Yep. I remember at the time I saw a lot of advice saying “you know you might want to seriously consider just installing your distro from scratch with a newer version.” Tracking down all of the dependencies (some of which had to be installed as binaries) was a very manual process.
Edit: Oh and another fun aspect of that time period was that since downloads were so slow on a modem, if you wanted a newer version or to try out another distro, you would go and order a cdrom from a place like Walnut Creek.
Back in the day, I upgraded a Slackware install from kernel 1.3 to 2.0. That was a fucking adventure.
You probably remember the libc5 to glibc swap. Bad times to DIY distros.
Yep. I remember at the time I saw a lot of advice saying “you know you might want to seriously consider just installing your distro from scratch with a newer version.” Tracking down all of the dependencies (some of which had to be installed as binaries) was a very manual process.
Edit: Oh and another fun aspect of that time period was that since downloads were so slow on a modem, if you wanted a newer version or to try out another distro, you would go and order a cdrom from a place like Walnut Creek.