Historic distros
The Linux kernel was released score and 10 years ago, and to acknowledge this achievement we’ve compiled a selection of our favourite distros from yesteryear. These can’t be booted from the DVD, but have a look in the olddistros/ folder on the disc and try booting the ISOs in a virtual machine.
We really wouldn’t recommend using these aging distributions on real hardware, especially if it’s connected to the internet. What’s more, they’re unlikely to work on hardware that wasn’t invented at the time of their release, but of course we can’t stop you from trying. None of these distros support booting from a USB stick, but you never know, it might be possible with Unetbootin or such.
In tandem with Les Pounder’s historic distros feature (see page 68) we’ve got a Debian 2.0 (from 1998) QEMU image. Codenamed “Hamm”, this release had a mighty 1,500 packages available in the repos. The apt command line utility wouldn’t be invented until Debian 3.0, so all package management is done through dpkg . So you’re free to recreate the quintessentially late-90s dependency hell experience.
Next, jumping forward five years, we have Klaus Knopper’s Knoppix. Knoppix was one of the first distros able to boot directly to a graphical live environment. This version includes some of the in-vogue software of the era, including KDE 3, GIMP 1.2, xmms and OpenOffice. A whole 96MB of RAM was needed to use the GUI, which even then was low. This edition defaults to Knopper’s native German, but you can change this in the Land und Sprache settings. While you’re at it, you’ll probably want to change the keyboard layout too. Oh and if you want to change resolution you’ll need to edit XF86config... the olden days!
Finally, we’ve got Ubuntu 6.06, which was the only release not to end with .04 or .10 due to a two-month delay. This was Ubuntu’s first LTS release, which was jokingly said to stand for Late To Ship. According to contemporary accounts the wait was worth it though, as Dapper Drake shipped with improved power management capabilities, a new graphical installer (Ubiquity) and an optional tool called NetworkManager that promised to make life easier now that people were starting to roam around different networks. The Human theme made its inaugural appearance too, in all its orangey-brown glory.
Under the hood it’s running kernel 2.6.15, so Udev (the kernel event interface that enables it to enumerate hardware dynamically) was still pretty new. But having even rudimentary hardware detection was a luxury in those halcyon days of the mid-2000s. And now, lest we drift off into nostalgic reverie, let us return to 2021 (do we have to? – Ed).