"BACK UP ANY IMPORTANT DATA," began the Linux 0.10 installation instructions. "Linux accesses your hardware directly, and if your hardware differs from mine, you could be in for a nasty surprise. Doublecheck that your hardware is compatible: AT style harddisk, VGA controller." The installation guide explained that there were five major steps in getting Linux installed and running on your computer, including the above first step of backing up the system. The second step was to use Minix and the mkfs command to create a new filesystem on an empty partition of your hard drive. Third you used dd to write the 'boot' and 'root' Linux disk images to floppy disks. The fourth step was actually booting from the floppies, "having a floppy as root-device isn't very fast (especially on a machine with less than 6MB total ram -> small buffer cache), but it works (I hope)." The final step was mounting the empty hard disk partition, copying the files from the floppy disks to the partition, and creating the necessary /dev files with mknod, "you should now have a filesystem you [can] boot from. Play around a bit, try to get acquainted with the new system. Log out when you've had enough." The document noted that while it was possible to install Linux using DOS, the instructions were intended for people using Minix:

"In general, this version is still meant for people with minix: they are more used to the system, and can do some things that DOS-based persons cannot. If you have only DOS, expect some troubles. As the version number suggests, this is still not the final product."

"Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?" began the October 5th, 1991 announcement for Linux kernel version 0.02 on the comp.os.minix newsgroup. In the release notes, Linus Torvalds continued, "as I mentioned a month(?) ago, I'm working on a free version of a minix-lookalike for AT-386 computers. It has finally reached the stage where it's even usable (though may not be depending on what you want), and I am willing to put out the sources for wider distribution." 19 days after the 0.01 kernel was released, the 0.02 kernel debuted with the new-found ability to run a handful of utilities including bash, gcc, gnu-make, gnu-sed and compress. There was no floppy driver yet, the hard disk driver was hard coded to AT-compatible drives, and due to various buffer-cache problems it was not possible to compile large programs like gcc from a running 0.02 kernel. Linus noted:

"I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves 'why?'. Hurd will be out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows), and I've already got minix. This is a program for hackers by a hacker. I've enjouyed doing it, and somebody might enjoy looking at it and even modifying it for their own needs. It is still small enough to understand, use and modify, and I'm looking forward to any comments you might have."