too. Minimum you will see even on desktop at the time, would be something like 64MB of ram, and most computers actually having 128MB. And GPU with 8MB or 16MB of video memory.
One of the reasons you also see a lot of graphical issues, might be because it looks you are using 16bit video mode, where 24 or 32 bit would be a norm for a system like that.
Some games requiring a root is probably not true. It is possible some of them require access to games directory, which is owned by group games, but maybe your user do not have that permission / is not in that group.
SVGAlib based games did need to be ran from root.
@@HamishPaulWilson but the games he presented looks to be running in x11, not svgalib / framebuffer
@@movax20h Repton looks to be SVGAlib.
if you find som archive ftp for 6.1 packages, maybe you can set up the update manager.
no word processor??
@@VladiFx There was Staroffice and ApplixWare, but those cost $$.
What is the f00f bug?
next step install linux 0.x from walnut creek cdrom distribution on 386
Red hat, empty sack, ready for desktop
How dare he not show the XMatrix screen saver or XChat.
64Mb of ram? Deluxe! In previous video it was 16 ....
That PC sure is tiny.
I'll show myself out now.
🤣🤣🤣
It's jnome, clearly.
I'll always pronounce it Jif not Cif
xBill 🤣
Go 6.2. 6.1 was kind of buggy
++
but even modern Linux is dogshit🤣
There is no reasonable explanation why a product that is sold for money should look so ugly.
5:00
> We have an address book; we've got a calendar; [skips over Emacs] uh, we have gedit here
Rude
Haha.. RMS would have words ;)