Knoppix was not the first

Knoppix was not the first

Posted Aug 21, 2007 4:54 UTC (Tue) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599)
In reply to: Knoppix was not the first by csawtell
Parent article: The anatomy of a Linux distribution

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

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