Knoppix was not the first [LWN.net]

Knoppix was not the first

Posted Aug 17, 2007 15:06 UTC (Fri) by maney (subscriber, #12630)
Parent article: The anatomy of a Linux distribution

Back at the dawn of Linux distributions, Yggdrasil Linux was available in runs-from-CD form. Or so I understand - I have no memory of actually using it. Possibly the performance was so awful on a 386 with an external 1x CD drive that I've blocked the horror of it out of my memory. :-)

Knoppix was certainly the first live CD to catch on in a big way, but it missed being the first to run from CD by quite a few years.

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Knoppix was not the first

Posted Aug 17, 2007 20:15 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

Back at the dawn of Linux distributions, Yggdrasil Linux was available in runs-from-CD form. Or so I understand

I'm skeptical, because modern runs-from-CD Linuxes use modern technology: union filesystem and ramdisk or ramfs.

Years ago, I modified my system to have a read-only root filesystem and it took quite a bit of work. To this day I have to modify some packages that expect to be able to modify files in the root filesystem and I hardly ever install new versions of anything. So while Yggdrasil could certainly have done it, it would have been expensive.

Knoppix was not the first

Posted Aug 18, 2007 9:49 UTC (Sat) by csawtell (subscriber, #986) [Link]

Yggdrasil did indeed run from the CD, but 'run' took on the meaning of 'demonstrate slowly'. It was effective in that one could see what you were going to get before you installed the package. I used the Fall-95 release for quite a while and was most disappointed when it withered away and died.
I think I've still got the disk somewhere, I'm almost tempted to spin it up on modern hardware just to see what happens.

Knoppix was not the first

Posted Aug 21, 2007 4:54 UTC (Tue) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599) [Link]

I think I've still got the disk somewhere, I'm almost tempted to spin it up on modern hardware just to see what happens.

I'm not sure I have an Yggdrasil CD (though I still have some MCC floppies...), but I did try booting Knoppix ca. 2003 on a 1995 Pentium 166(?) and 32 MB of RAM. Whoo boy, what a mistake... Took 20 minutes to boot and pretty much thrashed continuously no matter what one tried. :-)

Old distros on modern hardware tend not to fare too well simply because they don't recognize much (any?) of the hardware. When the original distros came out, ISA/EISA/VLB were king, and USB didn't exist; now it's all PCI/PCI-x/AGP/USB2--i.e., most of your basic I/O may not show up, which makes interactions...difficult. ;-) Of course, if it does boot, it should scream... (I still occasionally boot a 16MB Pentium-75 laptop running Slackware 3.4, I think. It's quite usable.)

Greg