Wow, I remember the days of the late 90s early 2000s checking out every distro I could get my hands on. I ordered so many from Cheapbytes and Linux Central. (I feel like there may have been a Linux Mall in there somewhere too). I just couldn't believe that these complete distros were free to install and use! RedHat 6.0, Debian Slink. NetBSD 1.4, Slackware.... Getting these things set up and then installing something like Enlightenment with some gorgeous theme.... only to tear it all down days later and try something else. What an incredible time.
I miss this as well - I had totally forgotten about ordering distro CD's online. I would also get them from the book store - a book about RedHat would include a copy in the back, for example.
Redat 3.0.3 was my first linux distro back in 96. It came on a set of 6 CDs from Walnut Creek. Together with Slackware & something else i dont remember.
Yeah I had that CD set as well. I think there was Debian on there as well, but I believe the installer was broken at that point so it was difficult or impossible to get a booting Debian system.
I have never heard of this! I have always used XFree86 (later forked to Xorg) as far back as I can remember. From what I can find, this was a commercial/closed source server that shipped for $99. There doesn't seem to be much info it.
Actually Metro-X server sounds quite cool for its time. Multi-display support, X-based GUI for configuration (anyone remember xf86config stuff?)...
I actually bought the Red Hat Linux 3.0.3 (and used it and its successors Until Red Hat 7) but the Metro-X didn't support my video card so I was stuck with the XFree86.
Does anyone know if the later Redhat versions (than 3.0.3) offered Metro-X? Probably not in the free, downloadable ISOs but was it bundled in the sold CDs or was this one time thing only?
I remember Metro-X. It supported several video cards Xfree86 didn't support back then so if you wanted to use newer video cards you had to "acquire" a copy of Metro-X. What's weird it wasn't the only proprietary software commonly used back then. Before drivers for Sound Blaster 16 cards were mainlined in the 2.x kernel we had to use Open Sound System which was commercial software made by this company called 4Front that had a free version.
It is weird, in part because iso has directory entries, and so does rar. Iso.gz or iso.xz seems like it would make more sense, eg. a block compressor.
But something like OS install media I would expect to already have compression applied to payload. Eg. Rpm and deb files probably use gzip. That wouldn't compress too well. So maybe just .iso would be fine.
Rar itself seems to be pretty common in certain enthusiast communities where people tend to use windows. For example I still see it when people are passing Android ROMs and unlocking tools around on web forums. And very few other places.
I'm curious because I'm trying to convince people to switch from .rar to .tar.gz at work, wonder if you know the benefits, what does it mean that one is a block compressor?
Generally speaking, there's two large categories of archivers in competition with one another:
1. Efficient random-access storage. If compression is supported, it is done on a per-member database.
2. Efficient all-at-once compression (block/solid compression). This is either handled explicitly by file format (RAR and 7z, for example), or the archive doesn't support compression (tar) and itself is processed through an external compressor.
On the first category, I would argue Zip has clear superiority over most other file formats. It supports all metadata fields for both DOS/Windows and Unix operating systems, and has very wide support amongst everything. Zip does not support the second category of archival formats.
In the second category, 7z (I don't know about RAR, but I suspect it holds true) only supports DOS attributes and modified dates, making it totally insufficient for backing up a lot of kinds of Unix file trees. tar is generally the de facto standard for Unix and naturally supports all metadata. I would argue gzip is long obsolete; zstd is much faster (it can nearly compete with xz too for file size).
tar files don't really support random access for individual members, lacking a central directory, though uncompressed files can be seeked rather rapidly anyway as the tar program just skips over members (each member encodes its length). Compressed tar files make this worse, since the entire archive must be uncompressed in memory just to find anything. This is a large reason that tar is mostly restricted to being used when extracting individual members is not a generally useful operation. If that is a useful operation in your datasets, go for Zip.
Certainly bizarre. Among other things, almost none of the archived distros can read the RAR format.
It's weird, come to think of it, that RAR has existed for a quarter of a century, and yet the format has never been documented or reverse-engineered and no FOSS implementations exist. The only way to make a RAR file is the official program, which is binary-only shareware; there is public source code for extracting RARs but under a license that explicitly forbids using it to reverse-engineer the format.
But I guess the overlap between people who care about all that and people interested in the kind of stuff RAR is used for is next to minimal.
Off the top of my head:
* Some VGM formats (game music) are compressed with rar
* Certain 90s game mods are compressed with rar
* Lots of pirated/cracked games are compressed with rar
The main reason I've been told as to why this is seems to be the extensive error correction, which was a big deal with large game files back in the Dial-Up/ISDN days where a corrupted download was more common than now, and old habits die hard.
That brings back some memories. I'm disappointed they don't seem to have any Yggdrasil archives, as I remember liking that and can't find any of my old disks.
