And will be cancelled in 18 months with 2 weeks notice.

If you weren’t at a university it was generally a challenge to get hold of disks. Downloading at home took forever on a 28.8 or even 56k modem (ie. 56 kilobits per second).

Slackware and Redhat disk sets were the thing, in my experience. But generally that only gave you the compiled code, not the source (although there was an another set of disks with the source packages).

If you wanted to recompile stuff you had to download the right set of packages, and be prepared to handle version conflicts on your own (with mailing list and usenet support).

Recompiling the kernel with specific patches for graphics cards, sound cards, modems and other devices (I remember scanners in particular), or specific combinations of hardware was relatively common. “Use the source, Luke!” was a common admonition. Often times specific FAQ pages or howtos would be made available for software packages, including games.

XFree86 was very powerful on hardware it supported, but was very finnicky. See the other posts about the level of detail that had to be supplied to get combinations of graphics cards and monitors working without the appearance of magic smoke.

Running Linux was mostly a enthusiast/hobbyist/geek thing, for those who wanted to see what was possible, and those who wanted to tinker with something approaching Unix, and those who wanted to stretch the limits of what their hardware could do.

Many of those enthusiasts and hobbyists and geeks discovered that Linux could do far more than anyone previously had been prepared to admit or realise. They, and others like them, took it with them into progressively more significant, and valuable projects, and it began to take over the world.

Procmail for the old school win.

I cut my teeth on an early version of The Linux Networking Howto, still available at tldp.org. That’s a little bit out of date now :-) but the basic IPv4 networking concepts are still good.

These days so much is implementation or distribution dependent. There has been so much very rapid development in this field during the internet era that the age of documentation matters significantly.

A mitigating, but also confusing, factor is that different generations of networking tools have backwards compatibility built in so that it has been possible to build firewalls on kernels running nftables using iptables utilities in userspace.

I think you could do worse than starting with the Debian wikis and then drilling down into other documentation for the specific distributions or applications you want to use.

I seem to remember that openwrt.org and shorewall.org (though that product is EOL) also have some good overarching network stuff. I think Hurricane Electric he.com may still do their free basic IPv6 certificate programme?

Wikipedia is also your friend in this, especially the references.

I’ve enjoyed onemarcfifty.com’s videos too, but that format isn’t what you are looking for, and the transcripts I have seen are not formatted.