I recently found this boxed copy of Linux for Windows from 2001. But what is it?!
Great video. Some insane decisions made by the devs, you’d think it just runs in a VM, and it kinda does…but it also installs GRUB, and if you boot it from windows it can’t access the network because windows doesn’t release it properly and there’s no way to get back to windows without rebooting the whole computer. Everything seemed to work fine out of the box if you just run it directly from GRUB…but at that point why not just dual boot properly instead of the fucked up halfway bs they implemented?
Well worth a watch.
It also looks like a fairly easy and straight forward install process. but yeah I watched the vid yesterday and it was a weird thing.
I remember back in like '99 or 00 my Dad and I tried to install Mandrake on the family PC. We watched A LOT of “The Screen Savers” on TechTV and they were always going on and on about Linux and how great it was so we figured we’d give it a shot. Went to Babbages and had to buy a copy. yes, we bought Linux. My Dad figured he could get it going because he knew DOS well enough to navigate directories and what have you.
We totally borked it when it came to the partitioning part. wiped the XP install by mistake and then couldn’t get Mandrake to install. we THEN had to go back to the store and buy a copy of XP because the reinstall cd that came with the PC didn’t work. so it was an expensive Linux attempt.
Now we both use Linux on our machines but we both waited like 20 years before giving it another shot. My dad uses Slackware (He loves it) and I’m on NixOS.
What a heartwarming tale of adventure!
Sounds awfully similar to my first attempt at installing Linux 🤣
VMs were not viable yet in 2001 for an entire underlying OS stack like this in the way you might be thinking on end-user hardware. I think VMWare was just coming out, and Xen wasn’t released until a bit later.
So, as per the video, it installs an .img file. the fact that in 2001 that wouldn’t be possible explains the whole “can’t get back to windows without a system reboot” thing.
Thanks for teaching me something new today :D
Because y’all missed the point that the main selling point was not having to repartition. Booting from GRUB is still the primary use case.
