Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!)
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Alternatively buy 10 16Gb USB sticks, add Linux and sell for $35 each (30% discount!!!)...
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It even works with missing or faulty hard drives. Since it runs on a USB stick, your existing computer is not altered, and youʼll have access to all of your old files.
Magic!
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Isn’t this rather similar to how bars sell beer for far more than you’d pay for it in the supermarket?
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@Gurth I bought Debian on CDROM many years back, my crappy connection would have taken forever to get it. That's a little less relevant these days, but still.
I guess it depends on if it's like the paint.net situation. If they're trying to fraudulently represent its the (only) place to get it then they're assholes. Otherwise I don't have a big problem with it.
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@Gurth Depends whether you pay for convenience, or due to ignorance, i.e. how many people buy this not knowing they could get their Loonix for free.
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@anonymous234 said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
Depends whether you pay for convenience, or ignorance
Like bottled water
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@Cursorkeys said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
@Gurth I bought Debian on CDROM many years back, my crappy connection would have taken forever to get it. That's a little less relevant these days, but still.
Same here, but with SuSE. I gladly paid for the convenience of having a complete, working system with user guide. Also a lot less relevant these days, of course.
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@Gurth In that case you paid for the work done on the Guide and not for the software packaged. Similar if you pay to get support incase of problems
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@masterX244179 said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
@Gurth In that case you paid for the work done on the Guide and not for the software packaged.
I paid for the work done to assemble a complete Linux system, plus the manual to help me get started using it.
This was over 15 years ago, long before the era of live CDs. If you wanted to use Linux, you either bought a distro and became a semi-expert installing it, or first became a full expert and then assembled your own installation from scratch. I chose the easier of the two.
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@Gurth said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
I chose the easier of the two.
I chose the third option: Download Red-Hat's ISO for free
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@Gurth said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
This was over 15 years ago, long before the era of live CDs. If you wanted to use Linux, you either bought a distro and became a semi-expert installing it, or first became a full expert and then assembled your own installation from scratch, or realized that it wasn't ready for desktop use.
FTFY.
(Though installing Linux was not that hard 15 years ago. 20 years ago, it was a different matter.)
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@Zerosquare said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
(Though installing Linux was not that hard 15 years ago. 20 years ago, it was a different matter.)
Even that was easy by comparison with a bit over 25 years ago. The first distros really made installing Linux a lot easier…
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@TimeBandit said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
@Gurth said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
I chose the easier of the two.
I chose the third option: Download Red-Hat's ISO for free
Well, free minus the cost of give or take 30 hours of being online with 56k dialup and hoping there's enough error correction involved.
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@dkf said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
@Zerosquare said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
(Though installing Linux was not that hard 15 years ago. 20 years ago, it was a different matter.)
Even that was easy by comparison with a bit over 25 years ago. The first distros really made installing Linux a lot easier…
I first installed Linux in 1995. Slackware 3.1. There was a bunch of unpleasantly low-level things to worry about. It wasn't that it was hard, but far too much of the complexity was exposed.
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@TimeBandit said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
I chose the third option: Download Red-Hat's ISO for free
I might have done that, had I know about it and hadn’t had much the same issue with that kind of download as @uschwarz.
@Zerosquare said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
(Though installing Linux was not that hard 15 years ago. 20 years ago, it was a different matter.)
It wasn’t, except for having to determine all kinds of stuff by hand, mainly related to video settings, that I really had no knowledge of and my monitor’s manual didn’t help with either. I didn't destroy the monitor through overly wrong settings, so I guess I got it right.
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
I first installed Linux in 1995.
That was when I was first exposed to it. No idea what distribution, because this was on the home system of a CompSci student online friend of mine, who I was visiting at the time. It didn’t overly impress me, as this was the era of Windows 95 (though that wasn’t quite out yet) and the OS my friend was obviously proud of, didn’t have a GUI.
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@Gurth said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
I first installed Linux in 1995.
That was when I was first exposed to it. No idea what distribution, because this was on the home system of a CompSci student online friend of mine, who I was visiting at the time. It didn’t overly impress me, as this was the era of Windows 95 (though that wasn’t quite out yet) and the OS my friend was obviously proud of, didn’t have a GUI.
Slackware 3.1 had a GUI, but only just. No desktop as we know it today, just xf86 and fvwm. And tcsh for a shell in color_xterm. Ugh. Oh, yeah, and a kernel from the 1.2 line.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
I first installed Linux in 1995. Slackware 3.1. There was a bunch of unpleasantly low-level things to worry about. It wasn't that it was hard, but far too much of the complexity was exposed.
I remember installing Linux in about 1992 (might've been the first few months of 1993). That was… not a great experience, but the hardware I was installing on really wasn't good either. Everything was a lot nicer once I got newer hardware and installed the distros available from mid 1993 onwards (first version of Slackware!). Things improved rapidly from there.
I still remember the PITA that was the switch from using Linux's own custom binary format (called “a.out” but that's an uninformative name) to using ELF. It was a huge improvement as it made it practical to have things like user-defined shared libraries, but it was immensely disruptive at the time as all the weird hacks that everyone had been using to build needed to be removed and consigned to the litter bin of history (where they belonged).
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I remember playing with Red Hat around 2001-ish. I got it to install, but it always crashed/rebooted on startup because the X config was wrong and I didn't know the first thing about correcting it (I still don't).
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@Gurth said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
It wasn’t, except for having to determine all kinds of stuff by hand, mainly related to video settings, that I really had no knowledge of and my monitor’s manual didn’t help with either. I didn't destroy the monitor through overly wrong settings, so I guess I got it right.
I guess it depends on which distro you were using and what hardware you had. My first experience with Linux was with Redhat 7.3, and IIRC, I didn't need too much work to get it working (I don't recall needing to enter video timings manually, for example).
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@dkf said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
I first installed Linux in 1995. Slackware 3.1. There was a bunch of unpleasantly low-level things to worry about. It wasn't that it was hard, but far too much of the complexity was exposed.
I remember installing Linux in about 1992 (might've been the first few months of 1993). That was… not a great experience, but the hardware I was installing on really wasn't good either. Everything was a lot nicer once I got newer hardware and installed the distros available from mid 1993 onwards (first version of Slackware!). Things improved rapidly from there.
I still remember the PITA that was the switch from using Linux's own custom binary format (called “a.out” but that's an uninformative name) to using ELF. It was a huge improvement as it made it practical to have things like user-defined shared libraries, but it was immensely disruptive at the time as all the weird hacks that everyone had been using to build needed to be removed and consigned to the litter bin of history (where they belonged).
Curiously, no. a.out (the format) is a lot older than Linux.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
Curiously, no. a.out (the format) is a lot older than Linux.
If you read that wikipedia page carefully, you'll see that it wasn't one format but rather many closely related ones.
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@Steve_The_Cynic And support will end soon
The final deprecation of the a.out file format on Linux will take place with the release 5.1 of the Linux Kernel
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@dkf said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
If you read that wikipedia page carefully,
:why_would_you_do_that?:
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
Slackware 3.1 had a GUI, but only just. No desktop as we know it today, just xf86 and fvwm. And tcsh for a shell in color_xterm. Ugh. Oh, yeah, and a kernel from the 1.2 line.
The main thing I remember my friend demonstrating was the multi-user ability, switching between CLI terminals with the function keys in combination with a few modifier keys (was it Ctrl+Alt? I don’t remember). To someone used to MS-DOS plus (by then) Windows 3.1, this was a major improvement.
@mott555 said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
I remember playing with Red Hat around 2001-ish. I got it to install, but it always crashed/rebooted on startup because the X config was wrong and I didn't know the first thing about correcting it (I still don't).
That’s one of the things I did need to tinker with to get working right. I’ve since forgotten probably everything I learned at the time, though.
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@Zerosquare said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
@Gurth said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
It wasn’t, except for having to determine all kinds of stuff by hand, mainly related to video settings, that I really had no knowledge of and my monitor’s manual didn’t help with either. I didn't destroy the monitor through overly wrong settings, so I guess I got it right.
I guess it depends on which distro you were using and what hardware you had. My first experience with Linux was with Redhat 7.3, and IIRC, I didn't need too much work to get it working (I don't recall needing to enter video timings manually, for example).
Red Hat 5.1 was worse... It was still during the time when ISAPnP mattered, and the so-called package to support it was less well packaged than it should be, and didn't cope even close to well if you had two cards. Guess who had two ISAPnP cards in his PC?
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
ISAPnP
Which stands for "Industry Standard Architecture Plug n Pray"
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In their defense, the ISA PnP standard was released very late in the ISA lifecycle, when ISA cards were beginning to be made obsolete by PCI cards. So it didn't get a lot of use.
@Gurth said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
To someone used to MS-DOS plus (by then) Windows 3.1, this was a major improvement.
Huh? You could already do that in Windows 3.1. You could even do that just with plain MS-DOS
5.04.0 (released in19911988) using DOSSHELL (except it was task switching, not true multitasking, in that case).
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@Zerosquare said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
except it was task switching, not true multitasking, in that case
That's totally not the same thing as having multiple independent sessions
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@Luhmann said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
:why_would_you_do_that?:
:more_fun_than_working:
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@Gurth said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
Slackware 3.1 had a GUI, but only just. No desktop as we know it today, just xf86 and fvwm. And tcsh for a shell in color_xterm. Ugh. Oh, yeah, and a kernel from the 1.2 line.
The main thing I remember my friend demonstrating was the multi-user ability, switching between CLI terminals with the function keys in combination with a few modifier keys (was it Ctrl+Alt? I don’t remember). To someone used to MS-DOS plus (by then) Windows 3.1, this was a major improvement.
Ctrl+Alt if you're in X. Just Alt if you're on a text terminal.
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@PleegWat said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
Just Alt if you're on a text terminal.
TIL. I always used Ctrl+Alt
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@TimeBandit said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
ISAPnP
Which stands for "Industry Standard Architecture Plug n Pray"
I'm aware of that, thanks. (That said, I generally didn't have much in the way of problems with it, except when the ISAPnP configuration file generator that Red Hat selected for 5.1 generated one card with configs numbered (0,0) to (0,2), and the second with configs numbered (1,3) to (1,6) instead of (1,0) to (1,3)... Bad things happened when the module that told the cards what to do tried to use this config file.)
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@mott555 said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
I remember playing with Red Hat around 2001-ish. I got it to install, but it always crashed/rebooted on startup because the X config was wrong and I didn't know the first thing about correcting it (I still don't).
I can remember installing SCO Xenix/UNIX/whatever it was called at the time in about 1988 or 1989, but it was mostly a "Whee, our device driver works; we can install this humongous 500MB SCSI drive on a machine that would normally have only a 20MB drive."
I first installed Linux some time before Red Hat stopped supporting Red Hat Linux, which Wikipedia tells me was 2003. Faced with the choice between RHEL and bleeding-edge Fedora, I chose neither and switched to SuSE.
It worked, and ran my webserver with no problems, but I remember there were a lot of "I don't know what this option does nor what the value should be, so leave it at the default and hope for the best" configuration options during installation.
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@Zerosquare said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
In their defense, the ISA PnP standard was released very late in the ISA lifecycle, when ISA cards were beginning to be made obsolete by PCI cards. So it didn't get a lot of use.
@Gurth said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
To someone used to MS-DOS plus (by then) Windows 3.1, this was a major improvement.
Huh? You could already do that in Windows 3.1.
I said CLI terminals, not GUI terminal windows.
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@Zerosquare If that’s being ic, then you have a strange definition. Under Windows 3.1, sure, running several programs at the same time was trivial. Maybe task-switching was also possible in MS-DOS, but I certainly don’t think I ever met anyone who knew you could. Logging in multiple times to start different sessions and programs simultaneously was something special if MS-DOS was your point of reference.
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I can believe not knowing you could run multiple programs at the same time with plain DOS ; for whatever reason, it wasn't popular.
But I don't understand being impressed by multiple CLI terminals when you're already familiar with an OS that supports running multiple CLI and GUI applications at the same time
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@Zerosquare said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
I can believe not knowing you could run multiple programs at the same time with plain DOS ; for whatever reason, it wasn't popular.
How could you run multiple programs under DOS?
AFAIK, when you started a program, it took full control of the machine. The only option was a TSR program, but that was not running at the same time.
But I don't understand being impressed by multiple CLI terminals when you're already familiar with an OS that supports running multiple CLI and GUI applications at the same time
Having multiple users logged in at the same time was something Windows couldn't do until NT if I'm not mistaking
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@TimeBandit said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
How could you run multiple programs under DOS?
AFAIK, when you started a program, it took full control of the machine. The only option was a TSR program, but that was not running at the same time.
I mean "run" as in "it's started, you can between them whenever you want, and each program keeps its state between switches". It's not true multitasking, as all the programs except the active one are paused, but it's already a big step up from the "only one program at a time" default. And in those years, home users didn't really have much need for stuff running in the background anyways (no email or other notifications to worry about). Music players would be an exception, but some were available as TSRs.
@TimeBandit said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
Having multiple users logged in at the same time was something Windows couldn't do until NT if I'm not mistaking
That's true, but much like most Linux features like file permissions, it mainly appealed to systems administrators. If you were a home user on a non-shared, non-networked computer, it was solving a problem you didn't have.
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@Zerosquare said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
But I don't understand being impressed by multiple CLI terminals when you're already familiar with an OS that supports running multiple CLI and GUI applications at the same time
I didn’t say I was impressed with it, I said I thought it was a major improvement (over what DOS could do).
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@Zerosquare said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
Music players would be an exception, but some were available as TSRs.
People listened to music on PC back then?
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@Gąska said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
@Zerosquare said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
Music players would be an exception, but some were available as TSRs.
People listened to music on PC back then?
Yes. I had a .MOD player that would load into high memory and which would let me listen to a long playlist of interesting things while playing the original Civ instead of having to stick to the default music of the game (which didn't use the capabilities of my soundcard at all well).
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@Gąska said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
People listened to music on PC back then?
At best, using the CD-ROM player, or play a WAV file or something mainly to specifically listen to it, not to put on as background music. I know I didn’t have a computer that could play MP3s while I did pretty much anything else on it until around 2000 (but I didn’t generally go for high-end systems).
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@Gurth I remember my first decent computer. A PIII, can't remember the clock frequency (IIRC a Coppermine model), 64MB RAM and a CD burner. Oh, and a Matrox G400 Millennium video card! (Great card that was, much better than the S3 Virge my dad had at his work computer back then). That was in 2000 I think. I paid around the equivalent of €1000 for it, with an LG monitor, keyboard and mouse. Until then we had used a 1988 Olivetti Msomething (a 286 with no hard disk) and, in 1998, it broke down and moved to an old 486 we bought used, that I think I've still got somewhere. The 486 couldn't decode MP3s of course.
The Matrox video card was great in Linux, I remember. Very well supported (for the time), of course running Linux back then was still a chore but those were the times when Linux was indisputably more stable, once you got it running, and possibly prettier than Windows.
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Yes, it was prettier (than both Windows 98 and Me; XP came along in 2004? No, I've checked, it was released in 2001, but I only installed it after SP2, as according to all the geeks at the time it was crap before then, and that was released in 2004):
I find it prettier than XP too which was garish.
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@admiral_p said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
I find it prettier than XP
To be honest, that wasn't a particularly high bar... Even XP's beta theme was prettier than the one we ended up with.
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@Zerosquare said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
Even XP's beta theme was prettier than the one we ended up with.
Depends. Do you like your theming to be done by Fisher Price?
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@Zerosquare said in Take one $10 USB stick (64Gb,) add Linux, sell for $80 (includes 50% discount!):
Even XP's beta theme was prettier than the one we ended up with.
Link? It's surprisingly hard to google up.
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@Zerosquare gross.