[oclug] Oldest Linux install?

[Adrian Irving-Beer]

On Fri, Feb 25, 2005 at 10:56:39PM -0500, Peter T. wrote:

> What was your oldest Linux install?

Slackware on a 486, 27 December 1996.

That same install continued to run on a 486 as my primary console,
even once I had a farm of about four Pentium III's.  I'm stubborn as
hell, I guess.  Even when I needed CPU, I just SSHed to the faster
machines.  Text-only all the way -- Tinyfugue, Pine, Lynx, and SSH
were all I needed.

For the latter half of its life, it probably had an uptime approaching
one hundred per cent.  I finally shut it down shortly before its sixth
birthday on 5 December 2002.

My first install *attempt* was September 1996.  I was a victim of the
stupid (IMO) inconsistency between device numbering (count from 0) and
partitions (count from 1), and accidentally ended up with a gig of
swap and no DOS partition to speak of, where all the downloaded
Slackware stuff was.

Thankfully, I had switched from a 210-meg hard drive to a 1.2 gig that
summer, and the old drive still had all its data, so not much was
lost, time wise.

(That hard drive went on to service my *slower* firewall for many
years, which ran well into 2001 or 2002 with the same 210 megs.)

It wasn't until I got a book and CD as a holiday gift that I actually
went wholeheartedly into it.  It helped that a virus wiped out my
entire system shortly beforehand, too. :)

At one point, I did a live-while-running manual install of RedHat
*over top* of the existing Slackware.  Given that I had no real
recourse at the time if the system became unbootable or unusable, it
was an interesting flirt with disaster, but it worked.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://tux.oclug.on.ca/pipermail/oclug/attachments/20050226/84a34885/attachment.bin