CHANGING TIMES Today Intel, Oracle and even Microsoft (sort of) now have their own Linux offerings Linux distributions have come a long way since the good old days. In the beginning, of course, there were no distros (actually in the beginning there was no Linux, and no space-time, then there was a big bang… – Ed). You’d start with the kernel, somehow bootstrap a barebones system, fetch some GNU tools, mess with the make files, compile those packages, install them, realise you’d got your Makefile wrong, tidy up the mess. Rinse, lather, repeat. It was great fun.
More often than not you had to get these things on CD or even floppy disk in the post, unless you had access to the internet (or a friend in a computer science…