WinLinux - The 2000s-era Linux Distro Designed for Windows Users! (Installation & Demo)

[@d2factotum]

Frankly, even with the issues you had with the hard drive being misdirected, this looks a heck of a lot simpler than the first Linux install I remember doing around 1995. Back then you had to recompile the kernel if you wanted support for undetected hardware!

[@elgato7557]

Can you imagine compiling the modern Linux kernel on a 90's PC 🤣 you would have great grandkids before it's complete

[@AlexRamosDrTaz]

Oh gawd... I recall having to do that after spending four days downloading enough of Slackware on a 56k modem at home early in 1998 LOL! Never again! (No, but seriously...I would if I needed to but haven't compiled a kernel since I began using Debian in the early 2000s... Ubuntu and then Ubuntu Studio later.)

[@LeonTichy]

Sounds like modern day 3D printing community, pretty cool

[@cnr_0778]

@@elgato7557 it's not too bad. Linux 0.9 or something takes roughly 30 minutes to compile on a 386.

[@antikz3731]

I hate the word kernel now. Lol it used to mean a delicious popcorn brand. Now it means, oh hey! Here's 420 updates because the new kernel MUST BE INSTALLED!!! OR DIE!!! hahahaha

[@DavisMakesGames]

Why didn't they just call it Winux, would've been way better...

[@aprofondir]

Microsoft would've been mad

[@MondySpartan]

@@aprofondir It’s what they were with Lindows. They ordered them to change their distro name to Linspire.

[@Jack-pc9sp]

​@@MondySpartan lmao Microsoft didn't win shit and actually paid money out in a settlement to Lindows

[@evilumski2]

I dont really think people where pc smart back then, today winux would make Perfect sense imo :P

[@thealien_ali3382]

I like this hairy guy

[@mattchtx]

I remember using this for a while as a teenager. I was always screwing up my computer trying new OS’s. The great thing about this was that it didn’t mess with the mbr or Windows. If I messed it up I could just uninstall and reinstall WinLinux instead of formatting the drive and reinstalling everything. It wasn’t practical as a full time OS, but it was useful to me because it helped me learn. I remember spending forever trying to get it to play nice with my sound card though.

[@jordanking6939]

This video puts an emphasis on Windows Refund day (back in 1999). I really don't think Linux distros got more user friendly until the early 2010's with more community support.

[@ArchLars]

My opinion is the reason that is is because Windows got kind of good after 98 with Win2000, WinXP and Win7. But I think Windows 8 will be seen as the final turn for many for Windows. Since then Windows have become more & more stale and MS is complacent about their OS market share.

[@MondySpartan]

2000s: Windows-like Linux distro 2020s: Windows Subsystem for Linux. Full circle?

[@JeffreyPiatt]

The company had a change in management. There was always a Unix subsystem for Windows

[@l4nzo0]

MONDYSP

[@vwestlife]

I've always been irked by that name, because it's actually a Linux subsystem for Windows, not the other way around. But IBM pulled that trick first, with "OS/2 for Windows" which was actually Windows for OS/2.

[@RodrigoBadin]

@@vwestlife You are calling about Microsoft. The company who put the 32bit DLLs on SysWOW64 and the 64bit DLLs on System32 lol

[@wileysneak]

@@vwestlife its easier to swallow if you consider the name "Windows Subsystem" to be just what they call an OS running virtulized on Windows - so Windows Subsystem for Linux/Android is just Windows Subsystem [which runs] Linux & Windows Subsystem [which runs] Android

[@cellularmitosis2]

OMG! I had thought the download for this was lost forever! This was the first district I ever used. Thanks for putting together this video!

[@PCWindowstechguy]

I really didn't know that there were linux distros and desktops in the late 90s/early 2000s which were specifically made for windows users coming over to linux, except the kde desktop ,while nowadays its pretty common to see these types of distros. It's just really intresting to see how linux has evolved over the years. Keep up with the great content Michael MJD!

[@ShayneJohnson]

This was my very first exposure with Linux. I spent countless hours trying to get this stupid thing to work on the family computer, and I had no idea at the time that this was the seed of what would become a career in Linux and HPC systems. So much nostalgia. Thanks for covering this.

[@SkynetCyb]

Did you end up making it work?

[@MegaManNeo]

By the way, Michael, BeOS 5 Personal had an installer just like WinLinux2000, allowing you to boot into it from Windows or floppy diskette too. It's a fun experience if you haven't done so already.

[@negirno]

Not only that, but that Personal Edition could be converted to a full-fledged dual boot by allocating empty space on your drive with a partition manager, booting into BeOS with the floppy, create a new BeFS partition, then copy/clone the whole system there and enable the boot manager. After that, you can boot into that and not needing the floppy and the image on the Windows partition. I actually did this back in 2000.

[@kbhasi]

Yep! But I should point out the last time I checked, both BeOS downloads on WinWorld were actually of modified versions that had been mislabeled. If Michael is reading this, I want to point out that I do have the install file!

[@KittyFae-]

For sure, I used BeOS instead of Windows for a while because my winmodem was way faster in Be than Win.

[@MegaManNeo]

@@negirno Oh wow. I didn't know that until I just read your comment 👀

[@negirno]

@@KittyFae- I've alap tried to go to the Internet on BeOS, my internal modem connected, but there weren't any flow of bits sadly, so I just downloaded stuff on Windows.

[@i1KiCK1BUTT]

As an active kde user this makes amazed at how passionate some of the Linux community is at keeping projects running near indefinitely.

[@therealDanyt]

Your videos are for people from 90s who used time travel to come here. Really appreciate your content man 😆

[@AaronOfMpls]

Hey, some of us time-traveled from earlier eras than that ... at the usual 1 second per second 🙂

[@Kippykip]

This actually looks pretty cool, a shame about the video drivers though

[@arnox4554]

@Pith Helmet The Nvidia drivers site reports that there is indeed a valid driver for it for Linux 32-bit though. Surprisingly up to date too, considering. They kept up driver development for it all the way to 2013.

[@Ayuraos]

Should of been called Winux 2000

[@thomasbohl6924]

1. Around that time there was a QNX version (yes, the OS that got later bought by Blackberry) that too could be installed and started via Windows 98. 2. The German fli4l Linux distribution (which was a specialised router/networking distribution) had a Windows-Setup where you would configure the system and it would create a self-contained bootable floppy disk.

[@CathrineMacNiel]

QNX was so cool. I loved the looks and the fact that it was a realtime OS.

[@drelius]

@@CathrineMacNiel one of the best GUIs

[@CathrineMacNiel]

@@drelius it was damn beautiful and snappy as well.

[@glennbowlsby7522]

I loved WinLinuix. Is was the first distro I ran that actually supported all my drivers perfectly. I had to wait for LInux Mint for me to have a flawless linux install

[@flp322]

Speaking of Wubi, I’d be pretty interested in a video about that. I briefly used Ubuntu circa 2006, don’t think I ended up going through Wubi but even at the time it was a pretty intriguing concept to me.

[@AlexRamosDrTaz]

I tried wubi when I first installed Ubuntu in 2008, but after a few tries, simply figured out how to install Ubuntu without it, creating the typical partitions of /, /home and the swap partition.

[@IkarusKommt]

Wubi just creates a file with the Linux filesystem on a Windows partition and sets up Grub to mount it and boot from it.

[@sadmac356]

I actually used it back in like 2012-2013 ish, and well…it was good for what I was doing at the time

[@UltralifeTech]

A couple observations as a novice Linux user: 1. During setup it appears to be copying the /dev/ files. Those aren’t actual files, but created by the kernel, represented as a file. 2. In modern Linux you never refer to drives by /dev/sda, there’s a change the lettering may change. You’d refer to the uuid of the device.

[@etopowertwon]

TBF back then, in kernel 2.2, /dev/ was the usual directory with actual files of special types (block device or character device) created with mknod utlity. It was prepopulated with hda1, hda2, hdb1, hdb2.... sda.... etc. There were not uuid links because, well, nobody created them. devfs was added later, but it was not that popuar and was soon replaced with udev which is still used today.

[@lirodon]

Obligatory "always something goes wrong in MJD videos" the fact that it put the Linux filesystem right out on the disk rather than use a loopback was interesting

[@judgejrc]

I used this distribution for a long time on my old 486 with Windows 98, it worked perfectly... it was my first experience with Linux since I didn't have another computer... this distribution was based on Slackware...

[@DaVince21]

Oh, man. Xmms was basically the Winamp of Linux. It even supported the skins! It was later superseded by Audacious which also kept the skins until their 2.0 version.

[@MegaManNeo]

You can still XMMS off repos 'til this day though. I am rather minimalistic these days, all my music sits on my NAS and I use either Cantata (which uses mpd as its backend), moc or Sayonara to listen to it. Back then, Amarok1.4 was my cup of tea.

[@mikeonthecomputer]

Audacious never removed Winamp skins support.

[@DaVince21]

@@mikeonthecomputer Oh that's great, I didn't know that! Honestly I also like their new interface with standard elements so I never bothered to look.

[@DaVince21]

@@atomyiik Who, some of the Audacious devs or the owners of the Winamp trademark?

[@whtiequillBj]

Yes! There is something worse the open, free and community driven software of the 90s. That is the terrible driver support and virtually non-existent hardware support that Linux had in the 90s.

[@ChristopherGray00]

It wasn't because linux was open, it was because desktop linux was in its absolute infancy at the time, i would even consider pre 2002 as "beta stage" for the grand majority of distros.

[@slightlyevolved]

​@@ChristopherGray00I would argue that Linux on the Desktop didn't *REALLY* become a thing until Ubuntu launched. Say what you will about it, but it did a *lot* to popularize Linux in the mass' mind. For the Gnerds among us, I suppose we did have RedHat, Suse, and, Gentoo/Arch. Really, it seems like desktop Linux grew up with the release of GNOME 2. The last bastion of true Linux suckedness was WiFi and GPU drivers....

[@ChristopherGray00]

@@slightlyevolved nah i gotta generally agree on that, ubuntu was when, at least to me definitely seemed like it genuinely started as a desktop system. but man desktop linux has evolved so, so far since then, it is actually incredible.

[@KennyZOfficial]

​@@slightlyevolvedi use Void Linux it's a distro for everything, it's amazing but it's harder to install and somethings for new users, i never had the chance to have a nice resolution in windows, now in linux i made a script myself in the init to get 1920x1080 as an option in my display configuration and that's really amazing you could even make another resolution like 3800x2160 that would be 4k, it's amazing to be honest the way you can modify the OS with your hands

[@bronwaith]

@@slightlyevolved oh and audio drives ;~;

[@segaboy9894]

I remember graphics issues like these in and around the year 2000 with XFree86. Nice trip down memory lane.

[@FubarMike]

Now lets see how this runs alongside windows 10 or 11. But I really have to say if this was someone's first encounter with linux and was marketed as easy. They would have probably ran for the hills and never looked back.

[@FubarMike]

@@simonsays2159 maybe the 2002 or 2003 versions. Presumably they would be made with xp in mind and maybe running win10 with legacy bios would work.

[@craigmurray4746]

@@FubarMike I think part of the process as well is that you need to be using a FAT32 system drive, doubt whatever kernel version in those early years could boot off an NTFS partition as used by XP

[@MegaManNeo]

The way that distro performs speaks for early 2000's Linux given your hardware isn't compatible. I had no issues with Knoppix 3.7 back in late 2003 to run on my MMX200 with 48M RAM, maybe you want to look into that for fun? Could upload the ISO I did from my CD too. That WinLinux installer really gives me Wubi vibes too, used Wubi to install Ubuntu 8.04 to my Vista machine which ran great and oddly enough was also the only way up until that point to install any other operating system on that machine. Fun times indeed.

[@travelthetropics6190]

Knoppix was great back then, I made a remastered livecd with my modem drivers etc

[@MegaManNeo]

@@travelthetropics6190 It was so much fun to experience such a thing in the first place for the first time simply by putting a CD in the drive and rebooting the PC! Sure it can be done just like that nowadays but it's just not the same anymore. Not crying for nostalgia here necessary, just pointing out that the way we interact and more especially how I use to use Linux changed ever since then. Given just with many programs Knoppix shipped and what has been possible, this was a blast for me and I loved doing stuff on my Windows 98 or later XP installation and doing other things in Knoppix just because it was a thing.

[@JordanViknar]

1:59 Quick Note : Wubi is still maintained under the name WubiUEFI.

[@mexikanecfilda]

imagine if the entire market would be led by open source software. microsoft is genuinely holding tech progress back

[@MrGamelover23]

Nobody pays for open source software, so it would never lead the market.

[@mexikanecfilda]

@@MrGamelover23 a big part of servers run on linux, even microsoft's servers like azure, amazon's servers run on linux aswell. So it clearly can lead the market. old comment by the way

[@MrGamelover23]

@@mexikanecfilda That's because there was actually money in servers. There's no money in the Linux desktop. So the only company actually pouring any real effort into making it usable for normal people is Valve. The market can't be led by something that's almost entirely built on volunteer efforts. That's why desktop Linux will never take over Windows.

[@mexikanecfilda]

@@MrGamelover23 fair point i guess

[@MrGamelover23]

@@mexikanecfilda It really is a darn shame. Linux only ever excelled where there was actual money to be made from pedaling it. People using UNIX workstations could have all the software they needed on computers that cost half the price if they switched to Red Hat. Servers charge a monthly or yearly subscription and in turn, they get a solid product for their use case and everyone wins. With desktop users, nobody's paying for a Linux distro, and the software they need doesn't work on it, so there's no money to made from it. The only exception is Valve. They're the only major company selling a desktop distro for regular users. And in turn, they end up pouring money and time into making Linux better for everyone. If multiple companies had been doing this from the beginning, then desktop Linux would be where server Linux is now.

[@nickg7286]

Oh man this took me back. WinLinux 2000 was my first introduction to Linux back when my time on the computer and what I was allowed to do on it were both restricted.. This was the safest way to not get in trouble and try/learn something new.. There was some confusion about Linux being "just like windows" as I was a first time user so when introduced to more traditional distros later there was still a bit of a learning curve but it definitely was a head start over my peers who had only ever used windows or pre-osx and even early osx mac.. PS: If I recall - XMMS is like a clone of Nullsoft's WinAmp if that helps :)

[@MetalTrabant]

If that would've been my first experience with Linux, I'd probably run straight back to good old safe haven Windows... that kernel panic and the driver issue could really scare away beginners. But luckily Wubi was around to experiment with when I started to get interested in Linux, and it was very much a help, as I haven't had much experience with partitioning back then, and was afraid of data loss, so it was an ideal solution for me. That was in 2008, and I've been mostly converted to Linux by now, using Windows only for gaming and some specific softwares. I think someone should resurrect Wubi to 'lure' new users into the Linux world by a safe and easy dual boot installation.

[@Windows_98]

i feel like michael is gonna make his amazing "nft" career everytime he installs linux into a machine

[@StonyBlazestation]

This video perfectly illustrates why nearly every beginner or intermediate computer user who had the wherewithal to even try Linux quickly abandoned it and returned to Windows.

[@CathrineMacNiel]

good color choices in the artwork.

[@ThrillaDX]

Yo when I DMed yout about this I didn't expect to see a video so soon. Awesome man. Thanks for making a video on it.

[@varianbohling251]

I remember not knowing what I was doing like many and stumbling upon WinLinux 2000. It worked, but that loop back filesystem magic they did was unfortunately wicked slow. The fun part was downloading it at 28.8. The good ole days.

[@blainepalmerza]

Awesome video, Michael!

[@retrogamepuppy1445]

I remember buying a disk with this off ebay in the early 2000's. It was a pc repair disk, but just a bootable linux disk. I literally paid for a free distro

[@bandlsd]

This is such a good representation of the general desktop Linux experience back then

[@leorelic]

while i can see why Windows is dominating the market share , and while i know Linux was hard to install and work with back then ... i am 100% happy with my Switch to Linux so i'm glad to see more videos about like this , keep up the good vids Micheal

[@arnox4554]

Windows dominated (past tense) the marketshare because from Windows 2000 and up, they were genuinely great operating systems. There wasn't really a need to switch... Until Windows 10 and 11.

[@negirno]

@@arnox4554 What you say is kind of funny, because while Windows 2000 was beloved by power users, XP was hated because of the phone-in activation and Fisher-Price UI among other things. Windows 95 was also hated back then when it was new because a lot of geek and demoscene stuff didn't work on it.

[@arnox4554]

@@negirno "XP was hated because of the phone-in activation" This is kind of understandable. In Microsoft's defense though, it was ABSURDLY easy to pirate Windows back before XP, and Windows development doesn't come free. It cost a shit-ton of money and a lot of time and experience to develop. And also importantly, you could activate Windows entirely offline just with a phone call as you've already said (even if it was admittedly kind of a pain in the ass for everyone involved), and if I recall correctly, as long as you had a valid key of SOME kind, you could keep it activated indefinitely offline as well. "and Fisher-Price UI" This complaint I don't get because XP made it super easy to switch it back to the original Windows 2000 theme and even offered the classic Windows 98 start menu style.

[@pianokeyjoe]

I knew there was something that kept me from ever trying this OS distro out. That darn kernel panic! That and the fact that at that time my Trident GUI9550TV 4MB card was not supported. Later in life I could afford a used ATI Rage Pro 8MB and 4MB card and Linux started working for me. But sadly, not WinLinux2000. I have found WinLinux2001 and 2003 which has 2 CDs. For your Limitation of 16 Colors, you would have been better off with a Window manager like FVWM or MWM which are very basic but where popular UNIX windowing environments that worked very well with grayscale and low color and low resolution displays. I noticed that you did not test the sound? I assume like the display, this version did not detect your sound card or Ethernet? What display card and sound card and ethernet is in your $5 Win98 PC anyway?

[@FoxyAnimater]

I believe that he has gone over that all in older videos on his KZbin channel, I personally have seen a lot of the story of this machine. Good luck trying to find it

[@pianokeyjoe]

@@FoxyAnimater lol, thanks. Possibly one of his first videos if it is still in his list.

[@craigmurray4746]

There's a GeForce FX 5200 in this PC currently, you can see the vBIOS screen at one point in the vid. Sound is onboard I think

[@pianokeyjoe]

@@craigmurray4746 Thankyou so much for answering! Ok, I figured because the versions of Linux BEFORE 2002(Windows XP era)just would not work right graphically with those newer cards and with the cheap onboard either. I found out the versions of Linux from 1999 to 2001 worked great with Soundblaster 16/32 and ATI rage pro cards. Now for onboard graphics, the INTEL 810 and 815 chipset graphics worked with the Linux from late 2000-2001. I have to say it was a very nit picky time for Xfree86! I remember when you could use Framebuffer or simple VGA16 or SVGA driver to get X to work but with my recent experiences trying to use my OLD Linux distros from that era on some of my P3 and P2 machines with different VGA cards, that choosing those generic drivers does NOT work. The Nvidia FX5200 and ATI Rage 128 cards seem to be P3 era cards from DELL and HP that came in closer to the time XP pro came out and indeed Xfree86 3.x just was not going to work with them. Now when Xfree86 4.x came out and kernel 2.4 came out? Things in the Linux world were finally getting serious enough to be able to switch from Windows to LINUX! Finally! More hardware compatibility..

[@mini_bomba]

Oh, that old KDE profile icon for root is such a cool one, it fits nicely with the meaning of the root account.

[@notthatntg]

Unlike "root@win98:~#".

[@AaronOfMpls]

Interesting to see a distro for Windows users from back then. I switched to Manjaro Linux myself from Win7 in part because the UI was already pretty Windows-like, and didn't take much fiddling to get it laid out how I want it. (Though I chose the XFCE version instead of KDE.) Neat idea too, to have it launch from a DOS .exe file so you don't have to repartition or anything. Especially since a bootable USB stick wasn't really an option yet. Though I think I'm with that reviewer; I might've given up too if I couldn't Google up a solution to that kernel panic. 😕 In any case, nicely done 😎 -- and shame about that (lack of) video driver. Linux driver support sure has come a _long_ way since the 90s!

[@boriszakharin3189]

The DOS exe and UMSDOS filesystem was very common for Linux distros back then if you didn't want to partition your HD and didn't mind the super-slow performance.

[@robinpage2730]

Given how modular Linux is, I wonder why they've never implemented a compatibility layer so it can run we Windows apps natively out of the box. As in, why can't WINE be turned into a kernel module?

[@vascomanteigas9433]

Security. It is a long dogma to avoid kernel modules as possible since it is a security pitfall. Wine only supports the User Mode of Windows environment and mimics the Windows NT implementation. The kernel mode of Windows NT exists on Wine only as a bridge for Linux native services, and except some specific cases no Windows drivers will run on Wine. The rare exceptions are the serial/parallel legacy or over USB devices which is fairy emulated by Wineserver (the User/kernel mode bridge), and virtual device drivers either by proxy (which enables NVIDIA CUDA for examples) or wraps Over native Linux drivers (like the BattleEye for Wine), which need to be made.

[@mrgrumpy888]

I absolutely love the KDE version 1 aesthetic. Wasn't there supposed to be an official recreation of KDE 1 at some point or am I imagining it?

[@rubidium1948]

It’s possible but I don’t see any reason they’d recreate it officially considering how customizable it is for the end-user other than to act as a little “Thanks for these many years of support!” from the devs.

[@kbhasi]

Yes, there was OTDE, but that project was abandoned or discontinued if I recall correctly. The closest things I could think of to that would be to mod Plasma 5.x or Trinity R14.x to look like KDE 1.1.

[@gymnasiast90]

I think they re-released v1 a few years ago to celebrate its 20th(?) anniversary. (With code modifications to make it compile on modern systems.)

[@BringMayFlowers]

Yes, it did get one. There's also one for KDE 2.

[@Vlad-1986]

Bit drunk to elaborate much, but I've using Linux since the early 2000s. Never used this, but remember that the idea of booting from a FAT partition ain't new: there where those distros who booted from DOS, and even one from a boot floppy (you could install it, and use a second floppy for Xfree86/additional stuff. Included games like lode runner too). I used that one and was pretty good on a w95 Pentium 166 laptop.

[@NoahClevinger]

I love your videos, Michael! Thanks for always making outstanding and engaging content.

[@bradleybrand0]

I'm guessing it would be too difficult to get a working graphics driver on WinLinux, right? It would be cool to get the graphics working correctly.

[@etopowertwon]

You need something like S3 card, which were supported by XF86 in 1999. Back then these cards were absolute beasts. With a special DOS player and S3 card I could watch divx movie on pentium 100, which lagged in every windows player.

[@idadru]

I feel like I vaguely remember this distro, however after trying to install Slackware sometime around '99 on a Packard Bell with nothing but a friend and a stack of how tos printed out I had had my fill of Linux for a few more years still at that point. lol

[@gutter_onion7855]

XMMS brings back memories. Also, TOTALLY not surprised the nvidia card isn't working properly.

[@negirno]

I've managed to install this back then and it's a little comforting that I wasn't the only one who gave up because of that kernel panic...

[@rickybhattacharya6]

WinLinux 2000, a precursor to Zorin OS. I have been working on windows for a long time. In order to operate Linux OS with Windows compatibility, Zorin OS is Ideal. I'm a user of Both Windows and Zorin OS.

[@TorontoPopulistConservative]

Would have loved to see this in full colour. It kinda blows my mind to see how much remains in Linux to this very day, namely the directory structure, "decompressing the kernel" message in some distros, and programs like GIMP and KDE.

[@mrkulinarisch7090]

Found you randomly on KZbin! Love your videos. Greetings from Germany

[@phr3dmcc0y]

is there *NO* linux video driver that can be installed? Even something from another KDE revision? I'd love to see this linux setup fully kitted out and playing the best it can. It'd be fun to see all the included features working and looking and sounding like they were supposed to.

[@robmcleod2876]

Would rely on the right kernel module being available and X knowing what to do with it. I don't miss this era of Linux at all!

[@Vlad-1986]

nah, it is not that way. The Linux kernel is the one handling the video, and all acceleration, colours, etc to KDE or whatever program needs it. If the Kernel is not detecting the drivers (or they are not compiled on it), there is nothing KDE or any other Desktop environment can do, but run into "basic VGA mode" and cross the fingers the video card supports those standards. I wonder if that can be done nowadays...

[@craigmurray4746]

Since this is a Geforce FX 5200, doubt you'd have much luck trying to get it running on such an old Linux kernel. The FX cards came out about what, 5-6 years after this distro?

[@Vlad-1986]

@@craigmurray4746 I wonder if that could at least support SVGA tho

[@craigmurray4746]

@@Vlad-1986 The card itself supports it of course, but how you would configure this prehistoric version of the X server to do that is far, far beyond me. All I know is that those were the early days and that things like a paid product called Accelerated X was available to support cards the X server didn't at the time

[@MaskedGEEK]

20:21 - that screensaver preview looks great. Jackson Pollock would be proud.

[@sl21ls]

the year 2000 is going to be the year of the linux desktop

[@robjeanbras1130]

Back in the day I used to use GNU-UNIX for windows. Not sure if it still exists. It ran Unix commands really fast on Windows. We used to use it to compare files on two servers to make sure they were in sync. This was a task Windows or DOS would take hours but Unix could do in minutes.

[@boneske]

Since we both have pretty much the same Pentium 3 Gateway(mine is the Pentium 3 1Ghz version) with the 810 chipset, I'm assuming you still have one of the newer graphic cards installed that was made after 1999. You could try to enable your onboard graphics card and use the generic SVGA drivers to get higher colors and screen resolutions. WinLinux 2000 detected my RIVA TNT 2 but wouldn't load into X, I switched to the generic SVGA drivers and it loaded the desktop no problems. The onboard graphics was going to be my fallback option if I couldn't get running on the dedicated graphics card. All you need to do now is install BeOS R5 PE and you can have 3 OSes running on 1 FAT32 partition.

[@loopyoof]

16:34 the micheal mhd nft sequel we all wanted

[@shittel]

15:16 IMHO, Netscape 6 killed Netscape. It was an unusable and sluggish mess making me eventually switch to Opera :)

[@mattig89ch]

nifty, as a daily linux driver, I had no idea this was a thing back in the days of win 98

[@WellBeSerious12]

That CRUNCHY/sychedelic background (first one) looks awesome. But not anything else with that low-color video mode.

[@simonpetrus1981]

Thanks👍🏻.

[@JavCaRRTech]

I love this videos I haven't seen it yet but I know I'll like it

[@livefreeprintguns]

XMMS was basically a WinAmp clone that used to be called x11amp.

[@techtriggr]

This was revolutionary back then...

[@ВиталийБойко-з5й]

Probably, this is the thing that gave birth to Wubi installer for Ubuntu. Thus, it's the gimmick from which I have begun learning Linux at all. Nice work!

[@alles_klar]

Always reassuring to see a series of typos on your new OS's installation screens

[@charleshines2142]

Back then many people were still on a dialup connection and you can imagine downloading an ISO would seem to take eternity!

[@le9038]

If only we had something like this today...

[@Fender178]

WinLinux reminds me of a Native virtual Machine in a sense that it runs right inside of Windows. I would bet that WinLinux2000 runs either version 1.1 or version 2 of K-Desktop environment depending when WinLinux2000 was released to the public. I wonder if there is away to load drivers to get stuff to work.

[@Kernel32x86]

Ancient linux distros like these are really fascinating. It would be interesting if you could try Mandrake Linux as well

[@robmcleod2876]

I used mandrake for a while at its peak. Even bought an external dialup modem to use instead of my internal winmodem. Things are so much better in Linux these days

[@SomeBlokeOrWhatever]

*Aw man* Mandrake Linux was the first Linux I used on my father's computer. Fun stuff.

[@rodhester2166]

good times.. I remember when that came out.. time to begin the weekend.

[@livefreeprintguns]

I appreciate the nostalgia factor, but I remember those days very well (I started on Slackware in 1996, been using Arch Linux since 2004) and all I can recall is how cringey those "Windows-like" distros were lol.

[@maxwasson2000]

You should check out Q4OS Trinity, It's a modern spiritual successor to WinLinux 2000

[@rawmilk905]

Yes. It has a very Windows 2000/9x feel.

[@Ametisti]

XMMS rings a bell, there's a chance I used that as some point, though I recall more using Banshee and... something else similar to Banshee. Not been using Linux much since I got a new laptop though.

[@mdavid1955]

Haven't seen this before. Linux sure has improved since then!

[@davidknapp928]

@michaelmjd FYI, in case nobody else has mentioned it, the numbers after the kernel panics are time stamps (3.01 seconds, 8.02 seconds, etc.) from startup; they have no other meaning other than giving you an idea of where to look in the logs for information. Yeah I know this is super late, but whatever.

[@HaveYouTriedGuillotines]

I had a friend that called netscape "nutscrape." ...I miss the 90s and 2000s. Ah, better times.

[@hibiscvs]

XMMS, man that's way back, it's called audacious now, but i did not expect to see xmms on an mjd video

[@IPlayGames3]

2005 will be the year of the linux desktop!

[@CAR912b]

This reminds me a lot of ZipSlack. It basically could be extracted to a folder on a Windows 98 PC and would boot similarly by dropping into DOS mode to get exclusive access and start the OS.

[@markharrisllb]

I tried SuSe Linux in the 90s and hated it, everything was horrendously difficult even if you managed to to get it working. Now my main operating system is Manjaro and I love it. I still have my iMac and Windows and a Windows/Mint dual boot for when I go away.

[@safi164]

I used to run it back in the day I still have a CD of this.

[@Everette997]

An mjd tech tip approved 👍👍👍👍👍

[@debugempty]

The backgrounds are interesting. I know them from when I was doing research on some odd backgrounds I found on a modded Xbox Original menu that had them in the files.

[@debugempty]

They are meant to be like looping textures. I always wanted to use them for a game cause they seem interesting

[@Mercenary1996]

Classic Michael mjd video always getting a kernel panic while using MS-DOS mode on some unorthodox Windows PC

[@arnoldsmith5754]

i installed win linux one time its a fun video brings back memories

[@ferrisr]

How did this compare to Lindows, before they got the smackdown? Maybe you can do a video on that at some point as well.

[@ogami1972]

i first found linux in 2001-ish, using knopix to fix a borked Win98 system. This is bringing back all kinds of trauma.

[@lucitribal]

"The Gimp" - There's no way the name wasn't intentional

[@wavvy01]

Actually 95 didn’t have the gradient (by default), only 98+

[@LuigiMario_1real]

anothor top quality mjd video

[@xyla4874]

Lets go a new mjd vid

[@ikannunaplays]

11:00 A PC built at that time wouldn't have had the DVD drive as the primary master, and that's where the issues started. A novice computer user wouldn't have built their PC so this is an issue you wouldn't have ran into as those who had DVD-ROM drives had them installed afterwards as they were upgrade options and not standard and the HDD would have been primary master from start

[@Springboi8389]

WinLinux 2000 sounds a lot like Windows Subsystem for Linux in terms of the fact that it piggybacks off of Windows in order to boot up and be usable. That's at least what I've drawn a parallel to.

[@zzcolby27]

The goal of this reminds me of the infamous Lindows/Linspire failure. Will that ever be covered here?

[@drako_claw]

Whats funny is while you talk about this, newer ISOs of pretty much any Linux Distro that offers KDE is about as easy to install. Kubuntu for instance even does auto-partition, just like Ubuntu (and several other distros) -- so novice users can actually install it fairly easily. The main difference is that you boot from a USB drive or DVD image to start the install. They don't usually "install" from within windows anymore, but they are just as easy.

[@singletona082]

Dear god I remember this and..... it was the era before package managers. When /EVERYTHING/ had to be source compiled. Dear God. I never want to go back to that shit.

[@compmanio36]

Pretty sure I remember Synaptic in Red Hat around this time. But pretty much everything else was compiling from source, yes.

[@singletona082]

@@compmanio36 I could be misremembering but at that point there was the .rpm system for existing packages, but like.... no repositories t ograb from. So if you were lucky you got the .rpm for whatever you wanted on hand but if not? oops well that's bullshit to find but here is the tarball to compile from.

[@JaredDoyle76]

Redhat had RPM beginning in 1997.

[@singletona082]

@@JaredDoyle76 OK ammended statment: No repositories.

[@jec_ecart]

There was also something called lindows. Then renamed to linspire

[@初生之鸟]

There is a Chinese Linux distro back then named Xteam Lindows (not to be confused with Linspire/LindowsOS) with this kind of Windows installer.

[@kbhasi]

The "hdc1" thing reminds me of an Advantech PCM-5864L industrial SBC that I recently got, which does of course have a CF card slot, that turned out to mount to the IDE secondary master, so it shows up as 'hdc' when I managed to get Debian 3.0 running on it, though it certainly helped that the VM I created the root FS on mounted the CF card as the IDE secondary master, with both CD-ROM drives being mounted as primary drives. Wow, and I find it amazing that they were able to modify KDE 1.1 to make it feel more like Windows, long before Plasma 5 would have a Windows-like layout! (13:29) The old KDE user icons persisted all the way into KDE 3.5, but were removed in Plasma 4 if I recall correctly. As such, you can still get those user icons in Trinity, though not by default! (14:00) You had to go into Control Centre or Info Centre (depending on the version) to see the KDE/Plasma version! (19:02) A lot of the KDE 1.x and 2.x backgrounds were intended to be tiled! I'm surprised you didn't notice that!

[@jmm1233]

nice that the linux subsystem is now freeware for all windows systems now