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Interview of Robert Shingledecker, Tiny Core Linux and DSL Developer (2009)

61 points by transpute

by 0xbadcafebee

1 subcomments

What a fun time that was in the aughts for distros. Hardware was rapidly changing and made a lot of new stuff possible. I wonder if there are still emerging hardware platforms to inspire kids today. I had the most fun when I could combine software with hardware, like trying to fit a distro on a floppy, or using the business card CDs to boot a distro into RAM, creating thin terminal clients, routers, firewalls. Feels more real when there's something physical involved.
Also worth noting that the concept Robert discusses of avoiding "system rot" is an early example of immutable infrastructure, a game-changing design used to automate fixing state and entropy failures in modern systems. Had no idea that's where it would lead.

by ghjfrdghibt

2 subcomments

Prior to my knowledge of Firefox profiles and multiaccount containers, I used tiny core to isolate my banking, shopping, general browsing, etc; from both each other and my base OS, in virtualbox. I preferred it to other small distros like slitaz and puppy because it was really bare bones and easy to add to.
Now you'd likely just use docker, or like me profile and containers for compartmentalisation; aka super paranoia.

by egberts1

0 subcomment

by bastloing

0 subcomment

That's back during the evolution of the operating system, I remember getting CDs of DSL with our console switches. What a great time to be building out our massive server rooms! Lots of fun back then!