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0 pointslizknope1y ago0 comments

Linux was free. You see that Linus says Tanenbaum charges for Minix.

I started running Linux in October 1994.

One of the main reasons I chose Linux over Free/NetBSD was the hardware support. Linux supported tons of cheap PC hardware and had bug workarounds very quickly.

I had this IDE chip and Linux got a workaround quickly. The FreeBSD people told me to stop using cheap hardware and buy a SCSI card, SCSI hard drive, and SCSI CD-ROM. That would have been another $800 and I was a broke college student.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMD640

Linux even supported the $10 software based "WinModem" I got for free.

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5 comments · 1 top-level

drewg1231y ago· 4 in thread

I started running linux in 1992 or so. I converted to FreeBSD right around the time you were starting with Linux because I had the opposite experience:

I was new *nix sysadmin, and I needed good NFS performance (replacing DEC ULTRIX workstations in an academic dept with PCs running some kind of *nix). I attended the 1994 Boston USENIX and spoke to Linus at the Linux BOF, where he basically told me to pound sand. He said NFS performance was not important. So I went down the hall to the FreeBSD BOF and they assured me NFS would work as well in FreeBSD as it did in ULTRIX, and they were right.

I've been a FreeBSD user for over 30 years now, and a src committer for roughly 25 years. I often wonder about the alternate universe in which I was able to convince Linus of the need for good NFS performance..

lizknopeOP1y ago

When I started college in 1993 about half the computer lab were DEC Ultrix machines. By the time I graduated it had transitioned to Solaris and HP-UX.

I had a summer internship in 1995 and the Win 3.1 machine was so unstable for running an X server to the Suns, 3270 mainframe emulator, and browser using the Win32s (environment for running 32-bit application on 16-bit Win 3.1)

We found the supply closet with over 200 old 486 machines. The other intern and I installed Linux on some and it worked far better than the Win3.1 setup. The older guys saw it and wanted one too. We set up an assembly line with a Linux NFS server with the Slackware disk images to avoid swapping floppies. At least over a 10 Mbit network we found the NFS performance to be fine.

A couple of years later at my job after graduation I convinced our manager to buy PCs to use as X terminals with larger monitors and move the Suns to the closet for the chip design jobs.

I remember having some NFS issues and Trond Myklebust (Linux NFS guy) had me trying some NFS version 3 patches that improved performance between a Linux client and Solaris server.

drewg1231y ago

The NFS issue that I had was that I was working for a math/stats department, and the profs made heavy use of LaTeX. Disks were tiny, and the fonts they required were huge. So we had fonts centrally available from an ULTRIX NFS server with a "lot" of disk space (for the time). When running xdvi on Linux, it would take minutes to render a page, with each character showing up one by one. I eventually figured out that xdvi was seeking around byte-by-byte in the font files. Since Linux didn't have any NFS caching, each new read for a few bytes ended up as a slow round-trip over 10Mbs ethernet. DEC ULTRIX (and FreeBSD) rendered the page in seconds, due to having working caching for NFS.

lizknopeOP1y ago

I remember various issues with NFS file locking and I always thought the security and permissions were crap.

I remember in my intro operating systems class we learned that you could open a file for read or write and they had a file offset pointer etc. Then I learned that NFS (v1 and v2) were stateless. The joke I heard was that Sun servers were so unstable in the 1980's that the system was stateless so that it could crash and reboot and didn't need to worry about the client's file state.

My college used AFS (Andrew File System) and the DCE Distributed Computing Environment. It was great as a normal user being able to create my own ACL Access Control Lists of other groups of students and give them read access to some files and make directories for class projects and give another student write access to a single directory in my home dir. NFS with groups is so limiting in comparison.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Computing_Environm...

I haven't used LaTeX in a long time but I was always impressed how it could make integral symbols over fractions with summations and everything else look perfect.

LeFantome1y ago

In 1992, I used both 386BSD and Linux. There is no doubt that BSD was the better technology at the time. It was not even close. But Linux had better consumer hardware support even then. I have used Linux continuously since then while I stopped using BSD before FreeBSD even came out.

My favourite distro right now is Chimera Linux which is Linux/BSD hybrid of sorts.

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5 comments · 1 top-level

drewg1231y ago· 4 in thread

I started running linux in 1992 or so. I converted to FreeBSD right around the time you were starting with Linux because I had the opposite experience:

lizknopeOP1y ago

When I started college in 1993 about half the computer lab were DEC Ultrix machines. By the time I graduated it had transitioned to Solaris and HP-UX.

A couple of years later at my job after graduation I convinced our manager to buy PCs to use as X terminals with larger monitors and move the Suns to the closet for the chip design jobs.

I remember having some NFS issues and Trond Myklebust (Linux NFS guy) had me trying some NFS version 3 patches that improved performance between a Linux client and Solaris server.

drewg1231y ago

lizknopeOP1y ago

I remember various issues with NFS file locking and I always thought the security and permissions were crap.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Computing_Environm...

I haven't used LaTeX in a long time but I was always impressed how it could make integral symbols over fractions with summations and everything else look perfect.

LeFantome1y ago

My favourite distro right now is Chimera Linux which is Linux/BSD hybrid of sorts.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse