
Installing Debian Linux 2.0 (1998) - voltagex_
http://archive.debian.org/debian/dists/hamm/main/disks-i386/current/install.html
======
alrs
So here's what installing Debian was like in 1998.

Short of going to a first-tier University AND having a campus job that allowed
you near the ethernet jacks, you were either going to spend weeks downloading
disk images over your 38.4 kbps modem, or you were going to buy a collection
of Linux distributions + the Sunsite archive on a 5-cd set that was released
quarterly and available at computer stores.

Assuming that your CDROM spoke standard ATAPI instead of some weird hooks-up-
to-a-soundcard interface from 1994, you probably had to create a floppy boot
disk by dd'ing it off the cdrom, as your BIOS was 50/50 able to support the El
Torito extensions that allowed a CDROM to boot the computer.

The dialog-based installer wasn't too different from now, IIRC. I think it was
Debian that had options for installing from not just floppy and ftp, but NFS
as well.

Once the machine was booted, you hoped to see "LILO" was successfully
installed to bootsector and you could choose which OS to boot. If LILO didn't
install right, it would just present "LI" and a blinking cursor. If you still
had DOS on the machine, the recourse was to use a DOS floppy boot disk and use
the undocumented "fdisk /mbr" command to put a normal DOS boot sector back on
your hard drive.

Once the machine was up, you most likely had to get PPP working with your
modem. Hopefully you had an external modem. Minicom was close enough to Telix
that you'd use that to make sure that AT commands were making it to the modem,
and then you went down the rabbit hole from there.

Getting X working sucked. I think by 1998 there was a helper script for
generating your XFree86 conf, but even that would most likely require some
hand-tweaks. If at this point you had your modem working you could at least
get online with PPP or even just a plain shell account to start searching
DejaNews for hints on how to get that working.

dselect was awesome, it felt like being connected to the world's hugest BBS,
where you were guaranteed that every piece of software in the archive would
work on your machine.

Now you're a few days in: You've got X working (probably at a wonky refresh
rate), you can connect to the Internet (when your ISP has an open line and you
aren't hitting a busy signal) and you've got Netscape installed. Getting your
soundcard working is probably still a week off.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Similar experience though it differed in the details. Downloaded disks from
the internet at work. Never had problems with IDE CDROM or booting. Those
parts easy.

Getting X or sound working, incredibly hard. Scary warnings about frying the
monitor and manually writing "modelines."

I remember wasting an entire weekend, morning until night tinkering with zero
progress to show for it. After about a week you'd give up and accept that you
made "this much" progress, and would never go further. At least until the next
major version came out with improved drivers.

Believe I tried the Caldera (or Mandrake?) linux in the late 90s and it was
easier to install.

~~~
jm4
Caldera was the one with the graphical installer where you could play Tetris.
I believe Mandrake was the one that was very similar to Red Hat (back around
RH 5.2) but I remember it being a little easier to get working.

X was difficult. I remember sound being fairly easy if you had a sound blaster
or turtle beach. The modem and PPP was where I always got hung up. I finally
bought an external modem and that made things much easier.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Hmm, I didn't remember using PPP or a modem. Now, I remember why.

At work we had a LAN. At home I had a Windows 98 box that talked to the
internal modem and dialed up, which routed to a special orange ethernet cable
with the wires crossed to an emachines box in the second bedroom. That one had
dual boot linux on it for tinkering and thought it was directly on the
internet. Good times.

------
esotericn
Well, it boots up in QEMU. I believe my first install of Debian was woody, or
Debian 3.

'If your monitor displays color, please select "Color" here.'

edit: Hard drive partitioned; we're formatting as ext2 now.

The installer is remarkably like modern Debian.

edit: Still churning; perhaps my 8GiB partition was rather overkill ;)

[https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/debian2/00-ext2.pn...](https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/debian2/00-ext2.png)

golly:

[https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/debian2/01-ext2.pn...](https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/debian2/01-ext2.png)

8 character root password:

[https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/debian2/02-rootpw....](https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/debian2/02-rootpw.png)

got me a dpkg:

[https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/debian2/03-dpkg.pn...](https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/debian2/03-dpkg.png)

I'm installing the sysadmin 'selection' ... we're getting Python 1.5 :D

:O

[https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/debian2/05-xfree86...](https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/debian2/05-xfree86.png)

I didn't want me no damned GUI! Mouse is broken!

Update: I'm in, I have vim, loopback, a user account, but no network
interface. Another time. :)

------
Arnavion
>Disable any virus-warning features your BIOS may provide. If you have a
virus-protection board or other special hardware, make sure it is disabled or
physically removed while running Linux. These aren't compatible with Linux,
and Linux has a better method of protecting you from viruses.

The BIOS feature is presumably referring to boot sector virus protection that
old BIOSes used to have that made them read-only. But what are "virus-
protection boards" ? The only search results with quotes are for variants of
that page, and searching without quotes gives too many irrelevant results.

~~~
goatinaboat
Must mean something like [https://www.asus.com/Motherboard-Accessories/TPM-
M-R2-0/](https://www.asus.com/Motherboard-Accessories/TPM-M-R2-0/) e.g. before
IME and so on were built in, you could add them as extras.

~~~
Arnavion
That's a TPM. Not sure what you mean by "IME", but TPMs both still exist and
did not exist in 1998. They also don't have anything to do with virus
scanning.

~~~
goatinaboat
Right, it was just a guess. I was using Linux professionally in 1998 and I
have never heard of a virus scanning board. Not sure I used Debian before 2001
though.

------
AceJohnny2
Oh those were the days.

Related: "Installing Linux on a Dead Badger" (2004)

[http://strangehorizons.com/non-
fiction/articles/installing-l...](http://strangehorizons.com/non-
fiction/articles/installing-linux-on-a-dead-badger-users-notes/)

~~~
dddddaviddddd
[https://web.archive.org/web/20190810142256/https://strangeho...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190810142256/https://strangehorizons.com/non-
fiction/articles/installing-linux-on-a-dead-badger-users-notes/)

------
nategri
Ah, "winmodems." I think the final boss of my ca. 1999 Red Hat install was a
winmodem.

~~~
techdevangelist
Yea getting winmodems to work on Windows was a chore good luck anywhere else.
The era of managing irq’s, jumpers for cpu clock multipliers, and if there was
the tiny twist in middle of a floppy ribbon to make it bootable couldn’t end
soon enough.

~~~
jdsully
The twist was to determine which was the A and which was the B drive. IMO a
lot nicer than the jumpers you had to set properly on both IDE drives.

------
neilv
Here's a few old Linux install-related Web pages:

* 1999 university lab/department-specific instructions for Red Hat: [https://www.neilvandyke.org/lab-linux-1999/](https://www.neilvandyke.org/lab-linux-1999/)

* 2000 assembling PC with Linux-friendly components: [https://www.neilvandyke.org/cheap-pc-2000/](https://www.neilvandyke.org/cheap-pc-2000/)

* 2003 laptop-specific install instructions for Debian: [https://www.neilvandyke.org/linux-thinkpad-560e/](https://www.neilvandyke.org/linux-thinkpad-560e/)

One thing I notice in the 1999 one is that, although I was already interested
in privacy&security, I was pretty cavalier about where I got RPMs. Maybe it
was hard to imagine that anything Linux could be evil?

------
nickjj
This mildly reminds me of the early 2000s when I first got introduced to Linux
and my friend guided me through installing Gentoo over TeamSpeak for the first
time. That was a productive 6 hours!

Fast forward to 2019 and now you can click a button on DigitalOcean's site and
have Debian 10 running in about 30 seconds.

------
interfixus
> _You must have at least 4MB of RAM and 40MB of hard disk_

When the world made sense...

It would have been around this time - 97/98 - that I first set up Red Hat 4 as
a dual boot with Windows 95. No hoops to run through, really, except endless
fiddling with PPP to get some sort of internet connection. The thing came on a
magazine cd-rom, and as my pc either didn't do cd-booting or I didn't know it
did, I had to cook a couple of floppies from provided images, presumably using
my beloved Disk Copy Fast. Download was out of the question. Largest thing I
did in that respect back then was StarOffice - a whooping 52 Mb package which
took five or six hours, done at night when phone rates were lower.

Later, I got rid of the Windows partition...

------
squarefoot
Debian in 1998? Try the fall 1994 Yggdrasil Linux in 1995 then:) The CD
(bought in a store, only copy available) was damaged out of the box in a
subtle way so that it started spitting errors over one hour after the
installation began when I was very likely in front of the third coffee. But
the installation continued somehow, so in the end the system sorta worked but
I had problems everywhere and no books, no Usenet, no Internet to ask for
advice, just a local BBS I couldn't connect to anyway because that half
working PC was the only hardware at disposal. This is what kept me back like 2
more years before trying Linux again (Red Hat).

------
jplayer01
Somewhat disappointed this isn't about installing and using Debian Linux 2.0
on a PC now 2 decades later, and comparing it to the experience of a modern
Debian. I'd even watch a video (does LGR know anything about Linux?).

~~~
ufo
Another thing I am curious about is the section about system requirements. How
much disk space would be necessary for a full installation of literally every
possible package in Debian 10?

~~~
dredmorbius
I've been installing Debian since rougly 1998, with separate partitions for
most major filesystems. My last /usr partition was 20 GB, and that's no longer
sufficient for a generous (though far from complete) Debian install.

The last package count I made of _unstable_ was over 70,000 distinct software
packages. I think _stable_ is well below that, though probably north of 40k.

A "full" installation is not possible as many packages mutually conflict.
Though it wouldn't surprise me if a _maximal_ install of software alone would
be well over 100 GB.

Much of the growth has come in support libraries, especially
internationalisation. For a while there was a package which would go through,
post-install, and remove unneeded translations and charactersets.

~~~
JNRowe
> The last package count I made of unstable was over 70,000 distinct software
> packages. I think stable is well below that, though probably north of 40k.

For others, like me, interested in this you can grab a txt/JSON package list
for mangling locally[1].

With the data I have grabbed it is 65k vs 57k.

> Though it wouldn't surprise me if a maximal install of software alone would
> be well over 100 GB.

A rough estimate[2] of just ``main`` on Buster:

    
    
      $ awk -F: '/^Installed-Size/ {print $2}' /var/lib/apt/lists/*buster_main* | numsum
      272960149
    

1\. [https://packages.debian.org/stable/](https://packages.debian.org/stable/)
\- Scroll to the bottom for links

2\. [https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-
controlfields.ht...](https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-
controlfields.html#installed-size)

~~~
dredmorbius
That's installed size in kB, correct? So, 273 GB, more or less, for "main".

"Well over 100 GB" ;-)

~~~
JNRowe
There is even talk on supporting packages that are larger than 10GB[1], so
three or four hundred gigabytes might be passed quicker than we'd think...

1\. [https://lwn.net/Articles/789449/](https://lwn.net/Articles/789449/) \-
Gives a little information if you scan for "size"

------
jake_morrison
I first installed SLS Linux in 1992. It came as floppy disk images on a CD-
ROM. I installed it on my girlfriend's new 386 computer, which had a monster
10MB hard disk. It booted up to the text console. I logged in, typed ls, was
happy it looked like the Sun machines I had used in college. Then deleted it
because she needed the space for DOS, Lotus 123, dBase IV, and WordPerfect.

I used Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, etc in my day job. I used to try to install Debian
on my new computers and fail because the kernel on the installer CD was too
old to support the latest chips. Finally I switched my desktop to RedHat Linux
in the late 90s.

For a while, I ran Gentoo, which meant compiling everything from scratch as
part of the installation process. One day for everything up to text mode, then
another day to get KDE running.

------
vlindos
I got my Debian from a CDROM packed with PC Magazine back in 1998.

Unfortunately the disk was scratched and the installation was failing at the
unpacking of one the deb packages.

I had no knowledge in tech other than some turbo pascal and ms dos batches
scripting skills. I had no internet connection (it was too expensively). I had
to do installation dual boot, to preserve the ms dos partition for the job of
parents. I had almost zero knowledge in English. My PC was 4 years old 386dx
with 4mb of ram.

However I did had spare summer vacation time at disposal. It took every third
evening this summer but just before school I was able to hack the installation
to skip the bad debs and boot into the New magical OS.

And then yet another adventure of configuring the new world called Linux
stared.

------
guggle
I started tinkering with linux the same year but with Mandrake instead. It
felt just like the beginning of the web, some kind of far west where anything
was possible, with no clear tracks to follow.

------
bluedino
A couple years after this, you could buy a Redhat CD off the shelf at Best
Buy, and if you had popular or generic hardware, it would pretty much install.
And a few years after that, Mandrake or Corel Linux booted from a CD and had
great graphics and everything.

By the time I got back to Debian, it was for servers. Netinstalls were compact
and awesome!

And then Ubuntu came out and blew everyone's mind, how complete it was
installed just off the CD. Even the idiots could install it then.

------
jojoo
> you were going to buy a collection of Linux distributions + the Sunsite
> archive on a 5-cd set that was released quarterly and available at computer
> stores.

I ordered debian potato (debian 2.2 / August 2000) as CD Sets via a german
book store. Came with an OKish book. I distinctly remember that the SuSe book
was better and i was really glad when i got a old SuSe manual from someone who
upgraded his machine and got a new manual along with the 10 CDs.

Great times.

------
asveikau
I got started with Linux in that year. I think I did red hat 5.1 and then
Debian 2.0. A few years later I tried openbsd 2.6.

The distros were too big for dialup, and Red Hat was charging a lot (or seemed
like it for free software) for CDs in a fancy retail box. But there was a
website "cheap bytes" that would burn CDs of distros for about $2.

I remember my apt-get dist-upgrade to Debian 2.1 because it took forever on
dialup.

------
INTPenis
My very first book that I begged my mother to buy for me was Debian GNU/Linux
bible with a Debian 2.2 CD.

Debian was great for a long time but since 2014 I've been a RedHat convert
using CentOS and Fedora where applicable. I firmly believe them to be better
than Debian or Ubuntu. Partly because I made the effort to learn things like
SElinux and iptables.

------
raverbashing
Unfortunately the oldest version available seems to be 3.0, though there was a
mention about 2.0
[https://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/](https://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/)

It would be interesting to test such an old version for historical purposes

~~~
mattl
[https://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/older-
cont...](https://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/older-contrib/2.0/)

------
dehrmann
I did something similar earlier this year: I installed modern Debian on a PII
machine from 1998. Turns out those are the oldest "modern" x86 chips supported
by Debian. The only special thing I had to do was install it to the disk in a
VM because I didn't have a way to boot from a CD on that computer.

------
ac29
> If you have a virus-protection board or other special hardware

I've heard of all sorts of esoteric PC hardware, but I've never heard of
hardware anti-virus boards.

Anyone know more about these? A web search hasnt produced anything useful.

~~~
blindblom
Hard to track down, but this could have referred to something like this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThunderByte_Antivirus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThunderByte_Antivirus)

------
cyberjunkie
Tried installing my first Linux distribution, Slackware (3.4) in 1997. It
worked. I deleted the only partition on that 630MB Seagate drive, and wondered
why Windows wouldn't boot anymore.

------
thom
I came to Debian slightly later than 98, but memories of the floppy net
install image fill me with joy. A whole OS bootstrapped from a 1.44MB medium
was very cool.

------
29athrowaway
2 years later, Knoppix (one of the first popular live CD distros, based on
Debian) made it much easier for people to experience Linux.

------
ufo
It's interesting that the very first thing in the page is a section on
copyrights, free software and the Debian Social Contract.

