Best news is ...

Posted Oct 1, 2025 13:12 UTC (Wed) by niner (subscriber, #26151)
In reply to: Best news is ... by swilmet
Parent article: Jumping into openSUSE Leap 16

The openSUSE installation on my desktop is from around 2001. Hard to say after such a long time. Oldest file in my /etc I can find is /etc/X11/fvwm2/system.fvwm2rc.old.1 with an mtime of Sep 24 2001. The original installation was 32 bit, but I cross-graded to 64 bits when I got my first Athlon 64 CPU. So yes, openSUSE really is an install once and upgrade forever kind of distribution. It's even the same process for switching between the different openSUSE distributions like Leap and Tumbleweed.

Best news is ...

Posted Oct 1, 2025 13:20 UTC (Wed) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link] (13 responses)

The openSUSE installation on my desktop is from around 2001

That is truly impressive. I feel like you should preserve that system for posterity purposes... How many times have you upgraded CPU/motherboard, etc.?

Best news is ...

Posted Oct 1, 2025 13:52 UTC (Wed) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link] (12 responses)

Oh boy, that must have been at least 6 or 7 complete overhauls with countless minor upgrades in between.

Fun fact: I've been using openSUSE/SUSE Linux/SuSE Linux/S.u.S.E. Linux on this machine since I think version 5.2 in 1998 (kernel 2.0.33 still sounds quite familiar). The only reason I reinstalled instead of upgrading to 7.3 or so was because I was curious about how the installation process has evolved over time. Back than new distro versions were released every few months (in boxes with sets of several CDs no less).

Bonus fun fact: I've also been using KDE since then with the first version being KDE Beta (ok, could have been Beta 3, really hard to find out so much later), before even 1.0.

Best news is ...

Posted Oct 1, 2025 14:10 UTC (Wed) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link] (11 responses)

"Back then new distro versions were released every few months (in boxes with sets of several CDs no less)."

Oh, I remember that well. Or you could snag most distributions on cheap CDs from Linux Mall, where I worked for a time in 1999-2000, or CheapBytes...

I do miss the box sets. There is something to be said for having something to hold in your hands, with a proper manual.

Best news is ...

Posted Oct 1, 2025 14:44 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (10 responses)

In truth, it's never been the same since they stopped shipping distributions as a big box full of diskettes...

Best news is ...

Posted Oct 1, 2025 22:33 UTC (Wed) by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248) [Link] (9 responses)

Ooooh diskettes were so much fun. I remember trying to install OS/2 on my dad's computer from 23 diskettes or so. For some reasons the first three of four attempts failed due to random read errors on any of those 23 diskettes, requiring to do everything from the start again.

OK maybe not _everything_ was better back then :)

Best news is ...

Posted Oct 1, 2025 22:48 UTC (Wed) by knewt (subscriber, #32124) [Link] (8 responses)

Back in my first year at uni, I would often find that a floppy I had written to a few minutes ago back in my residence, would fail to work by the time I got to the computer lab. Happened enough that in time I would write multiple copies of files onto multiple disks!

Later on, once we got adsl (brand new at the time), and I was able to easily copy files to my uni home directory over ssh, things were much simpler :)

Best news is ...

Posted Oct 9, 2025 12:37 UTC (Thu) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (1 responses)

> Back in my first year at uni, I would often find that a floppy I had written to a few minutes ago back in my residence, would fail to work by the time I got to the computer lab

When was this? I remember floppies being very reliable, until sometime around the early 2000s when you still *occasionally* needed one (eg to get a disk controller driver during Windows installation), and discovering that new boxes of disks could easily be *50%* duds. Or maybe they'd have worked with a really high quality drive, but not the one I was using. It's like the quality control just dropped off a cliff as soon as they stopped being mass market items.

Best news is ...

Posted Oct 9, 2025 15:39 UTC (Thu) by knewt (subscriber, #32124) [Link]

> When was this? I remember floppies being very reliable, until sometime around the early 2000s when you still *occasionally* needed one (eg to get a disk controller driver during Windows installation), and discovering that new boxes of disks could easily be *50%* duds. Or maybe they'd have worked with a really high quality drive, but not the one I was using. It's like the quality control just dropped off a cliff as soon as they stopped being mass market items.

So this would have been 1998/99. I suspect they were all floppies purchased from a shop at the uni itself, and likely not the highest quality. The next year (actually a second 1st year, thanks to changing degree and restarting), I moved off-campus and honestly don't recall what the situation was like. And from 2000/01 onwards I had ADSL which made life so much easier. Well, 2001/02 was fun, I actually ran a wifi bridge between two houses in order to access the connection. We were sharing a single 512Kb/s (iirc) link between several houses from the start, but the house I was in that year we couldn't easily run cabling to :)

Best news is ...

Posted Oct 10, 2025 9:35 UTC (Fri) by geert (subscriber, #98403) [Link] (5 responses)

It didn't help that the floppy drives on the university's various UNIX systems (if they had a floppy drive at all) had various limitations (IIRC, the SPARC ones supported HD (not DD) 3.5" floppies only).
When I did the release of XFree86 binaries for Linux/m68k, my transfer strategy was:
1. Split the archive in small parts, and checksum them.
2. Note down all parts with a failed checksum after transfer,
3. Retransfer all corrupt parts the next day.
After 3 days, everything was completed, usually.
Life improved when I got a DDS tape drive, which was much more reliable...

Best news is ...

Posted Oct 10, 2025 10:40 UTC (Fri) by knewt (subscriber, #32124) [Link] (4 responses)

Hmm, I wonder if that was it then. Because the computer labs were definitely some form of SPARC workstation.

After we got the ADSL, there were times I would....... borrow a lab workstation to run background tasks. The most memorable example being when the uni webserver didn't have an apache module I wanted, so I built my own copy and spawned it off in the background. The workstations didn't reboot all that often, so worked well :)

Best news is ...

Posted Oct 10, 2025 11:21 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (3 responses)

The SPARCStation 1's and 1+'s had a floppy. That was how we got files on and off too in our lab. Seems the 2's and 10's did too. I don't remember the type of floppy. You could definitely format a HD floppy as normal density though.

Best news is ...

Posted Oct 10, 2025 14:42 UTC (Fri) by geert (subscriber, #98403) [Link] (2 responses)

The floppy drive was an expensive option for most UNIX workstations. The serial and (monochrome) X terminals didn't have floppy drives either. The few machines with floppy drive were typically inside the server room. Many people didn't have a computer at home in those days, so less need for transferring data.
When the students kept asking for a floppy drive, they got an external SCSI floppy drive, connected to the server through a freshly drilled hole in the wall ;-)

Best news is ...

Posted Oct 10, 2025 15:06 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Now that you say that, yes, only 1 or 2 of the SparcStations had a floppy. But you could just go over, ask to just use the floppy, put your disc in the drive, go back to your own workstation and telnet in and copy your stuff remotely, then eject and go back and get your disk.

On floppies ...

Posted Oct 14, 2025 20:49 UTC (Tue) by roblucid (guest, #48964) [Link]

No way was I having floppies inside the server room, we had tape and CD-ROM even in 1990.
Floppies were more popular with Linux using PC, they'd improved a lot on the old true 5 1/4" floppies, having a plastic shell.
Later I did have them bundled with the Solaris sun4m arch workstations and I did find a use for them on desktop, as I'd store tripwire
instrusion detection software storing the data read-only on the bundled floppies,
I'd actually use that mainly to figure out the configuration changes and the files that GUI installers would put on machines as using
a GUI meant missing the good ole documentation and is in practice error prone and tought to replicate at scale.

The floppies were generally used for sharing (small) files with documentation people, translators and so on.
There was at one time requirement to use a DOS emulator and floppy drive, which the PC support installed with DOS
and had to be called back when their install caught a virus and stopped functioning. After that it had a virus scanner active too.
There were some FOSS tools around to write to floppy disks and convert files, but mostly networking was used,
the PCs becoming clients to a network of remote office servers, so UNIX was doing the distribution of data, with
PC clients using NFS taking over from an awkward DECnet system, which wasn't manageable at the scale we were
operating at, at least with a small team.

Best news is ...

Posted Oct 2, 2025 0:53 UTC (Thu) by swilmet (subscriber, #98424) [Link] (1 responses)

> The openSUSE installation on my desktop is from around 2001.

On the pets-versus-cattle spectrum, one can say that you've clearly chosen your side!

Personally I like doing fresh installs from time to time to have something pristine. Plus automation for most of the post-install configuration. I also clean up things like in ~/.config/, ~/.local/share/, deleting ~/.cache/, etc.

> So yes, openSUSE really is an install once and upgrade forever kind of distribution.

But it's probably too technical for the average person (for family, friends, …). So I still currently need to help them for the upgrades or re-installations.

A fine-grained set of packages is more complex to handle than a coarse-grained set of images for the OS, runtimes and apps. So I look forward to image-based solutions to mature.

Best news is ...

Posted Oct 2, 2025 6:19 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

There used to be a great online tool called SUSE Studio, which allowed you to create customised SUSE and OpenSUSE variants by just clicking one a web site. I used it to make a custom light-weight spin of OpenSUSE for an elderly relative and her secondhand Thinkpad. Included just what she needed, mainly Firefox and LibreOffice, and software needed to open the Internet via a 3G USB dongle. XFCE for desktop and xdm for login. The installer fit on a CD-ROM back then. Worked very well for a time. But after her laptop had to be upgraded due to ever-growing bloat of browsers, and SUSE Studio discontinued, moved her to Linux Mint.