Installing Slackware 3.0 (Linux distribution from 1990s)

Slackware 3.0, I think, was the first Linux distribution I ever used, back in 1995. In this video I create a virtual machine and install it there. This is what it was like to install Linux in the 1990s. Except that computers were 100 times slower, and you had to keep switching floppies.

As for hardware support, this was when USB had not been invented yet, and even PCI was new and relatively rare. Ethernet, if it existed, used coaxial cables more often than 10BASE-T. If you had Internet access, more than likely it was through a dialup modem that may have been like 38400 kbaud at best.

Music: Addam’s Family 2 — Pugsley's Scavenger Hunt — Boss Battle — Converted into MIDI, played using OPL3 emulator. Yeah, I’m aware it ends abruptly before the video ends. Sorry about that.

#Bisqwit #Linux #Slackware #Distribution #Virtualization #ComputerHistory

[Bisqwit]

In retrospect, I should have tried running sdoom. Also I did not know the delay loop calibration could fail.
Tip: Background music for coding.

[DamianReloaded]

Oh very nice! Slackware was the first distro I ever got. I used it all across the 90's. Compiling stuff on a 486 was really fun because I could watch an entire movie and then come back and see what dependency I missed! XD

[astyfoo]

God these kids today have no idea. There's so many things that emulation doesn't show you the struggle for. Namely things like when you were installing to a 40 megabyte (!) hard drive, you had to decide between installing the X server or the C compiler. None of this adjusting the emulated hardware either, if X didn't work on your PC you were futzing with the config for HOURS or you just didn't have a GUI. Actually your video does do a good job of showing that frustration, albeit sped up a bit, nice work. And recompiling the kernel (which people don't even do anymore) was an overnight affair.

I'm going to install this on an old PC and have my son use Minicom on Slack 3.0 over a Wifi232 to telnet to a chat server for a lesson on what we did for 'fun' in those days. Fortunately he's a good sport.

[GemasoftTv]

I really like your content, I'm a programmer from Mexico. ¡Saludos!

[adamsfusion]

Ah, Joe the text editor. Reminds me of the old days of doing OS/400 work on IBM mainframes. What an oddball of an editor.

[AlexandreMulatinho]

My favorite Linux distribution since 1999. Nice to see this :)

[UncopyrightTNT]

Emacs is STILL it's own category, if I remember correctly

[jaakkomerilainen]

1995 will be the year of Linux on the desktop platform.

[BecklyCrackers_thFloor]

Sometime in the early 2000's I remember doing some drywall work in trade for a desktop computer, & that I had to scrape off a sticker on the video chipset so that I could read some values from it, used within the XFree86 config. Watching you struggle with this really brings back some memories.

[mattemfw]

Wow slackware 3 was my first linux distro aswell. This takes me back, hard to find any reason to use this today. Thanks for a good video as usual.

[bwc]

This definitely brings back some memories! My first exposure to Linux was from a book I bought in 1995 which came with a Slackware CD. I didn't have much luck getting it to work, but it planted the seed that led to trying it again with Red Hat in 1999, and finally making an Ubuntu-based distro my daily driver in 2015.

[KynikossDragonn]

I never had a chance to try Slackware but I always wondered, is it even possible to use Open Sound System on modern Linux distros? Because I'm tired of dealing with legacy proprietary software that needs OSS and not having any luck with OSS wrappers\emulators.

Makes me wish ALSA was there from the beginning...

[ytuser]

This is super awesome. I did NOT have a chance to do that with this version, but I did install Slackware few years after 1990 and yeah, it was a task. Still, quite straightforward and logical.

[JoakimKanon]

First Linux distro I dabbled with, ~17 years ago. Times have changes, thank god. Slack was pretty hardcore, but you did learn. 😅

[tronus]

Wow, a trip down memory lane! I think I started using this version of slackware, but in 1999. I had it on an old CD and started to learn linux from there. What a pain in the ass!

[mitthjarta]

To this day X failing and having to fix xconf, has still been the biggest aneurysm inducing task on Linux.

Fingers crossed for Wayland adoption! and it avoiding all the caveats and idiosyncrasies of Xserver...

[alienmicrobes]

Slackware 95 was my first distro. First night of install, I got all the way to X-Windows and FVWM. It opened a whole new world.

[wazawoo]

I’m just like sitting here like: Oh shit, at 9:55, bread failed. Better put it back in the toaster.

[EximiusDux]

Interesting video. linux sure has come a long way. I would have never wanted to mess with the driverless, barely graphical (because of the drivers... unaccelarated) world of linux back then.

[kabeza]

i have installed a Slackware CD version in 1997 and It was tricky, but i remebered as a totally new concept. Linux has evolved very quickly un these last 20 yrs to become in the most spread os