Oh, serendipity! A few things line up together, creating opportunities for rare discoveries. This time it's a thing that probably will require someone to go and edit the Wikipedia page for Ubuntu...
How did we end up here? Well, first, I've been meaning to play with an old Ubuntu for a long time. Second, Atsuko unpacked out our Pentium III desktop last week. Third, Atsuko left me alone for half a day, and the only thing I could bring myself to do was trying out different Linuxes on this Pentium III machine.
Buckle up, I'm about to share many screenshots of old Live CDs, and some of them might surprise you (a little bit?).
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I guess I'll start with the conclusion: Ubuntu Live CD, at least 4.10, is a Knoppix derivative.
"No, that can't be right, Ubuntu is based on Debian!"
And so is Knoppix. And so is Knoppix fork called Morphix that was used as a LiveCD builder for Ubuntu 4.10. I have irrefutable evidence of this, and I am surprised that no one on the Internet seemingly ever mentioned that before.
That is not to say that Ubuntu is not based on Debian - it is. I am not trying to say that it does not come with its own packages and kernel, either. But it is also based on Morphix, at least in LiveCD 4.10.
First, I'll share a few screenshots hinting at the similarities. Then I'll show you the solid proof I'm talking about. And then I'll just share a bunch of screenshots of old Linuxes just for fun!
GRUB and splash screens are not a smoking gun, but consider how similar Ubuntu 4.10 Live and Morphix 0.5 boot experiences are (both circa October 2004).
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I made the discovery of Ubuntu 4.10 being based on Morphix by pure chance. The LiveCD didn't want to boot on my Pentium 3, so I restarted the system in the "expert mode". There I saw words "Morphix live CD". I would've completely ignored that if I didn't just read that Morphix was one of the Knoppix forks from early 00s.
It is a bit difficult to see, but if you check the photo of the CRT, you'd see that there are words "morphix rc" and "warty" on the same screen.
Frankly, I was so surprised that I even thought, for a moment, that this Ubuntu 4.10 Live CD is a fake, a Morphix Live CD with Ubuntu skins and splash screen. But no, it is real Ubuntu Live CD, and you can download it too, right from the Ubuntu's website.
This is pretty damning, but I have even more damning evidence of Ubuntu 4.10 Live being based off Morphix.
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So, if you boot Ubuntu 4.10 and will check out its CD, you will find an interesting file /MorphixCD/morphix/mod.xml. The file is used to build the Morphix OS Live CD - actually Morphix 0.5 - but it uses archive.ubuntu instead of ftp.debian for its main repository. It also uses files from LaMont Jones'es personal repository :)
And then dpkg lists a few packages from Morphix were specifically modified for Ubuntu.
I don't think anyone ever tried to hide this. After all, all this information is pretty much in the open, from dmesg to the filesystem on the LiveCD. But it is interesting to see that it isn't mentioned anywhere, either. Not even by the Morphix's author.
So, here we go: Ubuntu 4.10 LiveCD is a Knoppix+debian derivative.
As far as I can tell, things have changed a lot in 5.04, so maybe this applies only to Ubuntu 4.10.
( screenshots 🧵 cont)
I've been using Ubuntu since version 6.06, and I had the impression that Ubuntu is fairly stable and versatile. I have been very surprised to discover today that Ubuntu 4.10 did not compare to other LiveCD Linuxes all that favourably.
Morphix 0.5 booted on my Pentium 3 machine just fine, and found the internets, and had OpenOffice working (a bit later on that). But Ubuntu required me to run DHCP client manually, and its OpenOffice never fully loaded, even after I played a long match in Solitaire.
( screenshots 🧵 cont)
I guess one really cool thing about Ubuntu is that it comes with Windows goodies on the CD: AbiWord, Audacity, Firefox (!!), GNU IMP, OpenOffice, GhostScript...
But because of this, it doesn't have nearly as many goodies in the system itself.
( screenshots 🧵 cont)
Well, let's check out the experience of the original Morphix and compare it with Ubuntu, then?
I choose Morphix 0.4 instead of Morphix 0.5 so it'd be a bit more fun to see what we could have had, if Ubuntu became a thing a bit earlier, or relied on Morphix a bit more...
This version is a few months older than Ubuntu 4.10, so it has an older Gnome.
Looking at this splash screen, I wonder if THIS was the reason normies got Ubuntu instead of Morphix...
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Morphix 0.4 doesn't even try to pretend it isn't Debian. Debian's start page still works; XChat happily loads and connects us to FreeNode. Imagine this: you boot your 20+ year old computer, and it just connects to the Internet as normal, and the chat apps work as normal, and... uh... it just works.
Except for Google, Google doesn't work anymore, they broke the support for "old" browsers. Lame. Boooooo!
( screenshots 🧵 cont)
So, in this thread I just must say a few words about Knoppix. Back in the days, Knoppix was a ground-breaking Linux Live CD that spawned many other Linux Live CDs. It ended up being so influential that it is almost an expectation today for a Linux distribution to have a Live CD/DVD.
Of course, nothing ever stopped people from building a Linux system capable of using a CD disk as its root file system. In fact, one of the early Linux systems, Yggdrasil, did exactly that for the installer CD. So, how Knoppix was different from Yggdrasil or DemoLinux?
The secret sauce was in a special kernel module implementing CD-ROM friendly compressed block device. Without it, the Live CD experience was subpar, and the amount of software that was shipped on the LiveCD was minuscule. Compare 1999's DemoLinux 1.1 shipping Mandrake 6 with basically just Netscape and Gimp, and Knoppix 3.2 that comes with hundreds of tools, two full office suites, and even WINE - all on one CD.
( screenshots 🧵 cont)
Nina Kalinina