A pre-pandemic blast to the past, brought to me by some linux DVDs

Working on that old little junk tower I had dug up. Haven't cleaned it out proper yet, but that's soon to come. I did replace the clock battery though, as that had gone bad.

I ended up deciding to remove Windows 8 from this machine. Apparently upgrading it to 8.1 is a bit of a mild pain these days, and Windows 8.1 is only getting a year of extended support anyway.

I tried to install some systems, like Lubuntu, despite my previous experience. This time with a USB boot drive.

Well as it turns out, this machine does not support USB booting. I tried to load up my Void Linux CD to see if the boot menu would let me boot from it that way, but no luck, and I didn't wanna put in the effort to burn a whole new DVD. Then I had a thought.

I had burned a few Linux DVDs a few years back when I first used this as a daily machine. I went into my closet, dug through it a bit and dug up a spindle of DVDs, separated in sets of different colours.

An orange disc Labeled "Ubuntu 20.04 64 Bit",

a green disc labeled "Manjaro 20.0.3, KDE Plasma 64 Bit",

and a blue disc labeled "Lubuntu 18.04 64 Bit"

I brought the spindle down to the machine, took out that old blue disc and plopped it in, thinking "Oh, this is a little old, but oh well, I can just update it. It's what, two years out of date max?"

What this taught me is that my time perception has finally evaporated to nothing, and what I believed to be two years ago was actually four to five years ago.

These discs were burned around summer of 2018. It's only been four years, but it still feels like ages ago, almost like decades to me.

I installed it anyway and it has updated, just rebooting as I type this out, and it's all gone without a hitch.

It was a fun blast to the past, a past before this whole pandemic thing. I do miss those times, but now I have something to look back on.

I really need to invest in some rewritable DVDs.