This is a 1994 book about the many woes that Unix derived systems brought to sysadmins that were used to other solutions. Considering the number of commands that Linux still uses, it’s definitely worth a read.

  •  collapse_already   ( @collapse_already@lemmy.ml ) English
    2•9 months ago

    My first Linux installation was done using Red Hat CDs that I purchased for around $20. Probably around 1996. Patching was difficult. Drivers for many pieces of hardware didn’t exist. Remember Plug and Play was pretty new at that time frame. Lots of manual resolution of things like driver interrupt conflicts (boards had physical jumpers that you could move to change which IRQ they asserted). Looking back on it, I can’t believe any of us were doing it. But the eventual payout was wonderful. I can’t imagine what 1996 me would think about how easy something like the latest Ubuntu is. I would probably be pretty awed because I have a decent understanding of the massive amount of work that has been poured into the ecosystem now to make it what it is today.

    All that said, I will always have a soft spot for Solaris on an Ultraspark. That shit worked great.

    •  pbjamm   ( @pbjamm@beehaw.org ) English
      1•9 months ago

      I worked in a university Computer Science dept from about 1998-2002. Most of the labs were a combo of Solaris and Windows based machines. All the big time computing was done on super fancy Sun hardware. Sometime around 2001 I was part of a team that set up the first Linux based lab machines that students could use. It was a lot of work to get it all integrated but hardware was so much cheaper and so many students were running it themselves that it made sense. I was glad to help out as I had been a Linux user since I first installed Slackware from floppy disk on my 386.