Linux in 2001

Recently I reminisced what the Linux world was like when I first started dabbling seriously in 2001.

• GRUB 2 did not exist. GRUB 1 used menu.lst rather than grub.cfg.
• Xorg did not exist. XFree86 was the common standard.
• Most people used CRT monitors.
• Adding higher screen resolutions required editing /etc/X11/XF86Config.
• Users were warned that improper /etc/X11/XF86Config configurations could fry a CRT monitor.

• The nouveau driver did not exist. The predecessor driver was called nv.
• PATA/IDE was dominant.
• Hard drive capacities were less than 40 GB.
• Hard drives were noisy.
• Single floppy disk Linux systems existed. For example, Tom’s Root Boot and firewall distros.

• Many computer device cards were ISA.
• Configuring ISA plug-and-play was challenging..
• Wireless was frustrating. Most users were forced to use ndiswrapper.
• The Linux kernel 2.4 was released.
• The udev device manager did not exist.

• NTFS-3G did not exist.
• To support dual booting with Windows, users created a FAT 32 partition to share files.
• Firefox did not exist.
• LibreOffice, nee OpenOffice, did not exist.
• OpenOffice brought great promise but was horribly slow and sluggish.

Some additional reflections:

• Most people were using dial up and ppp.
• Most ISPs had connection time limits that abruptly disconnected users.
• Because of slow connections, content blocking was already popular.

• Newbie Slackware users relied on www.linuxpackages.net to install packages.
• Most of the web sites were static with few commercial sites.
• Nobody worried about data mining and tracking

Posted: January 08, 2020 Category: Commentary Tagged: General

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