[1] Source: [2002] https://www.cnet.com/news/google-buys-remaining-deja-com-bus...
I printed-out both of those over a long period on the work printers, using the reverse side of single-sided pages recovered from the paper recycling bins. And then settled in for a weekend...
I still remember choosing to include AX.25 in the kernel because it seemed like a cool thing with which I'd want to experiment at some point. Never got around to it!
Maybe I was better off in that I was getting my distro (Slackware) along with the giant 'Linux for dummies' book in which it was included. It still never got me far enough to be able to remove my Windows partition.
Getting a Winmodem to work in Linux was possibly, but not exactly easy. I couldn't afford a better modem at the time, so I just kept hacking away at it and booting back into Windows and searching the web to try to figure it out. This was 1996 or so; there was far less information on the web than there is today, and search engines weren't exactly great at finding what you needed.
I think I finally got online from Linux after a week or two. :)
Also I was a teenage nerd with lots of time for home computing.
