Early days in Linux with Linus

Discussion
1

I don’t know if this has been posted here before - but it’s the first time I’ve read this :

https://lwn.net/Articles/928581/

Resulted from google search prompted by curiosity about Linus’ first x86 computer.

In a nutshell - it was a 386 (DX33? It would have been a DX 'cause Linus didn’t want to faff around with 386SX - which had a 16 bit address space) and a tiny 4 MB RAM…

Interestingly - this was only a few months before I bought my first x86 PC - I didn’t know ANYTHING about PCs other than a few DOS commands - I got hoodwinked and ripped off - got a 286 with 1 MB RAM, with MS-DOS 3.3 (and no Windows) and got scammed into buying MS “Works” - cost me total of $2500 AUD (i.e. 286 PC, MS-DOS and MS-Works) - and it only had 5.25" floppy drive. For $2500 even back then - I reckon I could have got similar specs to Linus’ 386DX with a 3.5" FDD… And probably not a shonky full height Seagate 40 MB HDD…

But - we both played Prince of Persia ! I wish I’d gotten into assembler and C programming then - as it is - I was very unhappy with the setup - the max partition size under DOS 3.3 was 32 MB - so I had a C: drive of 32 MB and a D drive of 8 MB - that annoyed me so much - I figured out how to use MS DOS 4 and repartition with a single 40 MB C: drive…

My god PCs were awful back then! You had to KNOW the specs of your Hard Drive - e.g. cylinders and all that stuff - and input that into your BIOS correctly.

5 Likes
2

Thank you Daniel, I enjoyed that read.
So why do you think it took off so rapidly? There were other Unix-for-pc’s around at the time.
I personally opted to ignore Linux and use FreeBSD. … on a 486DX. Persisted with that for about 12 years.

We used a 386DX in the lab… 20 MHz… it ran an image framegrabber and image processing software written in Fortran under DOS. The 386 was a milestone… 386 binaries are still used today ( on 32 bit systems)

2 Likes
3

Back in 1986 i was teaching at a university and was able to order 386 macines to set up 2 new class rooms. Back then 20 machines (two classes of 10) was a massive expence. I remember looking at sx and dx with a big difference in price but not really understanding what or why, none of my staff could enlighten me so went fore the cheaper option, did not matter as no big data processing issues in a classroom teaching office products ( not always windows or microsoft, wordstar, wordperfect, dataease and dbase 2. Later we specialised in office word and excel)

Those were the days

2 Likes
4

We had 186 processors in our school. I think it was named MikroMikko 2. There was MS dos and win3.11 (IIRC) and Tetris. One phone line modem and no one used it. There was 8088 (8bit), 8086 and 20286 chips at that time but the 20186 was found nowhere else but at our school. All of them were junk, my C64 with cassette deck outperformed them in games😂

Linus was so ahead of time

2 Likes
5

Before I got my own PC - I was working in an office (I wasn’t IT then - I was in “HR”) with 2 colleagues - we had a single “shared” PC in there - it was an IBM branded - 8086 or 8088 (but not the HUGE chunky “XT”) - connected to a printer - with a 3270 mainframe terminal expansion card - it was networked to a Netware environment.

Unfortunately - that 8 bit DOS PC shared its printer (hideous HP InkJet) to 3 or 4 other users in nearby offices - soon as someone sent a print job to it - you could FORGET about using the PC! And too bad if you were in the middle of doing something!

Fast forward a mere 2 years or so - and I was in the IT department (which was in the same building as HR) - we had a training room with about 10 386DX PCs… It wasn’t used very often - it got used more as a DEATHMATCH LAB when we got Doom 1 :smiley: - and we sent broadcast IPX packets that crashed the whole Netware environment - what fun!

3 Likes
6

What Linus did was more good programming than innovation.
Unix existed long before Linux. Modern BSD kernels are quite similar to linux kernel.

The differences are in management… there is the famous quote
"its Intelligent Design and Order (BSD) versus Natural Selection and Chaos (GNU/Linux). "

The really good move Linus made was to use the GPL licence. That innovation belongs to Richard Stallman.
It makes a big difference… the BSD licence does not prevent inclusion of open source code in proprietary software ( eg like MacOS which is based on BSD not on Linux for that reason) .

So Linus did a lot to support FOSS… and continues to do so. More than anything else it was making the right decisions at critical times.

Could we live without Linux today?
I think , yes, but it would not be easy.
People say Linux requires too much mental effort compared to Win. Well BSD requires more thought than Linux, and it is not as well supported in some areas.
That is what you would be facing.

2 Likes
7

You say it very well Neville! The licensing is the key. We have foss because of the decision he made.

I have tried BSD (a few of them on daily use but not for a while) and it is a lot harder to get things working. There’s some good things like file system, ports, security, but it lacks ease of use. A bit like using Linux appr 20 years ago. My opinion is outdated maybe though

8

Yes it is still like that today.
but
Freebsd have recently made a decision to try and improve their desktop performance.
Lets wait and see what they come up with.

There is a saying
“The best way to keep something is to give it away”
I think it applies in this case.
Linus is far more attached to Linux now , than he would have been if he had sold it, or kept it in his drawer.

2 Likes
9

I just took the latest GhostBSD for a “spin around the block” - I quite like it…

Mate desktop… I can tweak it with “sudo pkg install station-tweaks” and move the window control widgets over to where they always should have been :smiley: (the left - like on MacOS or Ubuntu Unity).

It has plank installed by default (I reckon I’ll get rid of that bottom panel showing underneath the plank dock) :

image
image1022×770 156 KB

(running in Virtualbox - but I reckon I should give it a spin on bare metal)

BTW - it’s using ZFS by default - without encryption… I’m VERY comfy with ZFS - its the best software RAID solution that’s ever been invented (and hardware RAID is PURE garbage!).

I reckon I might check out the 32 bit version and see if I can make it work on a Thinkpad T42 - or - I may just try and install it in place of my aborted Gentoo on a Dell Latitude alongside some other Ubuntu based distro and Windows 10 (which I only ever used to bluetooth hack my Segway ninebot e-scooter)…

Hmmm - I’m thinkin’ about hacking my Ninebot again anyway :smiley: - try and get 35 km/h (35 km/h is damn fun on my e-bike on bush trails and gravel tracks!). Thirty five km/h isn’t very fast anyway - and if I want to go faster : I’ve taken my Harley up to 200 km/h on the Nullarbor plain - fastest I’ve ever been on wheeled transport was around 1997 - I clocked my Suzuki GSXR1100 at 240 km/h - it’s all academic - anything over the ton (100 mph or 160 kmh) just feels “awful fast” :smiley:

1 Like
10

I had Ghostbsd in virt-manager. It had ZFS.
I had some hitches doing updates so I scrapped it.
Then I tried a fresh install of latest release, and I could not get it to install in virt-manager.
I would like to find a spare machine and get a hard install where I could safely play with ZFS.
Ghostbsd is an attempt to make Freebsd user-friendly… a bit like Ubuntu does for Debian.

There is also now an official Freebsd move to become more desktop-friendly. That bears watching.

One of the things that is really well oiled in Freebsd is the package and version upgrade system . You can update across several releases in one step, you can go bsckwards any number of steps. You can install packages as binaries or as ports ( like gentoo).

Unfortunately I found that Ghostbsd was not as well oiled.
I was never clear on whether to use its GUI updater or to use freebsd commands, so I probably mixed them and messed it up.
So how do you plan to do your updates?

And another question.
Have you tried it out for sound or video?
I read somewhere that Ghostbsd was well setup for this. You do lots of music, what do you think?

1 Like
11

I NEVER do stuff like that in a VM… So I can’t comment…

I just looked to see if there was a way to run my favourite music player (on any platform) on MacOS : Sayonara. It seems not… I did note - it’s available on FreeBSD…

I use an app called Colibri to play audio files on my Macs… What I’d really like is something a tad better - it’s a reasonably good app that I paid for - and the developer, who’s Hungarian, but lives in NZ, is VERY responsive… But I’d like something that’s the same / similar everywhere - i.e. on Gnome based Linux distros (including arm64) and MacOS…

I hate the interface on VLC - I use MPV as it’s minimal and doesn’t try to be all things for all men (or women). I’ve seen VLC somewhere running a dark theme (maybe on MacOS) - but it doesn’t come that way on Pop!_OS or Ubuntu 24.04 - it’s ugly : Hey VLC - the 1990’s called - they want their UI back!

I did try using one of the terminal / CLI audio players on MacOS (mpg123?) - but there’s too much hacking around (you have to run something called jackd installed via homebrew to get audio to work in terminal - and it’s a bit flaky - the whole idea of playing music on a computer is for relaxation and vegging out, and having to hack things takes that away from the experience).

I’m about to dig out my Ventoy stick and put GhostBSD on there so I can try it out on hardware… Dell Latitude E7270 (quad core i7 [gen?] and 8 GB DDR4 and 512 GB nvme). Damn - can’t find my Ventoy stick - will have to make anothery…

Update : not looking good for GhostBSD - the live ISO doesn’t pickup the sound device on the Latitude E7270… And I can’t be arsed to figure out why… Move along, nothing to see here…

Bit the bullet and did the install, but it isn’t very newby friendly - I assumed it would ask me which partition to install on - and offer to repartition - but - you know what? By default it just wipes the disk - so I lost all the other O/S I had on there - the only one I wanted to retain was Windows 10 (which per above - I use to hack my Segway scooter). Not a major issue for me really - I haven’t even powered up this laptop for 9+ months or more…
And still no sound :

Apparently it’s not very well setup for this :smiley:
Gonna let it do some updates (in the GUI - I mostly don’t do updates or installs in the GUI - but I’ll let GhostBSD do its “thang” from the update prompt wizard doohickey) - and then I iwll see how long it can run on battery only - I seem to remember I could get about 4-5 hours using Ubuntu 18 / 19 / 20 on this laptop… I want something that can go longer than 3 hours - my ThinkPad running Pop!_OS is lucky to get 2 hours - I suspect the battery is probably dodgy (it was a slightly damaged 2nd hand e-bay purchase in 2021)… I’d rather use my MacBook - but - it has a hardware fault - the touchbar is mostly dead (doesn’t display but it responds to touch) - the touchbar has the media controls and F1-F12 keys… So yeah - I’m spewing I bought an MBP - I could have saved $300 and got a MacBook Air M1 with same RAM and storage…

Still no sound… just pulled the AC out and will see how long it goes (it’s just a tad optimistic claiming I have 7,236 minutes remaining :smiley:
If it goes beyond 3 hours - I may investigate getting sound working - if not - I’ll shelve it…

Update - got tired of the fish shell - it’s friendly enough - but things like a bog standard “while loop” I’d expect to work in ksh, bash or zsh - DOES NOT WORK! Neither does “sudo !!”…
So - installed ZSH and oh-my-zsh (via git)… that’s better… aint got time to figure out fish - so I’ll stick with ZSH…

1 Like
12

Mmmm - 6 hours! SIX HOURS! I’m not going to long term GhostBSD on this device - I’m going to put Ubuntu 24.10 on there… SIX HOURS is awesome! That’s pretty much idle - but - I reckon 4 hours watching multimedia content or listening to music and surfing the intert00bz - better than my Thinkpad E495 anyway…

and I’ll instead use my Latitude E7250 for BSD… That means I’ll have to hunt out another Dell power brick… no dramas - got heaps of them…

2 Likes
13

So BSD is somehow more power efficient?
Is it just running fewer daemons?

1 Like
14

No - I think I’d forgotten how long that laptop could actually go on a battery…

Somehow I reckon Ubuntu will do better than BSD on a laptop battery…

Just before I powered it off - had been running on battery for 6 hours - it reported 90 minutes battery remaining… All it had been doing pretty much was running a while loop and dropping the time into a text file every 5 seconds…

I’m about to whack Ubu Oracular Oriole onto my new Ventoy stick - alongside GhostBSD - and will give Ubuntu 24.10 a spin on the E7270… And then use the E7250 (slighly lower revision i7 with 16 GB DDR3 and m2 sata 512 GB - and only does 720p [1366 x 768]).

It’s just on beer o’clock so shall step out onto “the terrace” (my front porch) with a cold tinnie - crank up some music (new album by Aussie punks “Amyl and the Sniffers” released today - I’d pre-ordered on bandcamp some time ago - on the subject of Bandcamp - there were concerns it was going to become enshittified - but seems those concerns were ill founded) and watch the bushland across the road change colour as the sun descends behind me while I install Ubuntu 24.10…

2 Likes
15

OK - no idea why I stopped using this Dell Laptop - it was a “hand-me-down” freebie…
Cannibalised the RAM out of it to put in my Thinkpad E495. The E495 has 8 cores or 8 threads (I’m never quite sure about that) - shows up as 8 vCPU - but this Dell E7270 is still a better computer…
Been using it mostly off AC power most of today - installed Ubuntu 24.10 mostly on battery power - and I’ve still got hours of uptime left…
I’ll probably stop using the ThinkPad and my MBP M1 - and keep using this Dell… i7 6600U - 4 cores - I’ll probably re-scavenge the 16 GB RAM back into it…
2016/17 Dell freebie still a better computer than an 2021 Thinkpad or 2020 MacBook M1 “Pro” (I only won’t use it 'cause the touchbar is dead - I want/need media and audio controls)…
Typing this on the Dell E7270 - on Ubuntu 24.10… I may stop using Pop!_OS - 'cause it feels “ugly” compared to Ubuntu 24.10…

2 Likes
16

You have spare computers coming out your ears.
Ideal testbed for all sorts of projects.

Have you tried Void. ?
You can put in any DE.
Need to learn runit and xbps.

1 Like
17

No - and probably won’t… Quite happy to keep using systemd - it’s what ALL my customers run with their RHEL or OEL (Oracle Linux) systems… It’s what I know and I’m very comfortable with it (I :heart: “systemctil --user BLAH BLAH” and use it daily).

I’d rather just use something where the DE is integrated with the O/S fairly tightly… I’ve tried running different DE before - so many things don’t work - e.g. replacing Pixel desktop with XFCE on Raspbian - NOTHING works - e.g. the “system tray” or whatever you call it doesn’t talk to Bluetooth or WiFi… Then things like GTK get installed, or a bunch of KDE stuff - just to get one feature in another DE - and you end up with massive bloat…

And yeah - I have a whole bunch of computers that mostly cost me nothing… and so far - judging by today - the “free” computers are better than the ones I paid for!

I think I’ll get more daily use out of this Latitude E7270 (circa 2016!) than I will out of my 2021 ThinkPad E495 or my 2020 MacBook Pro M1… If the touchbar on the MBP wasn’t f–ked - it would be my daily driver - it’s got nearly everything I need - especially extensive battery life - that’s the bane of the Thinkpad - lucky to get 2 hours…

So far I think this 2016 Dell E7270 will easily do 6 hours - possibly more - that’s all I really need… Why did I ever buy those other computers? Answer: I got an amnesty and did about 10 years worth of tax returns and got a big windfall - so I spent some money… and the idea of an ARM64 device running a “real” UNIX was attractive…

The only thing I prefer on the Thinkpad is the trackpoint and integrated middle mouse button - I’'ll have to do some reseach on emulating middle mouse button click in Ubuntu 24.04… And I probably won’t “desktop” it - 'cause Wayland seems nice - but I can’t use Wayland in desktop mode 'cause of Synergy KVM… Oh and another thing about the E495 - it’s AMD. I haven’t run an Intel desktop for over 20 years - I’ve always gone AMD - but starting to rethink my anti-Intel dogma…

1 Like
18

They are both good.
I have intel because the guy who built my custom desktop only had an intel supplier.
Laptops dont appeal to me. Only ever had one… a Toshiba… which I parked on the desk and never moved.

1 Like
19

What will you do when S6 takes over?
Runit is not good enough, but S6 with 66 could replace systemd tomorrow.

1 Like
20

Will it “take over”? I’ll wait and see which way the wind’s blowing - if the major enterprise distros (the Canonicals and Red Hats of the world) shift that way - then so will I - reluctantly - I actually miss SysV Init (sometimes) - but I don’t miss it when setting up Resilio Sync in systemd as my user account… I tried to get my head around it with rc scripts to setup a daemon to run under another user account - but it seemed like too much hard work.

I actually run ResilioSync in my shell account on my NAS (TrueNAS - FreeBSD) - but I do it manually (I hardly never reboot it) with a shell script “kickitoff.bash” :

#!/usr/bin/env bash
./bsd-rslsync --config ./rsl-config.json --webui.listen 0.0.0.0:8888

Whenever my NAS reboots - there’s a few manual things I need to do anyway - above is just one of fthem. I actually reconfigured it to kick off an rc script to append to sudoers - because the default sudoers on TrueNAS is on a readonly filesystem - so if I edit it - it’s lost on reboot (all my tiny snippet of code does is read a text file and append that to /etc/sudoers - on post init).

BTW - ResilioSync on MacOS is vastly more sophisticated than it is on Linux… Like on Windows (and in both cases very well integrated with the native file manager)… I wish the developers (I paid for a pro license) would develop a proper Linux GUI (begs the question - which one? FFS - just going Gnome would help a long way!) for it - doing stuff like “Selective Sync” on Linux is ANYTHING but intuitive - but a piece of cake on MacOS or Windows - but it’s a tool I can’t live without so I persevere… even thought I paid for it - I use it like it was the freeware version on Linux - it’s very feature limited…

I agree - I’m fine with AMD on a desktop system I put together from parts I ordered piecemeal…
But when a “system integrator” puts together a laptop - especially “enterprise” grade laptops for the likes of Dell - they do as much as possible to extend battery life. That single feature can make or break laptop adoption… if it can’t go 2 hours - it might as well be a desktop…
The ThinkPad E495 was attractive to me - back in 2021 - because it had similar specs to the SteamDeck, at the time… BUT - the SteamDeck was designed from the ground up to be a portable cordless device… The E495 marketed / sold more into education markets than “jetsetting CEO” and the like…
I might shop around for something like the Latitude series - with good battery life - I don’t care about screen size (1080p is fine at 12-13") as I will only be using it as a laptop… I just want more cores+threads (4 is too few) - and maybe ability to go to 32 GB RAM… I also wish there were plain English things out there to tell you :

# cores
# threads
# virtual CPU

(AMD marketing do better at this than intel)
I believe “cores” is more important than threads… but I’m still a bit vague on this myself… I still remember my first PentiumIV laptop - running Windows XP - with “HyperThreading” - showed up as an SMP system (dual virtual CPU in NT / XP).

1 Like