time travel with tux (part I)
let's go back in time a bit...
the year is 2009 – little 🍃 is super into computers, as many kids were back then. computers are these wonderous boxes that had been around for quite a while even then, but it seemed as if there was no end in sight to the advancements in the field, which means that there was always something to discover, whether it be old or new knowledge (but given how green 🍃 was back then most of it seemed like new knowledge anyway, let's not pretend lmao).
from playing around with the rpg maker 2000 to modding games to downloading all kinds of stuff to mod one's desktop, it was a veritable wonderland. (little 🍃 even made their first attempts at learning about html back then – something about a website dedicated to star wars with absolutely zero css applied, just bare-bones html formatting, and it never went live...)
one day it just so happened – as anyone might have seen coming – 🍃 downloaded something or another, or must've messed with system files (who even remembers, each day there were new experiments to conduct so it could've been a great many things), but alas, trusty ol' windows xp did no longer boot. (yes, 🍃's computer still ran xp; the hardware was too old and slow for vista and windows 7 hadn't even been released yet). what a shock! imagine the panic! like a kid's favourite toy broken before their eyes.
luckily enough, 🍃 had some amazing teachers that were quite happy to actually teach the kids something, especially if they saw genuine curiosity – so, the best solution was to ask the IT teacher about the problem. naturally, troubleshooting an unbootable pc remotely from the classroom was not an option, so the teacher wasn't actually able to identify the problem. but they still had a trick up their sleeve...
have you ever heard of linux?
oh yeah, my friend's big brother uses that; he's an IT student. my friend and i weren't able to do much on it when said brother installed it on all family computers without mercy. what a meanie.
well, 🍃, you see, you could burn a live-cd and try to look into your computer's files to figure out what's wrong with it. a live-cd is a cd you pop into your computer and lets you use it just like that, without modifying your system in any way. for your purpose i'd suggest you look into knoppix or ubuntu.
whoa, that sounded mind-blowing! using a pc that was thought unbootable? without modifying anything whatsoever? from a flimsy cd-rom no less? when that friend's brother had made them test linux for themselves it looked (to their untrained, philistine eyes) more like a cheap chinese bootleg of a real operating system. that junk couldn't even run the most basic .exe files! what on earth was one supposed to do with it? if it was able to help 🍃 recover their pc though it was at least worth giving it another shot. who better to ask than the friend's big brother to burn a live-cd?
hey T, can you help me out? i wanna fix my pc, our teacher said i should use kn... knoppers, or something like that. or
oo-bunn-too
. can you help me burn a cd? ... please?
the IT student, only the gods know what must've gone through his mind in that moment, said nothing, merely raised an eyebrow, but, already sitting at his desk, turned his head to his screen and went on with his business... or so it seemed. a short few moments later, however, he took a disc from the pile of empty cds and popped it into his pc. when, after a while, the disc came out again, he grabbed a marker and labelled it Ubuntu 9.04
back home 🍃 inserted the cd into the pc... and after selecting the option to boot from the cd... whoa, what magic! it actually booted! and how fast! and how amazing everything looked! :O nothing at all like the experience on the friend's linux machine for some reason. this looked totally different. and really beautiful. the sounds, the interface? maybe it was simply the novelty of it, but a lasting impression was already made. playing around in the live environment was a lot of fun, the personal data was quickly saved onto an external hard drive, but... why should the fun end so soon? if only 🍃 could pop in a cd to test more things and programs, but the cd drive was occupied by the live-cd... but... wait a second...
what did it say on the boot screen? install ubuntu? now let's see...
15 years later...
now, tbh i don't even remeber if i attempted fixing xp back then. how magical it seemed to be able to just browse around xp's files within another operating system, booted from a cd. to my eyes it also just looked fantastic. of course i didn't really grasp the intricate differences between windows and linux – everything just looked different, from the file system structure to the gui right down to how you installed programs (not much changed in that regard). of course i still couldn't figure out how to get .exe files to run – even under WINE. for an amateur, a kid no less, the learning curve was simply too steep. plus i didn't grow up in an english-speaking country: actual learning material that wasn't aimed at university students or people working with computers for a living wasn't exactly commonplace, or at the very least not easy to find and certainly not easily digestible.
i ended up ditching ubuntu again not too long afterwards since not being able to play and mod games was just a little too boring, and other life circumstances soon meant i'd have to deal with much worse problems than an unbootable computer.
but i still look back very fondly to that day, and since it's been pretty much 15 years since then i decided to download an old Ubuntu 9.04 iso which i'll spin up in a virtual machine soon, to see how well my memories have aged or if it's more nostalgia than anything else.
i did end up going back to linux a few years ago – and yea, i'll save the rant about windows for another time. what i do find interesting though is seeing that, while some things changed drastically, some other things definitely have not. yesterday i borked my steam deck because i was trying to prepare it for linux from scratch (pretty sure that's against the geneva conventions or something as it must count as torture), and i got the idea to write this blog entry while i ssh'd into the deck from my arch desktop to rescue my files (it's doing its thing, i had to kill some time) before i'll re-image the deck and go back to lfs (this time in a virtual machine lmao) and other linux-related shenanigans (now that i'm at least a liiiiiitle bit smarter than i was 15 years ago and have access to proper documentation it's actually fun to get my hands dirty and learn all the ins and outs).
to finalise setting up virt-manager i will need to log out and log back in, which i don't wanna do while files are moving off the deck (duh). but sometime in the next few days i shall take a look at the old school Ubuntu and see what i can get to work under it. while cleaning out some boxes recently i also found an old cd that cointains super tux version 0.1.1 (whoa, now that's a museum piece) and see what that looked like back in the day too! there is certainly another blog entry coming for that, and yes, it'll contain lots of pictures and maybe even some video footage. memories like that should be preserved C: