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Red Hat Linux 6.1 was released in October 1999, 25 years ago this month! So let’s install it out on period hardware, compare it to modern day Fedora, and see what 25 years of desktop Linux progress looks like.
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Chapters:
00:00 Is Linux Really That Complicated?
01:22 What’s In The Box?
08:35 Installation Process
16:47 First Impressions & Problems…
21:17 Classic Linux Problem 1: GPU / Monitor Configuration
25:45 Classic Linux Problem 2: Networking
28:54 Classic Linux Problem 3: Sound Card
32:13 25 Years Of Linux Progress
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I remember getting this exact boxed distro for free at a Redhat funded linux talk with Richard Stahlman as a speaker. Good times.
Wow I don’t miss those days. I remember paying for a commercial sound system since at the time it ”just worked” (although I can’t remember what it was called now). And the days of arcane setting up of X modelines and everything.
Nice video, man! I remember installing Fedora Core 1 and Mandrake on my Athlon Thunderbird, back in the day, from IT magazines that had special numbers with installation guides and nice pressed and colorfull distros CDs. ALSA was prezent, so sound was working out of the box. Some cool stuff were: playing movies with mplayer from text mode, without loading Xserver, or connecting to internet with PPP dialup scripts, or TUX racer and FOOBILIARD with 3d acceleration. I also had a SmoothWall distro running for a while on a Pentium 166 MMX, 32 mb ram, back in the early 2000s. I still have that Pentium 166 MMX PC. That was a fun time to be around!
Just what every person needs: clustering for their web servers.
Red Hat Linux 6.2 was my first Linux. I already have the Stickers.
20:48 I remember that I upgraded my 1997 P2 266 with 48 MB of RAM to a P3 667 with 128 MB in late 1999. While certainly somewhat high end (especially when I added the GeForce DDR), I didn't have extravagant money to put into it, I remember trying to stay close enough to the sweet spot. So 128MB being very expensive and very extravagant in 1999 raises my eyebrows a bit 🙂
I can remember trying RedHat back in the day as I bought a pack of CDs with various distributions on. IIRC it was RH5.
I can remember winding up in dependency hell (I was new to the Linux game; the closest I had got prior to that was using Xenix via a dumb terminal on a Programming course I did; luckily that meant I already knew vi & could make my way with compiling stuff)
I switched to Debian and didn't look back. 🙂
(Although I dabble with Arch now, too)
I got my first RHCE certification on Red Hat Linux 6.1 back in 1999. This brought up a lot of really cool old memories. Thank you.
Oh LInux. I remember doing an install of Red Hat back in the day and what a pain it was. Heck, installing Netware was easier! 🤣🤣🤣
I think 1997 was my first redhat experience. I hated it lol ended up ignoring linux as much as I can and regret it to this day as it's part of my every day work life.
32:13 You can talk to me and my daughter anytime
Rigged, you taken smoothest distro in those times
60 Hz on a crt was painful I remember.
Such great memories from that era of Linux. I would have followed up the fresh install by installing Ximian's Desktop, a more polished and refined version of Gnome 1.4 iirc. RedCarpet was their update tool, and we still have Evolution the mail client etc. Great time.
The funniest part about all this is that GNOME from 1999 is still WAY more functional than GNOME from 2024
Been running linux for years now, it just works and no bullshit stuff like in windows, manjaro linux is my go to OS
From experience with old labels in storage, odds are the adhesive on the stickers will have gone by now, either they'll be permanently stuck to the backing or they'll peel off but not stick back on to anything else.
Thank you for this nostalgia hit ! Used RedHat in late 90's on school's server, spent lots of hours learning, letting it overnight to render PoVRay images, compiling whatever picked our teenage attention or simply having a blast with our 256kbps line.
I think it was 1999 when i bought it in my local computer shop. I'm 42 now so it sounds about right
Wow this was my first linux distro actually. This video is gonna be great to watch!
so many memories, really nice trip into the past
Thanks for bringing back the memories. I anticipate waking up screaming in the middle of the night for the next week or two from having nightmares about configuring Linux.
I remember installing Corel Linux in about 2000. It was quite easy to use and install. It was bundled with WordPerfect. They stopped supporting it after Microsoft bought a large number of shares in Corel
I wonder when the first terminal emulator came out so you didn't have to keep dropping to the terminal directly.
I remember trying an early version of Red Hat and Mandrake Linux in the early 2000s and my experience was pretty similar to what is in this video. For a PC user that was somewhat seasoned like I was, having used PCs regularly since the 386 era, Linux was a more difficult to setup than Windows but not impossible. Mostly took some patience and the ability to access the internet from another computer.
However, for someone who was much less experienced and trying to set it up on their first or only PC, I could see it feeling like it was freaking awful to do at the time!
One thing I think really helped people get some decent experience with Linux were downloadable and burnable Live CDs! That way a person could burn a CD, reboot their computer, boot into a Linux environment and play around without having to try to setup a dual boot configuration or blow away an existing Windows install. Especially handy on a family PC.
RedHat Pre-enshitification. lol 😂
Why is the logo of a red lizard punching a white triceratops?
I still have the monitor I was using back then. I wrote its sync rates on the bezel in sharpie because of Linux,.
Ironically that "graphical mode" setup actually runs in text mode, just styled to look graphical.
I was born in 98 so I didn't really get to see this era of Linux firsthand, but something I would like to note is that in my experience messing around on VMs and such Caldera had the most streamlined installation and end user desktop Linux experience of that time period. Corel Linux looks promising too but I haven't quite got it working with a VM yet.
I am surprised that Red Hat only used one Boot disk in this version.
Most distros around that time still had two floppies, in a "Boot" and a separate "Root" disk, before getting to the CD's.
I bought my pc in 1998 and put 256mb in it, a decision I certainly didn’t later regret but yeah, it wasn’t the cheap part of the pc!
Redhat 7.2 was my first and yeah the similar story as every one else Had a winmodem, couldn't get online. Later I got a serial modem then a year later we got DSL. Also couldn't get nvidia graphics working beyond basic unaccelerated graphics. Got me stuck on Windows for a while. I full time linux now though.
I used RedHat 6.2 Server and Workstation in our computer lab back in uni! It was one of the better, more user-friendly Linux distros, although I really preferred Mandrake and SuSE.
Nowadays I prefer Linux Mint for x86/x64 systems and Adelie for my antique PowerPC Macs.
I first installed Slackware from a few dozen floppy disks in 1995. In 1996 I got the Infomagic 6 CD Linux collection. I think I tried out Redhat back then but eventually stayed on Slackware.
Linux was so powerful back then, with virtual terminals and true multitasking and all the stuff from the Unix world. And if you had a suitable video card you might have been able to tease out video modes from your monitor that were not possible on Windows.
Stickers… scan them so they can reproduced.
My first Unix was Coherent by Mark Williams Company. It ran on my 386-20 with 4 MB of RAM and a 40MB hard drive and came on about 40 floppies. This would have been about 1990.
Im glad that my first Linux experiences back in early 2000's were on ibm thinkpads so just about everything worked out of the box no issues lol
the last time I HAD to enter the terminal on linux was to edit some printer configuration files for cups or whatever. Almost everything else is plug and play for the most part. Granted I do optionally enter the terminal to accomplish certain tasks faster than what the GUI can do.
I actually had an older RedHat version. In which you got 8 Cd's to install on a computer. If I recall that it would take over an hour for the install to complete. Course, being new to Redhat and Linux …I installed everything. Jump ahead to 2024 and I work as a Redhat Systems Administrator. I still use Redhat, but wish IBM would spin it off and make it useable by all.
Ah big box linux! Love it
I used to go to the library and check out the Linux books. There were CD holders in the back of the books with different distros. I don't know why exactly but Mandrake was my favorite distro around 1997-98 when I was about 12. I would only make it a few days on a Linux Desktop before getting frusturated and because I loved WinAmp skins. The good old days…
The 90s was the golden era of Linux and man do I miss it. I feel like so many distros are so polished now that they have no magic. I still prefer distros like arch and even slackware for the fun.
I had this version 😂 Never really used it tho!
Maybe can try S.u.S.E. Linux instead. I never tried S.u.S.E (1999 era) before, but I believe it is much better than Red Hat Linux
I can remember downloading Slackware to a gazillion floppies and installing via command line. If you wanted X windows it was a whole new level of pain and configuration
I remember Red Hat 9. I miss the Bluecurve theme
I tried installing Red Hat back then. It didn't support my video card, complained that 16 MB of RAM was "very little" (even though it was perfectly fine for Windows 9x at the time), and made me manually sort out the dependencies of all the software it included. No thanks!