I can only imagine in that era there was quite a bit more learning forced upon you than these days with our plethora of (somewhat) standards-compliant hardware and in-tree drivers. Though I'm definitely going to be channeling some of those experiences as I got a kernel-panic during the first boot after installing Slackware 15.0 on a newly built AMD B550 chipset / AMD Ryzen 5700G -based PC. I'm thinking its likely something to do with a combination of LILO, an NVMe interface SSD and EFI/CSM but I hope to get to the bottom of it. Worst case scenario, I perhaps can update the kernel via the bootable ISO as that was stable as a rock during the install.
> I can only imagine in that era there was quite a bit more learning forced upon you than these days with our plethora of (somewhat) standards-compliant hardware and in-tree drivers.
It's romanticized a lot, but boy was it painful! hear my story and weep.
In 1995 I got slackware with a textbook from the university library. I had a brand-new 486 paid for by a dad with 2 other kids in college and nothing more than a factory job to pay for things.
So my 486 had no CDROM. And it only had 4MB of RAM. And a pirated version of DOS, until I got slackware.
After 3 months of saving from weekend work I made enough to get a shitty soundblaster pro clone. And then I returned it for another unit, because, as I complained to the store owner "this doesn't work". When the replacement didn't work either I realised it must be my computer, more specifically, those "drivers" provided on the floppy disk were for msdos :-/
So then I started reading a bit, and digging into the driver sources, and reading the little pamphlet that came with the soundcard. "Hah!" I thought, "the IRQ channel for the soundcard appears to be hardwired!"
And thus begun the longest 3-day weekend of my short life up to that point; Linux had no modules, everything was compiled into a single binary image. You have any idea how long it takes a lowly 486 with 4MB of RAM to compile a kernel?
The entire weekend was "make this change, type make $SOMETHING, then wait for 50m, then watch it fail to boot, then examine how far the bootloader got, then boot with previous image, then undo that change and repeat the process".
Eventually had the soundcard working though. On a system on which no bloody games would run ...
My first Linux experience was very similar, except graphics card driven.
My neighbor told me to try Linux, and my computer at the time was a Mac (old PPC 603e cpu), which I’d put a PC Voodoo3 in and flashed it with a Max bios. Couldn’t afford a Mac card, PC ones second hand were much cheaper.
Anyway, the basic X frame buffer was so slow I needed accelerated 2D. The Voodoo3 driver was available as a patch to 2.2.18 and I was on 2.2.16. So, had to learn to patch and compile a kernel as one of my first acts of learning Linux.
But it got me accelerated 2D which made X bearable, so I could use KDE (2) or Gnome (1.4, still my fav).
After that it was enough to get me to build my next desktop as a Linux PC through college.
> The entire weekend was "make this change, type make $SOMETHING, then wait for 50m, then watch it fail to boot, then examine how far the bootloader got, then boot with previous image, then undo that change and repeat the process".
I also used Slackware in the same period and remember having to edit the code of the Kernel to get the CD-ROM to use the correct IRQ/IO to get it to work. This was CD-ROM that used the sound card (Creative Labs) not IDE.
