Arch Linux Turns 20
'"Arch Linux, the rolling Linux distribution that powers Valve's Steam Deck is now 20 years old," reports Neowin. Slashdot reader segaboy81 writes that "What's cool to see here is that everything changed behind the scenes, but on the surface, things are the same." From the article: Announced on March 11th, 2002, and codenamed Homer, version 0.1 was released to minor fanfare. The release notes were a far cry from today's, essentially announcing it had broken ground and the foundation was going in, as it were. Homer's release notes: I've finally got a bootable iso image on the ftp site. The bad news is that you don't get a pretty interactive installer. But if you wanted one of those, you would have gone with RedHat, right? ;) I'll try to get the docs up for ABS (Arch Build System) which, IMHO, is one of the best advantages of Arch. With ABS, you can easily create new packages, and it's trivial to rebuild existing packages with your own customizations.... It shipped with Linux kernel 2.4.18 which many of the Linux old-timers (myself included) will remember was right before we started to get nice things like auto-mounting USB drives in kernel 2.6. XFree86 4.2.0 was also in stow, which is what we now call Xorg. If you wanted to build software, you had to use an absolutely ancient gcc toolchain (2.95.3). Web browsing was covered by the ghost of Netscape Navigator, Mozilla 0.9.9. Heady days, these were!' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/22/03/12/0251257 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
On Sun, 13 Mar 2022 15:23:11 +1300, Peter Reutemann quoted:
'It shipped with Linux kernel 2.4.18 which many of the Linux old-timers (myself included) will remember was right before we started to get nice things like auto-mounting USB drives in kernel 2.6.'
Was that with devfs? I remember the Mandrake 9.1 install I was running for a while in 2004 had devfs, though it was already disappearing from most distros in favour of the modern udev system. devfs was a virtual file system, normally mounted in the /dev directory, which made all your hardware automatically appear as device files. Sounded like a neat idea, but besides having (reportedly) fundamental “unfixable” bugs, it violated the concept that the kernel should only provide mechanisms for doing things, not enforce particular policies -- those should be configurable in userland, under the control of the sysadmins/users. So now we have sysfs, normally mounted at /sys, which provides information (and accepts control) over your hardware, nothing more. What is put into /dev (and used to do actual device I/O) is managed by the udev process, under the control of rules files that can be configured in a great variety of ways.
'If you wanted to build software, you had to use an absolutely ancient gcc toolchain (2.95.3).'
GCC 2.95 represented the reunification of EGCS and GCC, according to <https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/History>. Or rather, the EGCS fork took over the “GCC” branding. EGCS was created a couple of years earlier after dissatisfaction with how the FSF was managing the project.
participants (2)
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro -
Peter Reutemann