Today I stumbled upon
this youtube video
which takes a retrocomputing look at a product I was involved in
creating in 1999. It was fascinating looking back at it, and I realized
I’ve never written down how this boxed set of Debian “slink and a half”,
an unofficial Debian release, came to be.

As best I can remember, the CD in that box was Debian 2.1 (“slink”) with
the linux kernel updated from 2.0 to 2.2. Specifically, it used VA Linux
Systems’s patched version of the kernel, which supported their hardware
better, but also 2.2 generally supported a lot of hardware much better than
2.0. There were some other small modifications that got rolled back into
Debian 2.2.

I mostly remember updating the installer to support that kernel, and
building CD images. Probably over the course of a few weeks. This was the
first time I worked on the (old) Debian installer, and the first time I
built a Debian CD. I also edited the O’Rielly book that was
included in the boxed set.

It was wild when pallet loads of these boxed sets showed up. I think they
sold for $19.95 at Fry’s, although VA Linux Systems also gave lots of them
away at conferences.

Watching the video of the installation, I was struck again and again by
pain points, which the video does a good job of highlighting. It was a
guided tour of everything about Debian th