Early kernel development

Are you a recent Linux convert who’s had to engage in combat with rogue configuration files, misbehaving drivers or other baffling failures? Then spare a thought for those early adopters whose bug reports and invective utterances blazed the trail for contemporary desktop Linux. Up until comparatively recently, it was entirely possible to destroy your monitor by feeding X invalid timing information. Ever had problems with Grub? Try fighting it out with an early version of Lilo.

In the early days, even getting a mouse to work was non-trivial, requiring the user to do all kinds of manual calibration. Red Hat released a tool called Xconfigurator that provided a text-mode, menu-driven interface for setting up the X server. It was considered a godsend, even though all it did was generate an XF86Config file which otherwise you’d have to write yourself.

So while in 2000 users whined about Windows Me being slow and disabling real-mode DOS, your average Linux user would jump for joy if their installation process completed. Even if you got to that stage, it would be foolishly optimistic to suppose the OS would boot successfully. Hardware detection was virtually nonexistent, and of the few drivers that had been written for Linux, most weren’t production quality. Yet somehow, the pioneers persisted – many were