Re: NEWBIE wants older LINUX for learning the basics

Patches Forever wrote:

Cool name "Patches". Is it French? ;)

I learned MSDOS and Windows by tinkering and asking questions. I am looking for an older version of LINUX that I can install and tinker with as a learning tool.

Why older? You should know that the basic concepts around Linux didn't change much in last 20 years, so even if you use the latest distribution you would know how to operate a 5-year-old one as well.

Maybe there's something comparable to MSDOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1.

Sure: bash and X Windows. Both much more advanced than MS counterparts you mentioned.

Something that has documentation - like MSDOS always came with a manual that explained different options for setting up your system and explained how to use the utility programs.

Just type:

man [command name]

and there you go.

With MSDOS I learned the commands and syntax, then batch file programming, response files for programs like DEBUG and EDLIN, programming with interpreter BASIC, and also about how to configure the system - all from 2 or 3 books.

Ok, you can write bash scripts which are similar to batch files. And for interpreted language I recommend Perl or Python.

Can someone here recommend an older version of LINUX that would be good for this purpose?

Perhaps you could start with Slackware. I recommend you take the version 10.2 or 11.0.

Something I can tinker with and learn like MSDOS and Windows 3.1 and that has good documentation or third party books available. I don't mind if it's complicated as long as there's a good source of documentation available

Great book for starters here:

http://www.slackbook.org/

If you want to read it online, go directly to:

http://www.slackbook.org/html/index.html

- and hopefully it's not too buggy.

No buggy at all. Slack is rock-stable.


--
Milan Babuskov
http://njam.sourceforge.net
http://swoes.blogspot.com
.

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