Heh. My "when Linux was bad" story was when I was 14 and trying to bootstrap mkLinux for PPC on my PowerBook 1400. It had a problem that whenever an interrupt would happen close to an HD ACCESS, the text {IDE TIMEOUT} would crawl across the screen until you pressed the debugger interrupt switch, after which it would continue on. This meant that any form of input while it was accessing the HD would result in the interrupt switch being hit, or even transferring data from the CD to the HD would take for-ev-er.
This meant the normally 45-minute install process turned into about two-and-a-half-hours of babysitting the poor laptop. I also became very conscious of memory/swap usage early on, so I had to use a rather light window manager (I think I settled on AfterStep as a decent combination of features and light-ness). I also learned how to tune X11 color requirements, since only 256-color mode was supported.
A good way to cut my teeth initially. Later on I got my parents to purchase a 7200/75, which was the cheapest Mac I could find that would run the official Linux/PPC distribution. That box carried me a hell of a long way - used it as a print server and as the family NAT router, compiled my own kernels for the first time, even wound up doing a Linux From Scratch build at some point.
This meant the normally 45-minute install process turned into about two-and-a-half-hours of babysitting the poor laptop. I also became very conscious of memory/swap usage early on, so I had to use a rather light window manager (I think I settled on AfterStep as a decent combination of features and light-ness). I also learned how to tune X11 color requirements, since only 256-color mode was supported.
A good way to cut my teeth initially. Later on I got my parents to purchase a 7200/75, which was the cheapest Mac I could find that would run the official Linux/PPC distribution. That box carried me a hell of a long way - used it as a print server and as the family NAT router, compiled my own kernels for the first time, even wound up doing a Linux From Scratch build at some point.
Good times, those.