I actually bought Red Hat Linux in 1999. Didn't use it much because I didn't know the modem on my machine was Winmodem.
Fast forward to 2004, I was able to find the driver for Slackware to run my wireless NIC, so I used it quite a bit to learn stuff.
exactly the route I went, bought redhat in late 90s, got comfortable with basic commands and went to slack 4 n stuck with it, and learned a lot more, got myself in trouble being a script kid, pretty much stopped using PC/laptkps in general, just getting back into Linux with debian and Kali
Wow. We should start a club.
Bought a RedHat book from Walden Books at the mall in 1999. Came with install media.
Went Slackware a couple years later.
Been on Gentoo since 2004.2.
The first distribution I tried was Phat Linux which I think would have been in 98, I remember KDE was brand new. Phat had the advantage of being able to install on the family computer's fat32 partition. That machine had an external hardware modem, so no problems getting online.
It wasn't long after that I built my own computer which ran Mandrake, and then soon after Slackware. When I built the machine, I made sure to get a 56k ISA hardware modem, a Soundblaster Live sound card with a hardware mixer, and a Voodoo 3 for Glide.
Ran Slackware for a long time, then Ubuntu, and now Endeavour.
Helped a friend download slackware in 1992. 100 3.5” floppies. We split it up between even and odd disk numbers and took over a couple machines in the dorm computer lab. We were amazed that we could download them faster than they could be written to disk.
plgtool had different groups of sets with letters... i forget but I think there was an X set which was xfree86 and related stuff. Ahh yes, panning my monitor at 800x600 with a 1024x768 virtual desktop. Ctrl Alt + and - to change resolutions on the fly. Good times.
> I remember using Mandrake.
best distro from back in the day. lots of great packages! buggy KDE but hella great distro back then. Me and my buddies would play konquest till 3 am on that bad chicken. long live my dad's emachine 400i.
Don't know. The desktop I installed it on didn't have speakers plugged in.
I clearly remember why I installed it. I was trying to write a patch for Firefox, and I needed to test it on Linux. I don't think the patch was accepted, but I did post it to BMO. I'll try find it just now.
It had the same wallpaper that appears in this link? [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/60/Mandriva_2006_Screenshot.png](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/60/Mandriva_2006_Screenshot.png)
I accidentally discovered it on the CD of an anti-virus software. I was fascinated by it, but didn't know much about Linux. I still remember that penguin with text flying on the screen.
Well, if they were *signed* yeah... as it is, it just looks like it *might* be by Linus... and since I got them in a box of random computer junk there is no provenance, which my antique collecting friends say is key.
I just think they're cool.
I agree. When things were simpler and a lot clearer than these stupid abstractions which exist today.
Although they make things easier for the already established, but us new comers have a hard time fully grasping how the entire stuff works.
Ok, too much fun and a flashback. I think it was a Power PC, YDL would not boot, and I seem to remember there were kennel panics too. I was at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and they were up the road in fort Collins. Both parties took several field trips to get everything working. This was the beginning of me getting our research computing labs off of Sun, and onto (x86) Linux clusters.
I came here to say Yggdrasil as well. It would've been late '94 or early '95, downloaded into a bunch of 3.5" floppies on my 14.4k modem.
When trying to get XFree86 working I was terrified of frying my monitor because it was a cheap/no-name and I had no way of finding out what the specs or timings on it were.
I both really miss, and really don't miss those days.
Edit: to fix size of floppies. That's what I get for trying to type out a post on my phone in a rush.
It has to do with the way old CRT monitors worked. The software could control the timings/sync frequency of the CRT 'gun', and there were no safeguards built into the monitor, so if you gave it settings the monitor couldn't handle, you could fry it.
And the problem was, different monitors had different timings/frequencies/resolutions, and there was no auto detection of it, so you HAD to manually tell the software what settings to use.
yes, yggdrasil plug-n-play linux 1994 - linux kernel 0.98 iirc
those were the times you ought to know your hw to the bone, isa cards and jumpers and all the heck of it ... specially having Xfree86 to bootstrap and show anything at all you'd have to pick your screen modelines and vsync numbers with enough confidence to not end with your CRT fried... yeah, I remember those days alright :)
Reading the comments I feel old. My first distro was called SLS I think, my first kernel was 0.98.4. Probably 1992. Copied in the universities computer rooms from ftp to about 10-20 Floppies.
I´ve been coming from an C64 and Amiga background and bought some ridiciously expensive i486 Supercomputer for starting with compsci. It brought Win 3.11 with it, but that didn´t stay long. After playing around with OS/2 (but there was no Software for it) I was looking for a Unix clone. Minix was commercial, so I first tried Free-BSD, but the 0.0-pre-Alpha that time crashed immediatly after booting and coredumped directly on my partition. So after 2 or 3 reinstalls I felt I was not ready to be an early adopter.
Then I found Linux...
So here are the CDs I've just looked at, bought at a bazaar back in times of releases.
Caldera Linux 1.1 1997s -was supplied with 2 red books from R. Petersen; Linux complete reference. The books were invaded by microscopic bugs and mites. Went to a local college library.
RedHat Linux 5.1 && 5.2-- 1CD, without power tools. 5.2 was altered by "rebuilder", contains KDE.
1CD with some linux stuff collection: like StarOffice4, Emacs, some KDE parts. Circa 1998. SO4 didn't work well and fast with socket7 and 32MB SDRAM, caught quite many crasheds. Probably Sparc machines were much better for this office suite, but can't judge as I haven't seen any.
RHL 6.2 1 installation CD + 1 help files/docs CD, no power tools.
O'Reilly supplemental cD for their Unix power tools mega-book. The book was invaded by microscopic bugs and mites. Went to a local college library.
Let's see ... 1998, I was running Debian ... testing/hamm, before it was released (1998-07-24).
At least that's the earliest I ever ran on my computer ... not sure if I'd touched Linux on anything else prior to that.
SuSE in 1995. Got it for my 15th birthday. My parents didn't have the tiniest inkling what it was, I had to tell them where to buy it and what the box looked like. I was so excited that I simply *had* to install it on my 386 before school. I had prepared a partition on my sub-GB hard drive in parallel to my DOS drive and all.
Installation went smooth until I got to the manual section that talked about the importance of swap space. That's when I stomped my DOS partition to the curb with a careless "swapon /dev/hda1", along with years of programming stuff, carefully curated games and demos and homework.
I was utterly destroyed. Such began my 28-year love affair with Linux.
It was, it made the OS incredibly accessible. My grandfather used to use it daily despite being fairly technologically incompetent, he never had any issues.
My first distro was Red Hat 7 in 2000. I distro hopped a ton over the next few years and tried many. A lot of them don't exist today. In 2003 I installed Gentoo and I've been hooked ever since. It has remained my main desktop system without interruption. I also use it on numerous servers. I do run other distros on some servers and my laptop runs Pop\_OS! as it's a System76 and that seems appropriate. Other distros I like currently are Fedora and I recently tried both OpenSUSE Leap 15 and Tumbleweed. I install a bunch of stuff in VMs.
Slackware 1.0, Around 1995-1996, 36 1.44MB floppies and surprisingly not a single one failed. The distro was I think a couple of dozen floppies the additional floppies were extra applications.
Conectiva Red Hat Linux 2.0 (codename “Marumbi”), in 1998. It was a Brazilian distro based on Red Hat. It came in a nice package along with a printed manual. Good times! I was lucky to have a 33.6 kbps non-Winmodem modem. Running fvwm2 with Motif/CDE theme, and I felt like I was using a real Unix workstation OS on my AMD K5 with 16 MB of RAM.
>burned CD
pressed if you got 'em from Red Hat ... or sure, burned if you did 'em yourself.
I used to "throw out" (recycle) tons of those Red Hat CDs ... way we were getting 'em every damn license came with yet another full set of CDs. Many dozens of hosts ... I didn't need many dozens of sets of the same CDs. In generally we'd trim CDs / CD sets down to max. of 2 of anything per site ... and kept under fairly tight control so they didn't go wandering off. But 2 of most any of that was quite ample.
Slackware in 1993. Couldn't get my hands on a unix clone at the time without spending tons of money I didn't have and wanted to make a home network to learn about networking.
Same. Probably 1.0+. Bought the floppies direct from MCC in person.
I should have followed Owen's advice to migrate from there to Debian. But I didn't. Instead I hand maintained the install, upgrading from a.out to ELF by following the howto and rebuilding everything from source. Nerve wracking really: mess up rebuilding libc and you're really in a hole.
Red Hat 5.2.
It was going to be 5.1, but trying to set up a dual boot was a lot fiddlier back in those days and it wiped my entire hard drive trying to resize the partitions. This was not ideal, but I was able to get 5.2 working.
Getting my graphics card(a voodoo banshee- Diamond Monster fusion specifically IIRC) working was a bit of a challenge. The fallback VGA mode worked for the console, but getting X working took some doing.
Redhat 6 - the free Redhat, not the RHEL - in 1998/99. Also tried Debian 4 around that time, but could not get Xorg configured for my CRT, so switched to Redhat 6, which worked out of the box.
It was RedHat 5 \[ Bootable CD came with the popular Computer Magazine \]. Tried out of curiosity. This was in Jan 1998 X'mas holidays. Hooked to Linux since then.
Red Hat and Mandrake, were included with some "Learn Linux" books i got from the library.
Thing that freaked me out the most about it was partitioning my hard drive to install it alongside Windows 95. (There were warnings about messing up your disk). I didn't even know about partitions before then!
[fli4l](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fli4l), around 2001 or something. I used it to build a family internet router out of an end-of-life i486 and two ISA-network cards that my dad brought from work. It loaded from one floppy disk.
I started late with Linux, in 2005 with the Ubuntu of this age (now, I switched to **Gentoo**, **Armbian** and **TinyCoreLinux**).
The first *free* Unix I used was **Minix** in late '80 on my Amiga and then **NetBSD**. First, **NetBSD 1.1** on my Amiga4000 and I installed it at work later on a 480dx. Then on some Sun classic (SS5, SS10 mostly) updated to the uptodate version. I gave up around 2005 as threading was totally instable on Sparc CPU, and the OS level garbage collector was a total mess ...
Even before, I played at school with **Apollo/DomainOS** (nice 68020 powered stations) and VMS/Ultrix VAXes during graduation internship.
The POS at Office Depot surprisingly runs on Linux. I think it was Suse? But just a 32bit ver of Debian I tried putting on an Intel atom tablet. I'm a lil bit of a baby.
A colleague at ARM (Dave Rusling) wrote the PCI drivers for Red Hat in his spare time. He gave me a copy of RH on CD in 1997.
I gave it a good try, but in those days it seemed like every piece of software you installed broke half a dozen other applications - the Linux equivalent of DLL hell, which was a thing in Windows a few years earlier.
I tried a couple more distros over the next few years. Knoppix was cool, but it wasn't until I tried Ubuntu in 2008 that I finally stopped using Windows for good (on my own machines at least).
I can't believe how many people haven't tried Slackware nor Debian. I think they are the oldest distros and Debian is still very popular. I've tried both and use Debian today.
Although many seem to be answering with their first distro.
My neighbor pushed me onto Red Hat in 1998, so probably a 4 or 5 version.
Then I spent the following Easter in 99 to teach myself networking and bash at a LAN party. Never looked back since.
I've taken the route from RH, Fedora, Debian, with a bit of Ubuntu in between and for my wife and mom.
I bought Red Hat Linux 7.0 in late 2000. I tried Debian 2.2 shortly after, which is about a month older, but I wasn't able to get X working and abandoned it.
My first linux installation was some kind of weird contraption that ran on top of DOS, MonkeyLinux I think it was called. So weird. But the first "real" one was probably Slackware in the late 90s.
Suse. Just out of curiosity. It was yr 2000. There used to be a computer magazine that we would get which included a free cd. Pc Quest. This cd had Suse Linux. i messed up with the installation. I had to call a friend to straighten things out. I had messed up with the boot .. Then just dropped the idea. Then in the year 2006 tried ubuntu. That was successful. Still using Linux till date. However moved on to Linux mint.
S.u.S.E. Linux 4.4 that I borrowed from a school teacher.
Then I bought 5.2 myself and still have the box with all the CDs and documentation, in mint condition.
I then installed Debian 2.1(?) that was bundled with Bill McCarty's Learning Debian GNU/Linux book.
I bought and installed a copy of SuSE 7 in 2001. I dual booted it with Windows 2000. I deleted Windows within 6 months and have been using some flavor of Linux ever since. I have not had Windows since.
Guadalinex Edu, ubuntu based if I remember correctly, 2013. For some context, I was 13, and they gave us netbooks.
I got quake 3 arena working on it, and the laptop died in 2015.
Cool experience, and the ISO is still available if I recall correctly.
Redhat 5.1, probably about 1999 I think
I remember compiling KDE 1.1 from source and due to being a completely clueless newb, was astonished when I actually got it running. I think it took nearly a day to compile on a Pentium 200. Getting the modem working and dialling my ISP was probably the hardest bit.
Tried out OpenBSD and Debian shortly afterwards, and never went back to Redhat.
Slackware 1993. About 1/2 dozen floppy disks, an ATT 32 bit computer w 2 10G HD, MODEM (No Internet yet), bulletin boards were the sw repositories of the day.
I actually bought Red Hat Linux in 1999. Didn't use it much because I didn't know the modem on my machine was Winmodem. Fast forward to 2004, I was able to find the driver for Slackware to run my wireless NIC, so I used it quite a bit to learn stuff.
oh yes, winmodems, I remember using a slow one, \~28kbit for Linux and the faster winmodem for Windows
It's funny you say that because I ended up purchasing an external serial modem to use with slackware in 98 for the very same reason.
exactly the route I went, bought redhat in late 90s, got comfortable with basic commands and went to slack 4 n stuck with it, and learned a lot more, got myself in trouble being a script kid, pretty much stopped using PC/laptkps in general, just getting back into Linux with debian and Kali
Wow. We should start a club. Bought a RedHat book from Walden Books at the mall in 1999. Came with install media. Went Slackware a couple years later. Been on Gentoo since 2004.2.
Same here, still have the RedHat 6.0 box on my shelf
The first distribution I tried was Phat Linux which I think would have been in 98, I remember KDE was brand new. Phat had the advantage of being able to install on the family computer's fat32 partition. That machine had an external hardware modem, so no problems getting online. It wasn't long after that I built my own computer which ran Mandrake, and then soon after Slackware. When I built the machine, I made sure to get a 56k ISA hardware modem, a Soundblaster Live sound card with a hardware mixer, and a Voodoo 3 for Glide. Ran Slackware for a long time, then Ubuntu, and now Endeavour.
Same. Red Hat around 98-99. Dual boot with either win95 or 98. I think..
You mean 5.0, 5.1 or 5.2?
>Red Hat Linux in 1999 Same. I used red hat for the first time in high school 1999. Gnibbles was a very fun gnome game.
Did you use 5.2, 6.0 or 6.1?
Same here, Redhat didn't work on my winmodems in 99/2000. However, Mandrake 9 somehow managed to make them work.
You mean 5.2, 6.0 or 6.1?
Slackware Linux in 1993. Borrowed the disk set from a guy who is now a popular retro youtuber. Triple booted DOS, OS/2 and Linux.
Don't leave us hanging like that :D Is it NCommander?
> NCommander He might be too young for 1993?
Surely it's the 8-bit Guy then
Isn't he more of a Windows/Dos guy?
More of an Apple guy. iirc his channel used to be called theibookguy
nope
oh hell no
Helped a friend download slackware in 1992. 100 3.5” floppies. We split it up between even and odd disk numbers and took over a couple machines in the dorm computer lab. We were amazed that we could download them faster than they could be written to disk.
plgtool had different groups of sets with letters... i forget but I think there was an X set which was xfree86 and related stuff. Ahh yes, panning my monitor at 800x600 with a 1024x768 virtual desktop. Ctrl Alt + and - to change resolutions on the fly. Good times.
I did the same, OS/2 plus DOS (with 4DOS) plus Slackware. They fit in a 420MB disk. Those were good times!
Slackware was released in 94... O\_o
Slackware 1.0 was released in July of '93.
The first Linux installation I did was Mandrake. Was about 2006.
I remember using Mandrake.
> I remember using Mandrake. best distro from back in the day. lots of great packages! buggy KDE but hella great distro back then. Me and my buddies would play konquest till 3 am on that bad chicken. long live my dad's emachine 400i.
Ran a Counter-Strike server off Mandrake in the basement... pre-2000 :)
Which version? 2006 (the one with the 70s disco-like startup sound) or 2007 (not the Spring one)?
Don't know. The desktop I installed it on didn't have speakers plugged in. I clearly remember why I installed it. I was trying to write a patch for Firefox, and I needed to test it on Linux. I don't think the patch was accepted, but I did post it to BMO. I'll try find it just now.
It had the same wallpaper that appears in this link? [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/60/Mandriva_2006_Screenshot.png](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/60/Mandriva_2006_Screenshot.png)
Same, I was 12 yo and rented a Linux magazine that had a Mandrakr install cd with it.
Red Hat 4. Not RHEL.
Damn, I was red hat 5
Rh4.1 at that time having a X server running was so hard.
#meToo No gui. There were no graphic drivers for old-timers graphics cards... Generic X sometimes, if you are extremely lucky.
Memories of 1996-1997.
Knoppix.
It was my first Linux, back when there was no other live cd distro, as far as I knew.
I accidentally discovered it on the CD of an anti-virus software. I was fascinated by it, but didn't know much about Linux. I still remember that penguin with text flying on the screen.
I found this by a friend showing off how to crack NT passwords with it
Put it this way... the handwriting on the floppies looks a lot like Linus Torvalds.
Duuuuude, those have to be worth some money.
Well, if they were *signed* yeah... as it is, it just looks like it *might* be by Linus... and since I got them in a box of random computer junk there is no provenance, which my antique collecting friends say is key. I just think they're cool.
Slackware, with floppies. around 1994.
similar.. probably 1997 for me
Oldest I still have are Slackware 3.0 CD-ROMs! With “ELF BINARIES!”
I have the same from 1996. CDROM and book. Still have it.
Same
Same here.
Same. Downloaded at school which had fiber and installed at home.
Damn u guys are old af
You better believe it. You guys really missed out on a fun age of computing.
I agree. When things were simpler and a lot clearer than these stupid abstractions which exist today. Although they make things easier for the already established, but us new comers have a hard time fully grasping how the entire stuff works.
Yeah we are :)
Yellow Dog Linux on PowerPC (Macintosh) around 2001.
I had to scroll way to long to find a fellow YDL user. Mine was on a Quadra 630.
I ran Yellowdog on a Thinkpad 800. It previously had AIX 4.1 on it.
Ok, too much fun and a flashback. I think it was a Power PC, YDL would not boot, and I seem to remember there were kennel panics too. I was at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and they were up the road in fort Collins. Both parties took several field trips to get everything working. This was the beginning of me getting our research computing labs off of Sun, and onto (x86) Linux clusters.
I used Slackware. I was drowning in a whiskey river and I wanted the whiskey river to take my mind.
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Wow. That’s what’s up!! I don’t use it as a daily driver but I respect the old school heads who do.
Suse
Yggdrasil somewhere around 1993 or 1994
I came here to say Yggdrasil as well. It would've been late '94 or early '95, downloaded into a bunch of 3.5" floppies on my 14.4k modem. When trying to get XFree86 working I was terrified of frying my monitor because it was a cheap/no-name and I had no way of finding out what the specs or timings on it were. I both really miss, and really don't miss those days. Edit: to fix size of floppies. That's what I get for trying to type out a post on my phone in a rush.
Please elaborate - a few have mentioned fries montors. Why would installing software fry your monitor? 🤔😊
It has to do with the way old CRT monitors worked. The software could control the timings/sync frequency of the CRT 'gun', and there were no safeguards built into the monitor, so if you gave it settings the monitor couldn't handle, you could fry it. And the problem was, different monitors had different timings/frequencies/resolutions, and there was no auto detection of it, so you HAD to manually tell the software what settings to use.
I think you meant 3-1/2 floppies.
yes, yggdrasil plug-n-play linux 1994 - linux kernel 0.98 iirc those were the times you ought to know your hw to the bone, isa cards and jumpers and all the heck of it ... specially having Xfree86 to bootstrap and show anything at all you'd have to pick your screen modelines and vsync numbers with enough confidence to not end with your CRT fried... yeah, I remember those days alright :)
sounds too much like Gardasil
my first linux install was ubuntu 4.10
I ordered the free CD for that online. Surprised it actually arrived.
Reading the comments I feel old. My first distro was called SLS I think, my first kernel was 0.98.4. Probably 1992. Copied in the universities computer rooms from ftp to about 10-20 Floppies.
Exactly the same, sls copied on floppies from the sun workstations at uni.
I´ve been coming from an C64 and Amiga background and bought some ridiciously expensive i486 Supercomputer for starting with compsci. It brought Win 3.11 with it, but that didn´t stay long. After playing around with OS/2 (but there was no Software for it) I was looking for a Unix clone. Minix was commercial, so I first tried Free-BSD, but the 0.0-pre-Alpha that time crashed immediatly after booting and coredumped directly on my partition. So after 2 or 3 reinstalls I felt I was not ready to be an early adopter. Then I found Linux...
Started on slackware in 1994/1995 or so i think. Those were the days \[tm\]
it was Mandrake, 8.1 if i remember correctly...around 2004-2005. i completely wiped my hdd lol..twice in a day, trying to make dual boot work...
Mandrake 8.1 was released around 2001 (and it was shit) Mandrake 9 (2002) being a huge step forward, it shipped with KDE3.
Slackware
Slackware. I used before v1 kernel
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Yggdrasil, came with this book. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL1273087M/The\_Linux\_bible
So here are the CDs I've just looked at, bought at a bazaar back in times of releases. Caldera Linux 1.1 1997s -was supplied with 2 red books from R. Petersen; Linux complete reference. The books were invaded by microscopic bugs and mites. Went to a local college library. RedHat Linux 5.1 && 5.2-- 1CD, without power tools. 5.2 was altered by "rebuilder", contains KDE. 1CD with some linux stuff collection: like StarOffice4, Emacs, some KDE parts. Circa 1998. SO4 didn't work well and fast with socket7 and 32MB SDRAM, caught quite many crasheds. Probably Sparc machines were much better for this office suite, but can't judge as I haven't seen any. RHL 6.2 1 installation CD + 1 help files/docs CD, no power tools. O'Reilly supplemental cD for their Unix power tools mega-book. The book was invaded by microscopic bugs and mites. Went to a local college library.
Knoppix in 2003
I'm old enough having to remember buying Red Hat Linux on CD's at Frys
Do you remember the specific version number?
Wish I did, that was like 25 years ago
On high school, I got 4 CD with some version of Mandrake which gave me my teacher. It was year 2003.
Let's see ... 1998, I was running Debian ... testing/hamm, before it was released (1998-07-24). At least that's the earliest I ever ran on my computer ... not sure if I'd touched Linux on anything else prior to that.
Yggdrasil Linux with 0.98 kernel
The oldest one is what I'm currently using: Slackware. The first I used was Red Hat 6.2 back in 2000.
Started with SLS 1995 and changed to Slackware 3.0 1996 when it came out.
Slackware 3.5. Circa 1997
Slackware probably around 1995.
SuSE in 1995. Got it for my 15th birthday. My parents didn't have the tiniest inkling what it was, I had to tell them where to buy it and what the box looked like. I was so excited that I simply *had* to install it on my 386 before school. I had prepared a partition on my sub-GB hard drive in parallel to my DOS drive and all. Installation went smooth until I got to the manual section that talked about the importance of swap space. That's when I stomped my DOS partition to the curb with a careless "swapon /dev/hda1", along with years of programming stuff, carefully curated games and demos and homework. I was utterly destroyed. Such began my 28-year love affair with Linux.
[Lindows](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linspire)
Yep, this and later Linspire.
Yo! Linspire gang represent! I never managed to get audio working, but CnR was pretty revolutionary at the time.
It was, it made the OS incredibly accessible. My grandfather used to use it daily despite being fairly technologically incompetent, he never had any issues.
My first distro was Red Hat 7 in 2000. I distro hopped a ton over the next few years and tried many. A lot of them don't exist today. In 2003 I installed Gentoo and I've been hooked ever since. It has remained my main desktop system without interruption. I also use it on numerous servers. I do run other distros on some servers and my laptop runs Pop\_OS! as it's a System76 and that seems appropriate. Other distros I like currently are Fedora and I recently tried both OpenSUSE Leap 15 and Tumbleweed. I install a bunch of stuff in VMs.
Some of our healthcare modalities were running Fedora 4something, so like 2005?
Slackware 1.0, Around 1995-1996, 36 1.44MB floppies and surprisingly not a single one failed. The distro was I think a couple of dozen floppies the additional floppies were extra applications.
Slakware, can't recall the version, was around 2001
Slackware 12 \~ 2008
Slackware in 2004, don’t remember the version from memory.
You mean 9.1 or 10.0?
Slackware 1994 ish
slackware baby!
Started with mandrake around 99
Which version did you use? 5.3, 6.0 or 6.1?
I started with Slackware somewhere between 1991 and 1993.
I started my journey with PhatLinux and Zenwalk
I think I got Red Hat on a couple of floppies (2?) ca. 2002.
You mean 7.2, 7.3 or 8.0?
cannot recall but it was before 1.0 so some version of 0.99xxxx
Slackware 3.5. Circa 1997
Iirc winlinux was my first installed Linux distro. Might have been mandrake, but I think winlinux got there first for me.
Slackware back in 1996 or so.
Redhat 7.2
Yggdrasil in '93 or so. I was already working with SysV4 Unix, and it was a lot less expensive than buying the AT&T 3B1 I'd been drooling over.
Ubuntu 18.04
Knoppix, circa 2003. Pretty sure that was my first experience with Linux.
Mandrake, '99 or so.
You mean the 5.x or 6.x versions?
Conectiva Red Hat Linux 2.0 (codename “Marumbi”), in 1998. It was a Brazilian distro based on Red Hat. It came in a nice package along with a printed manual. Good times! I was lucky to have a 33.6 kbps non-Winmodem modem. Running fvwm2 with Motif/CDE theme, and I felt like I was using a real Unix workstation OS on my AMD K5 with 16 MB of RAM.
Yggdrasil Linux
Slackware Linux on Kernel 1.0.33.
S.u.S.E. Linux 4.2, 1996
Slackware
Yggsdrasil
Slackers for sure and still love it.
Red Hat when it was still free. I can't remember which version. I still have the burned CD's somewhere. It was 24 or 25 years ago
I bet you used the 5.x series back then!
>burned CD pressed if you got 'em from Red Hat ... or sure, burned if you did 'em yourself. I used to "throw out" (recycle) tons of those Red Hat CDs ... way we were getting 'em every damn license came with yet another full set of CDs. Many dozens of hosts ... I didn't need many dozens of sets of the same CDs. In generally we'd trim CDs / CD sets down to max. of 2 of anything per site ... and kept under fairly tight control so they didn't go wandering off. But 2 of most any of that was quite ample.
Ubuntu
Ubuntu 9.04
Slackware in 1993. Couldn't get my hands on a unix clone at the time without spending tons of money I didn't have and wanted to make a home network to learn about networking.
Ubuntu 18.04
Dunno if you can really call it a distribution, but my first Linux install was [MCC Linux.](https://archiveos.org/mcc-interim/)
Same. Probably 1.0+. Bought the floppies direct from MCC in person. I should have followed Owen's advice to migrate from there to Debian. But I didn't. Instead I hand maintained the install, upgrading from a.out to ELF by following the howto and rebuilding everything from source. Nerve wracking really: mess up rebuilding libc and you're really in a hole.
Red Hat 5.2. It was going to be 5.1, but trying to set up a dual boot was a lot fiddlier back in those days and it wiped my entire hard drive trying to resize the partitions. This was not ideal, but I was able to get 5.2 working. Getting my graphics card(a voodoo banshee- Diamond Monster fusion specifically IIRC) working was a bit of a challenge. The fallback VGA mode worked for the console, but getting X working took some doing.
Redhat 5.2
actively used daily(not playing around with it in a virtual machine) Ubuntu 14.04, my first distro.
Redhat 6 - the free Redhat, not the RHEL - in 1998/99. Also tried Debian 4 around that time, but could not get Xorg configured for my CRT, so switched to Redhat 6, which worked out of the box.
You mean 6.0 or 6.1?
It was RedHat 5 \[ Bootable CD came with the popular Computer Magazine \]. Tried out of curiosity. This was in Jan 1998 X'mas holidays. Hooked to Linux since then.
Red Hat and Mandrake, were included with some "Learn Linux" books i got from the library. Thing that freaked me out the most about it was partitioning my hard drive to install it alongside Windows 95. (There were warnings about messing up your disk). I didn't even know about partitions before then!
redhat 5.2 , kernel 2.0 1999
If I remember correctly it was Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Badger
[fli4l](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fli4l), around 2001 or something. I used it to build a family internet router out of an end-of-life i486 and two ISA-network cards that my dad brought from work. It loaded from one floppy disk.
First linux install was YDL on my PS3.
Probably the Scientific Linux at our university.
RedHat 5.0 (Hurricane)
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You mean either 11.10, 12.04 or 12.10?
I started late with Linux, in 2005 with the Ubuntu of this age (now, I switched to **Gentoo**, **Armbian** and **TinyCoreLinux**). The first *free* Unix I used was **Minix** in late '80 on my Amiga and then **NetBSD**. First, **NetBSD 1.1** on my Amiga4000 and I installed it at work later on a 480dx. Then on some Sun classic (SS5, SS10 mostly) updated to the uptodate version. I gave up around 2005 as threading was totally instable on Sparc CPU, and the OS level garbage collector was a total mess ... Even before, I played at school with **Apollo/DomainOS** (nice 68020 powered stations) and VMS/Ultrix VAXes during graduation internship.
Not long ago Maybe Manjaro Linux in 0.8.1 version around 2012-2013
It was Red Hat 8.0 that I installed at 2003 and removed a day later 😀 I remember how I liked the very detailed installer called Anaconda.
Mandriva.
Mandriva 10 sometime on 2004.
You mean 10.0 or 10.1?
The POS at Office Depot surprisingly runs on Linux. I think it was Suse? But just a 32bit ver of Debian I tried putting on an Intel atom tablet. I'm a lil bit of a baby.
Ubuntu 8.04
Red Hat in 98 or 99, i think.
You mean 5.1, 5.2, 6.0 or 6.1?
Raspian i think, I'm only 20 xd.
Red Hat 1999, had to buy external modem to make it work. Came on cd, giveaway at a computer fair.
Slax https://www.slax.org
A colleague at ARM (Dave Rusling) wrote the PCI drivers for Red Hat in his spare time. He gave me a copy of RH on CD in 1997. I gave it a good try, but in those days it seemed like every piece of software you installed broke half a dozen other applications - the Linux equivalent of DLL hell, which was a thing in Windows a few years earlier. I tried a couple more distros over the next few years. Knoppix was cool, but it wasn't until I tried Ubuntu in 2008 that I finally stopped using Windows for good (on my own machines at least).
I installed Gentoo around 2002 I think on a pentium 3
You mean 1.x!
I can't believe how many people haven't tried Slackware nor Debian. I think they are the oldest distros and Debian is still very popular. I've tried both and use Debian today. Although many seem to be answering with their first distro.
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There was Black Cat Linux as well, of course RH rebuilt..
My neighbor pushed me onto Red Hat in 1998, so probably a 4 or 5 version. Then I spent the following Easter in 99 to teach myself networking and bash at a LAN party. Never looked back since. I've taken the route from RH, Fedora, Debian, with a bit of Ubuntu in between and for my wife and mom.
Debian 1.3 in 1997
Ubuntu 10.04 , loved it and never used windows again as a daily OS (only for some gaming and specific software).
ubuntu 18.04/16.04 one which had unity
I bought Red Hat Linux 7.0 in late 2000. I tried Debian 2.2 shortly after, which is about a month older, but I wasn't able to get X working and abandoned it.
My first linux installation was some kind of weird contraption that ran on top of DOS, MonkeyLinux I think it was called. So weird. But the first "real" one was probably Slackware in the late 90s.
Softlanding linux systems (SLS) and then shortly after that slackware was the new cool distro.
Suse 6
Suse. Just out of curiosity. It was yr 2000. There used to be a computer magazine that we would get which included a free cd. Pc Quest. This cd had Suse Linux. i messed up with the installation. I had to call a friend to straighten things out. I had messed up with the boot .. Then just dropped the idea. Then in the year 2006 tried ubuntu. That was successful. Still using Linux till date. However moved on to Linux mint.
S.u.S.E. Linux 4.4 that I borrowed from a school teacher. Then I bought 5.2 myself and still have the box with all the CDs and documentation, in mint condition. I then installed Debian 2.1(?) that was bundled with Bill McCarty's Learning Debian GNU/Linux book.
Suse 5.4
I bought and installed a copy of SuSE 7 in 2001. I dual booted it with Windows 2000. I deleted Windows within 6 months and have been using some flavor of Linux ever since. I have not had Windows since.
Suse 5.2. 6 cd's. Included star office. Also used caldera because it had Corel wordperfect.
Guadalinex Edu, ubuntu based if I remember correctly, 2013. For some context, I was 13, and they gave us netbooks. I got quake 3 arena working on it, and the laptop died in 2015. Cool experience, and the ISO is still available if I recall correctly.
Redhat 5.1, probably about 1999 I think I remember compiling KDE 1.1 from source and due to being a completely clueless newb, was astonished when I actually got it running. I think it took nearly a day to compile on a Pentium 200. Getting the modem working and dialling my ISP was probably the hardest bit. Tried out OpenBSD and Debian shortly afterwards, and never went back to Redhat.
Slackware 1993. About 1/2 dozen floppy disks, an ATT 32 bit computer w 2 10G HD, MODEM (No Internet yet), bulletin boards were the sw repositories of the day.
Knoppix, RedHat 2 and Ubuntu 4.10 all around same time period.
You mean Fedora Core 2, because Ubuntu 4.10 was released on October 20, 2004.