Happy birthday, Linux! Recall Core 1.0
Recently, we shared with you material about the evolution of Linux. Today, in honor of the recent 26th birthday of the operating system kernel, we are publishing a story about how it all began.
I first installed Linux in 1993. Then I worked at MS-DOS, but I really liked the systems on Unix, which stood in the institute's computer room, where I, a student, sat all day. When I heard about Linux, the free version of Unix that I could run on my home 386, I immediately wanted to try it. My first Linux distribution was Softlanding Linux System (SLS) 1.03 with a Linux kernel of 0.99 alpha, patch level 11. The system needed as much as 2 MB of memory, or 4 if you wanted to compile programs, or 8 to run the X window system.
I thought that Linux, compared to MS-DOS, is a huge step forward. Although Linux lacked the same variety of programs and games that were present in MS-DOS, I found that Linux is a much more flexible system. Unlike MS-DOS, now OS could work in the real multitask mode, executing at the same time several programs. In addition, there were a lot of tools in Linux, including a C compiler that I could use to create my own programs.
')
A year later, I upgraded to SLS 1.05, which could boast the latest Linux kernel 1.0. But, more importantly, support for kernel modules appeared in Linux 1.0. Thanks to the modules, now there was no need to recompile the kernel to support the new hardware. Instead, you could download the appropriate one of the 63 available modules. In the README for SLS 1.05, you could find the following note about the modules:
On August 25, the Linux kernel celebrates its 26th anniversary. Celebrating this event, I installed SLS 1.05 again in order to remind myself of how much the Linux 1.0 kernel was and better see the huge Linux path that has passed since the early 1990s. Join me on this journey through the waves of memory!
Softlanding Linux System was the first real "distribution", which included a program to install the system. Although this process was not as simple as today. Instead of booting from a CD-ROM, I needed to boot the system from the installation floppy disk, and then run the installer from the command line prompt.
Starting SLS 1.05 installation from the command line
A nice little thing that appeared in SLS 1.05 was support for a color text installer. When I chose the color mode, the installer screen turned light blue, the letters were displayed in black. Still, it's prettier than a primitive black screen with white text.
Color text setup screen in SLS 1.05
The SLS installer is simple, we have only text appearing at the bottom of the screen, but it does its job. After answering a few simple questions, I was able to create a partition for Linux, format it in an ext2 file system, and install the system. Installing SLS 1.05, including X and development tools, required 85 MB of disk space. By modern standards, this is very small, but when the Linux 1.0 kernel came out, 120 MB disks were still running.
Creating a partition, formatting in ext2 and installing Linux
First boot
When I first downloaded the newly installed Linux, some details about this early version of the system surfaced. For starters, Linux doesn't take up too much memory. After booting the OS and testing several utilities, Linux took less than 4 MB. On a system with 16 MB of memory, this meant that there was still enough space to run the programs.
Check file system and free disk space
In Linux 1.0, the familiar
File system / proc
The
Folder / etc
After the system has booted, it's time to get to work. So what can be done with this early operating system based on the Linux kernel?
Let's start with file management. Every time you log in, SLS reminds you about Softlanding (Softlanding menu shell, MESH), a file management program that modern users may find similar to the Midnight Commander . Users in the 1990s would compare MESH with Norton Commander, probably the most popular third-party file manager for MS-DOS.
MESH
In addition to MESH, not so many fullscreen applications are included in SLS 1.05. However, here you can find familiar tools, such as the Elm mail client, the programmable editor GNU Emacs, and the venerable Vim.
Email client Elm
GNU Emacs Editor
There is even tetris in SLS 1.05, you can play right in the terminal.
Tetris
In the 1990s, the most common way to access the Internet was a dial-up connection, so the Minicom application for working with the modem was included in SLS 1.05. Minicom provided a direct connection to the modem and required the user to enter AT commands in order, for example, to dial a number or terminate the connection. The application also supported macros and other convenient features that made it easy to connect to a modem pool of a local provider.
Minicom modem application
Let's talk now about working with documents. SLS appeared long before something like LibreOffice or OpenOffice. In Linux in the early 1990s, there was nothing like that. Instead, if you needed a word processor, then you most likely would have downloaded MS-DOS and ran something like WordPerfect or a Globular GalaxyWrite.
However, all systems on Unix included a set of simple text formatting tools -
Simple text document in nroff
Text formatted with nroff
In order to make the system work in graphical mode using window system X, it was necessary to put more effort than could be expected by reading the documentation for the SLS:
I first installed Linux in 1993. Then I worked at MS-DOS, but I really liked the systems on Unix, which stood in the institute's computer room, where I, a student, sat all day. When I heard about Linux, the free version of Unix that I could run on my home 386, I immediately wanted to try it. My first Linux distribution was Softlanding Linux System (SLS) 1.03 with a Linux kernel of 0.99 alpha, patch level 11. The system needed as much as 2 MB of memory, or 4 if you wanted to compile programs, or 8 to run the X window system.
I thought that Linux, compared to MS-DOS, is a huge step forward. Although Linux lacked the same variety of programs and games that were present in MS-DOS, I found that Linux is a much more flexible system. Unlike MS-DOS, now OS could work in the real multitask mode, executing at the same time several programs. In addition, there were a lot of tools in Linux, including a C compiler that I could use to create my own programs.
')
A year later, I upgraded to SLS 1.05, which could boast the latest Linux kernel 1.0. But, more importantly, support for kernel modules appeared in Linux 1.0. Thanks to the modules, now there was no need to recompile the kernel to support the new hardware. Instead, you could download the appropriate one of the 63 available modules. In the README for SLS 1.05, you could find the following note about the modules:
Modularization of the kernel is aimed at reducing, and ultimately, eliminating the need to recompile the kernel, which was necessary to replace or modify device drivers, or to organize dynamic access to rarely needed drivers. More importantly, it is likely that the efforts of individual working groups should no longer be directed towards the development of the core. Everything goes to the possibility of binary kernel releases.
On August 25, the Linux kernel celebrates its 26th anniversary. Celebrating this event, I installed SLS 1.05 again in order to remind myself of how much the Linux 1.0 kernel was and better see the huge Linux path that has passed since the early 1990s. Join me on this journey through the waves of memory!
Installation
Softlanding Linux System was the first real "distribution", which included a program to install the system. Although this process was not as simple as today. Instead of booting from a CD-ROM, I needed to boot the system from the installation floppy disk, and then run the installer from the command line prompt.
Starting SLS 1.05 installation from the command line
A nice little thing that appeared in SLS 1.05 was support for a color text installer. When I chose the color mode, the installer screen turned light blue, the letters were displayed in black. Still, it's prettier than a primitive black screen with white text.
Color text setup screen in SLS 1.05
The SLS installer is simple, we have only text appearing at the bottom of the screen, but it does its job. After answering a few simple questions, I was able to create a partition for Linux, format it in an ext2 file system, and install the system. Installing SLS 1.05, including X and development tools, required 85 MB of disk space. By modern standards, this is very small, but when the Linux 1.0 kernel came out, 120 MB disks were still running.
Creating a partition, formatting in ext2 and installing Linux
First boot
System
When I first downloaded the newly installed Linux, some details about this early version of the system surfaced. For starters, Linux doesn't take up too much memory. After booting the OS and testing several utilities, Linux took less than 4 MB. On a system with 16 MB of memory, this meant that there was still enough space to run the programs.
Check file system and free disk space
In Linux 1.0, the familiar
/proc file system already exists, although it does not provide as much useful information as can be seen in modern versions of the OS. In Linux 1.0 /proc includes interfaces to basic system information retrieval tools, such as meminfo and stat .File system / proc
The
/etc directory on this system is rather empty. It is interesting to note that SLS 1.05 borrows rc scripts from BSD Unix to control system startup. Everything is started using rc scripts, with changes to the local system specified in the rc.local file. Later, most Linux distributions will use more familiar init scripts from Unix System V , then the systemd initialization system.Folder / etc
Job
After the system has booted, it's time to get to work. So what can be done with this early operating system based on the Linux kernel?
Let's start with file management. Every time you log in, SLS reminds you about Softlanding (Softlanding menu shell, MESH), a file management program that modern users may find similar to the Midnight Commander . Users in the 1990s would compare MESH with Norton Commander, probably the most popular third-party file manager for MS-DOS.
MESH
In addition to MESH, not so many fullscreen applications are included in SLS 1.05. However, here you can find familiar tools, such as the Elm mail client, the programmable editor GNU Emacs, and the venerable Vim.
Email client Elm
GNU Emacs Editor
There is even tetris in SLS 1.05, you can play right in the terminal.
Tetris
In the 1990s, the most common way to access the Internet was a dial-up connection, so the Minicom application for working with the modem was included in SLS 1.05. Minicom provided a direct connection to the modem and required the user to enter AT commands in order, for example, to dial a number or terminate the connection. The application also supported macros and other convenient features that made it easy to connect to a modem pool of a local provider.
Minicom modem application
Let's talk now about working with documents. SLS appeared long before something like LibreOffice or OpenOffice. In Linux in the early 1990s, there was nothing like that. Instead, if you needed a word processor, then you most likely would have downloaded MS-DOS and ran something like WordPerfect or a Globular GalaxyWrite.
However, all systems on Unix included a set of simple text formatting tools -
nroff and troff . On Linux, they were compiled into the GNU groff package, this package was also available in SLS 1.05. One of the tests that I subjected to SLS 1.05 was to create a simple text document using nroff .Simple text document in nroff
Text formatted with nroff
Window system X
In order to make the system work in graphical mode using window system X, it was necessary to put more effort than could be expected by reading the documentation for the SLS:
Running a window system X on your computer can be a bit complicated, mainly due to the fact that there are many types of video cards. Linux X11 only supports VGA video cards, but there are many such cards, and only some of them are fully supported. SLS comes with two window system servers X.
The first, full-color XFree86, supports, in whole or in part, such cards as ET3000, ET4000, PVGA1, GVGA, Trident, S3, 8514, graphics cards with graphics acceleration, ATI plus, and others.
The second server, XF86_Mono, should work with almost all VGA cards, however, only in monochrome. Accordingly, it uses less memory and should be faster than color. However, he certainly doesn’t look so nice.
The basic configuration information of the window system X is stored in the / usr / X386 / lib / X11 / directory. In particular, the Xconfig file sets the timings for the monitor and the video card. By default, the X window system is configured to use a color server, but you can switch to the x386mono monochrome server if the color does not work normally, because in monochrome mode, the system should work with any standard VGA card. In general, this means assignment as a reference to the current X server / usr / X386 / bin / X.
Simply edit the Xconfig file to specify the mouse type and timings, and enter the startx command.
All this does not sound very encouraging, and it should be noted that this is the way it is. Manual configuration of the window system X, indeed, is not an easy experiment. Fortunately, thesyssetupprogram is included in SLS 1.05, which helps to set various system parameters, including the screen settings for the window system X. After several answers to questions and experimenting with the settings, I was finally able to run X!
Syssetup program
However, it is worth remembering that we have X from 1994, we did not even have a desktop concept yet. Among the options available to me were FVVM and TWM. TWM was easy to set up, it provided a simple but functional graphical environment.
TWMShutdown
No matter how pleasant it was for me to remember how it all began, it was time to return to my modern desktop. My first Linux worked on a 32-bit 386th computer with 8 MB of memory and a 120 MB hard disk. Today, my car is not an example more powerful. On it, I can do a lot more than in the old days. There are 64-bit Intel Core i5, 4 GB of memory and a 128 GB SSD disk. The Linux 4.11.11 kernel works on all this.
After my experiments with SLS 1.05 are over, it's time to say goodbye.
Turn off the computer
See you, Linux kernel 1.0. Nice to see how far you have come over the years.
Dear readers! How did you celebrate the birthday of the Linux kernel?
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/336774/
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