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.lstrather thangrub.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/XF86Configconfigurations could fry a CRT monitor.
- The
nouveaudriver did not exist. The predecessor driver was callednv. - 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
udevdevice 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: Category: Commentary Tagged: General
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