This really brings back memories of how painful installing any software in the early 90s was. The small company I worked for got us a Yggdrasil CD to try but we were unable to get it installed on any of the PCs we had at the time. MCC might have done better, but we hadn't heard of it.
I very clearly remember my very first version of Slackware -- pre 3.0.0 (which I actually bought on cd for a few bucks). I don't remember that first version, just that I downloaded the floppy disk sets over zmodem at 14.4kbps (thankfully saving to hard disk, not to floppy).
That first version of Slackware I used had the Linux kernel 1.2.8; IIRC that series went to 1.2.13 before going through the a.out->ELF transition.
Anyway, original point, that Slackware distro of 1.2.8 had a bug where every single time I had to reinstall the bootloader for a newly-compiled Linux kernel (which I had to do regularly), LILO was broken and hung at the `LI` prompt... those who were there may remember, the number of letters of LILO: that were output gave a sign to the source of the error.
But every single time, I had to rescue boot, and try to remember what I had to fix to make LILO work again.
Could very well have been Slackware. Slackware was my first Linux distribution, it came as a set of like at least 20 floppies. All of mine were repurposed AOL disks. After spending about a solid week or so downloading the whole set of disk images over a slow and intermittent dialup connection, the next most painful thing was the fact that floppies were notoriously unreliable. Some disks would throw I/O errors when writing. Some would get caught immediately after when verifying. Many others showed no problems until install time. Getting two dozen floppies to actually read 100% of their contents successfully took a week or two on its own because I only had one computer to work with.
Was Yggdrasil that bad? My first distro was Slackware and, with the help of the book accompanying the CD, it was doable. Sure you had to define modelines for X11 (the Xorg name didn't exist bad then) to support your monitor and supporting GPUs was quite the endeavour, but in the end we'd make it work. We'd even compile and run Emacs (in 45 minutes or so).
