The Forgotten Secrets of the First Linux LiveCD (Yggdrasil Linux)

If you know anything about early Linux, you probably know what Linux LiveCDs are. But if I were to ask you what the first Linux LiveCD was, what would you answer?

My socials:

Chapter Marks:
00:00 - Prelude
01:30 - Chapter 1 - The First Linux LiveCD
11:08 - Chapter 2 - Popping The Hood
18:24 - Chapter 3 - And The Install Script I Rode In On
25:53 - Chapter 4 - The Root Of The Matter …

If you said Yggdrasil Plug and Play Linux, then you know either like pain, or you know your Linux history. In either case, you are in good company. Yggdrasil Linux is often one of those things that comes up in conversation, but little actual information can be found about it. That's because for many years, it was a lost media distribution, meaning it was known to exist, but no copies were properly preserved.

After a lot of effort, I did actually manage to find additional copies of Yggdrasil that had been saved properly, as well as reconstruct the December 1994 release. Next, I found a lot of surprising features, such as the ability to use DOS MSCDEX drivers, and more, and an automatic phone home device powered by UUCP.

This lead to an adventure in exploring the ins and outs of ancient Linux compatibility, and determining what, if anything Yggdrasil Incorporated had patched and changed, and trust me when I say it was *a lot*.

Tracks used in order:
- Incomplete - Gavin Luke
- Enigma - David Celeste
- A Key Figure - David Celeste
- We Still Have Courage - Bonnie Grace
- Particle Emission - Silver Maple
- Enigma - David Celeste
- Me and My Horse - Sight of Wonders
- Progressive Progress - Howard Harper-Barnes
- Superior - Silver Maple
- Paradigm Shift - Gavin Luke
- The Road Less Travelled - Christoffer Moe Ditlevsen
- Acceleration - Dream Cave
- Dreamed of This - Dream Cave
- Just Playing - Jules Gaia
- Progressive Progress - Howard Harper-Barnes
- For the Many - Jon Bjork
- Never Forgotten - Christoffer Moe Ditlevsen
- Observations - From Now On
- Colossal Logic - Rand Aldo
- Sacred Waters - Gabriel Lewis
- The Unforgettable - Gavin Luke
- Just Playing - Jules Gaia
- Particle Emission - Silver Maple

#linux #ncommander #retrocomputing #yggdrasillinux

[..]

That MPEG demo out of a bootable CD in 1994 surely blew dozens of minds.

[douglasboyle]

"Let me make this clear, THIS SHOULDN'T WORK"

That's our Linux!

[CyroTheSpider]

Honestly X and sound just working out of the box in 1994 is a complete shocker. Would be interesting to see the extent of modifications they made to get such a seamless experience. Wasn't really around at that time, but I heard enough stories to know that the rest of distros became truly user friendly only a decade later.

[horstlederhosen]

Love it. For nearly 30 years no one has believed when I've told them about running Yggdrasil with mscdex mounted cd-rom. Drive I used back then succesfully was Sanyo branded and connected to parallel port. It was incredible slow compared to then common mitsumi/panasonic drive connected to sound card that was directly linux supported.

[rwickenden]

My very first introduction to Linux was purchasing Yggdrasil Linux released on 27 1.44Mb disks from an advert placed in an electronics trade newspaper published in England in 1993. Packed with the disks were about 12 pages of information on A4 paper. The only cost was was for the blank 1.44 Mb disks. The first disk was a boot disk and a couple of workmates and I spent about two or three weeks in getting everything working including X Windows on 386 PC's. I have been using various distros of Linux ever since and stopped using MS Windows in 1999. It was a very steep learning curve but so worth the effort in the end.

[MegaManNeo]

Huh...
I was always under assumption that Knoppix was one of the first liveCD distros but seeing what Yggdrasil did waaaay back when Windows 95 wasn't even released, is impressive despite its flaws.

[seshpenguin]

Wow, Yggdrasil is incredibly forward thinking (in concepts anyway). Simple to try/install, integrated configuration and interfaces, networking promoted, etc etc. I feel like there is a lot of stories to be told by previous employees of the company, I wonder if any of that will be uncovered.

[pasan.]

I remember using Knoppix live CD and thinking how cool it was in the early 2000s. Never knew this existed.

[shouptech]

You're a mad man going through all of this to get it working! I love the effort you put into this video and it will help preserve this little bit of Linux history.

[EdCourtenay]

Gotta love that "Hi there!" sample lifted straight from Peter Gabriel's "Big Time"

[jbuchana]

Back in that era (I think a little earlier) I ran Slackware. I remember that it had a 0.9x kernel. Setting up X and dialup networking was a chore, but worth it. If I never hear the word "modeline" ever again I'll be happy. Fortunately my then ISP supported Unix/Linux and was owned by a friend of mine. Setting up SLIP and an associated chat script was still a pain.

[boelwerkr]

The IDE CDROM<->HDD / HDD<->HDD IO lock was a problem for some time. It was encouraged to have the HDD on an other controller than the CDROM. There where a lot of hot-fixes. It was ultimately solved when the IO Manager was rewritten the first time. I got into Linux 1996 and the early Linux kernels had spotty IDE support at best. I always used SCSI cards and drives in my computers.
I sometimes miss the early days of Linux, but then i remeber the three weeks to make X11 run with the new and better graphics card / monitor combination i got.

[KiyaheikeMeUk]

Wow! A blast from the past. I still have my original CD and book. Not sure where the floppys are, most likely still lurking somewhere. Yes, it was a PITA to install. I gave up with the Misumi CD drivers and went SCSI. I already had SCSI HDDs so a CDROM wasn't that much of a push. It was a great intro to a full distro after coming from the 0.99 betas. Though I eventually abandoned it for Slackware '96 (Still have those CDs and huge book too). Might have to locate both of those and spin up a VM. Thanks for the (painful but joyful) memories. :-)

[sudo]

That awesome ! I never knew that early Linux distributions were going that far ! Yggdrasil Linux was really ahead of its time, as you said, at the time, Linux had little support for CD-ROM drives, it only really supported SoundBlaster Compatible one, its very impressive for only a Linux distro of that time, to develop new drivers for other CD-ROM drives and literally modifiying the Linux kernel to make it work.

[Desmaad]

That "Hi there!" startup sound was clearly taken from Peter Gabriel's "Big Time".

[FLDT-Alain]

Fascinating video. I didn't know that they had improved the Linux kernel that much. I have touched Yggdrasil a bit in my early Linux days, but my first real Linux install was Slackware 3.0 on a weird machine : the Texas Instrument Travelmate 4000M 486 DX4/100-based notebook. That thing actually had a built-in Adaptec AHA1520 SCSI controller just for an external, obviously, CDROM drive. That made things much easier.
Configuring sound for the MediaVision Jazz16 chip poorly emulating a Soundblaster Pro was kind of a nightmare. Configuring X for the Cirrus Logic 6440 chip was tricky too, I certainly had to play a lot with the modelines to get it working.
I have co-authored a how-to at that time, which you can still find by Googling "The Texas Instruments TravelMate 4000M Linux Mini-HOWTO". A blast from the past.

[JimLeonard]

Wonderful overview, thanks for making it.
I was puzzled, though, why you thought a 720K image wasn't meant for a 720K format (either a DSDD disk, or a DSHD disk formatted to 720K which also works).

It's worth noting that emulators solve a lot of problems. We had to do a lot more manual config and recompilation when using real hardware back then (you mentioned "this is a heavily tweaked and modified installation" but in those early days, they *all* were -- there was no "standard" or "vanilla" distro). Also worth noting that back then, expectations were different. You mentioned that the speed "must have been glacial" but that's only compared to today's expectations. Back then, we were used to applications taking 10-20 seconds to load (and once they loaded, as long as you weren't dipping into swap, they ran fine).

[xEmmy]

16:44 The GDT isn't necessarily the complex part - GDT is (at a hardware level) a pointer to special data in memory (specifically, a table with the layout of how the OS uses memory), so there's no reason you can't have two GDT's and swap the pointer as needed.

What impresses me, is that they managed to get Linux and DOS to avoid tripping over each other. These are operating systems, not applications - they can't run in user mode (unless Yggdrasil provided an outright hypervisor), so they can see - and overwrite - each others' memory. And instructing them to not do that, requires special attention. You'd have to boot Linux to a spare scrap of RAM, then tell it every single byte (well, page, more likely) of RAM DOS uses, then tell DOS the same thing about Linux.

It's not necessarily very difficult at a basic level, but it definitely requires some inventiveness, especially if either operating system leans particularly heavily on assuming it's the only OS on the system (which is likely).

[greatquux]

Ah, what a wonderful look back at Linux many years ago. And it’s of course still running my computer today. Thanks for putting this together and please keep making more!

[SirajFlorida]

You're my new hero! Thank you for putting so much work into recovering this wonderful element of our linux history!