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My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com)
Joe Barr looks back
at a decade of using Linux. "I have now officially entered my second
decade using Linux and free/open source software in a meaningful way. I
began dabbling with Linux as early as 1995, but in June of 1996, I began
using it for real when I created my first Web site. Today, my Linux desktop
takes care of all my personal computing needs, both at work and at
play. Here's one man's story of how he and Linux matured together."
(Log in to post comments)
My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) Posted Oct 13, 2006 22:26 UTC (Fri) by pfred1 (guest, #35195) [Link] Hey we started runing Linux at about the same time! Happy 10th anniversary to the both of us I guess.
My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) Posted Oct 14, 2006 0:02 UTC (Sat) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link] Hey we started runing Linux at about the same time!I did too, but I backslide. ;-) I couldn't leave those 3D games alone for a while. I guess I'll have to wait 2 years and celebrate with LWN.
My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) Posted Oct 14, 2006 2:24 UTC (Sat) by einstein (subscriber, #2052) [Link] There are 3d games for windoze? j/k
oh well. I've been playing FPS games on linux ever since doom was ported to linux in 1995, and I remember when quake for linux came out around Christmas of 1996. When quake 3 demo came out, I was there with my voodoo graphics card and dri drivers, lots of hours down the tube with idsoftware games.
Nowdays it's ut2004, and still quake 3 arena. also rtcw and the spinoff, et. I also bought quake 4 and doonm 3, but I honestly like quake 3 arena more.
My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) Posted Oct 14, 2006 9:35 UTC (Sat) by grouch (guest, #27289) [Link] 'Fess up -- any early Doomer in Linux had to spend some time torturing MS Windows users with demos of ttyquake as soon as it came out. How many eyes did you ruin?
My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) Posted Oct 14, 2006 10:33 UTC (Sat) by steve_goa (guest, #27461) [Link] There was this great 'SimCity'-like game that I loved playing on Red Hat Linux 7 which was running fairly good on my Pentium 150 ~ 32MB RAM ~ 4 GB HDD.
-Steve
My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) Posted Oct 14, 2006 10:47 UTC (Sat) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link] Lincity is still going strong!
My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) Posted Oct 14, 2006 12:49 UTC (Sat) by mjr (guest, #6979) [Link] Not to buff proprietary games over free replacements, but as a little-known curiosity, there was actually a Linux demo version of the original Simcity around a fair decade ago. Don't recall if license keys were actually sold.
My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) Posted Oct 14, 2006 19:04 UTC (Sat) by msphil (guest, #1378) [Link] I know of one *cough cough* :-)
My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) Posted Oct 16, 2006 18:41 UTC (Mon) by einstein (subscriber, #2052) [Link] ttyquake was a very cool hack, it's all coming back to me now...
My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) Posted Oct 13, 2006 23:46 UTC (Fri) by Erich_J_Ritzmann (guest, #39670) [Link]
Sheesch, to think I coulda wrote something called my first 13 years with Linux and got linked to
I used Soft Landing Software distro (subtitled: for DOS bailouts), Linux version 0.99.xx -- I
My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) Posted Oct 14, 2006 15:44 UTC (Sat) by Ribbit (guest, #8400) [Link] Hey, I remember when SLS was about, though I never used it. The first distro I remember using was called (appropriately enough) Nascent Linux, which had a 0.99pl<something> kernel. After that I moved to Yggdrasil, which had the choice between the stable 1.0 and bleeding edge 1.1 kernels. (And recommended the latter IIRC. Ah, those were the days!) Somewhere along the way TurboLinux and Red Hat 4.x found their way onto my machine. I still have fond memories of the Red Baron browser which came with RHL4.
What other ancient, long-forgotten distros did people get started on?
My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) Posted Oct 14, 2006 16:00 UTC (Sat) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link] What other ancient, long-forgotten distros did people get started on?Whatever was on those "infomagic" CDs. Someone told me they thought it might have been SLS, but this is inconclusive. BTW, does anyone remember what Caldera was originally based on? There used to be copyright notices for some German company in some of the files in Lisa.
My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) Posted Oct 14, 2006 17:01 UTC (Sat) by Erich_J_Ritzmann (guest, #39670) [Link] Caldera, I also have OpenLinux Base 1.1 CD's kicking around. They were Red Hat based.Supposedly, they had several value adds, like better NW integration and came with StarOffice (a german company at the time). LISA was the "Linux Installation and System Administration" tool. They called themselves the user friendly Linux, but when my non-techie friend tried it out it was hanging just as often as Windoze.
The only other time I managed to hang Linux was when I was playing around with the Adaptec
My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) Posted Oct 14, 2006 17:15 UTC (Sat) by einstein (subscriber, #2052) [Link] That's a real blast from the past. I actually started with SLS back in 1993. Back then, installing linux was a labor and skill intensive affair. This cool new distro called Slackware came out after that, and by December I was a slacker and stayed with Bob Dobbs for several years. In those pre-netscape days, the internet was all about email, usenet, telnet and ftp. Then this interweb thing started, and we all had this "mosaic" web browser - and other browsers, like arena, grail, amaya, chimera...
Speaking of ftp, does anyone remember archie?
There were other distros - yggdrasil, MCC, TAMU... I finally started using this rehat thing, with their red baron web browser, but I also got the periodic slackware CDs from infomagic. Caldera came out, based on redhat, but they later diverged. They were an interesting distro - I realy liked the tetris game in the installer.
The years went by. I tried debian, turbolinux, mandrake, but continued to run mainly redhat. redhat split, I ran fedora for a while, then jumped ship to suse in 2004, and here we are nearing the end of 2006. How time flies.
My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) Posted Oct 14, 2006 19:04 UTC (Sat) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link] Achie? Yes... And gopher. I've got this little yellow Falk Plan bookexplaining how to use gopher from the unix command line. After all, Falk publishes roadmaps, so it was bound to publish a map to the Digital Highway.
My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) Posted Oct 15, 2006 22:40 UTC (Sun) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link] Achie? Yes... And gopher.Gopher lives on... as webmail. ;-)
My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) Posted Oct 16, 2006 19:33 UTC (Mon) by papik (guest, #15175) [Link] I have a 5-CD Set of InfoMagic of nov 1995. I see Slackware, RedHat endDebian and the mirrors of sunsite.unc.edu and tsx-11.mit.edu.
My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) Posted Oct 14, 2006 17:18 UTC (Sat) by wilreichert (subscriber, #17680) [Link] Slackware, tho not ancient or long forgotten. I jumped in when the 2.0 kernel hit. Guess that about puts me in the 10 year club too.
My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) Posted Oct 14, 2006 19:02 UTC (Sat) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link] I think I started early 1994 -- for some definition of starting. It tookme a month to get X11 to work, one week of said month was spent finding batteries for my pocket calculator to calculate X11 modelines. And it took until 1996 before I moved my uucp node over to Linux from Waffle to Dos, but I started coding on Linux before that. I've got the ancient Linux Journals to prove my pedigree :-). Re-reading them reminds me what fun it was -- every new application, toolkit, library, language was welcomed with a hearty backslap. Though even then the letters page of LJ was full with people saying "Give me only this one little thing, and I can move over to Linux". Quod semper and all that.
Incidentally, it's also KDE's ten year's anniversary!
My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) Posted Oct 14, 2006 21:55 UTC (Sat) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link] Slackware Linux was also my first distro in 1994. I got my first Linux disks in 1993, but my machine had 2MB RAM, and I wasn't interested enough to look whether it was possible to get it to work. I got hooked in 1994. It must have been the first half of 1994, because I remember pretty well that Slackware Linux 2.0.0 got released. I did not have a decent net connection until 2000, so I was very happy with the TSX-11 and sunsite.unc.edu archive discs that were included with the Slack CD sets. The Infomagic CD sets were great too, nice artwork :). My ventures into BSD started in 1994 with FreeBSD 2.1.5.
I can remember the awe of seeing the first KDE Alphas. Not that I planned to run it, but I naively though I could finally promote Linux to others after the first stable KDE was released.
It has been a great ride, and time really flies.
My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) Posted Oct 16, 2006 15:41 UTC (Mon) by jstAusr (guest, #27224) [Link] Yeah!, FreeBSD. I started with MSDOS in the late '80s and really liked the command line. I thought win3.x was a regression and win95 eye candy was cool until I wanted to fix things, got so mad that I was seriously ready to chuck my machine, never to use a computer again. I had heard about the Unix type OSes but with 16MB RAM on a P120 thought they wouldn't work for me (along with the FUD from others who had said "no way, you need a special computer to use UNIX and you need special skills"). Found cgywin(?) which sounded like it might work on a "windows" computer but it promptly overran 400MB of free space on a 1.2 gig disk. Then found FreeBSD, got the floppies thinking there was no way it would work, intalled and got a blank screen with something like ">" at the top thinking at first "well that didn't work, but wait, that looks abit like a command prompt, 'dir enter', hey! there is stuff! it works, it works!" Bought OpenBSD CDs because "it is more secure" and I wanted something to install from in case of disaster. Then switched to Debian GNU/Linux because the GPL protects everyone equally which is an extra for the users and everyone is a user, although some more than others. I'm still happiest when using the command line.
My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) Posted Oct 14, 2006 20:10 UTC (Sat) by etwilson (guest, #8459) [Link] I just had to look up to see when Debian "Bo" was released to figure out how long I've been using Linux. Bo was release in June of '97 so I guess that I've got almost another year before I hit ten with Linux. Working with Linux and other open source products has helped my career immensely, I don't learned half that I have without being able to tinker with this stuff.
My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) Posted Oct 15, 2006 11:55 UTC (Sun) by dambacher (subscriber, #1710) [Link] I just happened to find my old unifix-linux cdrom distribution with kernel 0.99-14s2 .-)
My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) Posted Oct 15, 2006 16:25 UTC (Sun) by komarek (guest, #7295) [Link] Wow, listening to this discussion about early linux brings back a lot of great memories. I started with SLS in 1993 off of (around 30-ish) 5.25" floppies downloaded through kermit at my university. Linux didn't support the serial port on my Packard Hell 386 SuX 20. I tried BSD-386 (or was that 386-BSD) as well (that is, before the split), and it wouldn't boot at all.
My goal was to have multiple telnet windows to university computers, but without a serial port I had no modem. So I gave up (and found a really nice shareware DOS terminal emulator that I should have paid for, started with T..., don't recall).
It wasn't until 1996-ish that I got back to GNU/Linux distros. Somewhere in between, I remember convincing a friend with a *fast* 486-50 to install X, and we had a great time with xroach (back when the roaches were slow enough to be fun). From 1996 to 1999, I used GNU/Linux systems for everything but games and few bits of student-edition math software. In 1999 (Win98), I gave up on Windows for everything.
Yes, I also remember archie, veronica, and what I though of as the "gopher revolution". The first time I saw a "web page" under Mosaic, my comment was "That's nice, but aren't those graphics a waste of bandwidth?" I think the web page might have been "Find The Spam", which you can still see (sometimes) at http://www.smalltime.com/findthespam.html (it's still a waste of bandwidth, but a good waste ;-)
Then there was slip, slirp, and ppp, all of which were discouraged by my university, and requried special permission. And there was X, with instructions on how to configure it "without calling the fire department" (yes, that's a quote, I still have the CD insert). Heck, I remember when I was forced to get a cdrom. I'm only 33, but I feel really old now.
-Paul
My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) Posted Oct 15, 2006 19:23 UTC (Sun) by sholdowa (guest, #34811) [Link] Well, I converted from RSX/VMS to Unix in 1984, and started getting paid to support Linux in 1998. Do I win (:
My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) Posted Oct 16, 2006 10:34 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] Probably, until someone drags Peter da Silva or another of the official USENET Old Unix Hands in here. :)
My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) Posted Oct 16, 2006 17:04 UTC (Mon) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] I was a (junior) system administrator for Unix systems in 1985, so I'm not far behind you. But I don't think that qualifies as Linux history. I started with Linux in October of 1995 with a copy of Slackware which came on a CD with a web server book--and ran it on what I think is the absolute minimum one could have run i386 Linux on--a 16MHz 386sx, retrieved from my employer's attic, where it had been retired some months before, along with a new CDROM drive, Buslogic SCSI controller and 1G external SCSI disk. It had a whopping 8M of RAM (half of which I stole from another equally ancient machine.) Let me assure you, it took a LONG time to compile a kernel on that thing, and exercised the swap partition quite nicely. :-) I think that Slackware version came with kernel version 1.2.13, IIRC. But that machine ran as a UUCP and POP3 server (along with Mac filesharing), for several years, until something finally decided to fail on the motherboard. (I had left by then, and heard about its failure secondhand.)
My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) Posted Oct 16, 2006 17:10 UTC (Mon) by marduk (subscriber, #3831) [Link] I remember my first introduction to Unix was... summer 1988. I was in high school then but taking a Pascal programming class at a local university. They taught us to use the "vi" editor. Having been used to DOS and Apple ][ environments I found vi and the whole Unix environment horrible.
Five years later I'm in college and wanting to get this internship which required Unix knowledge. I spent some time learning Unix from this this really good Unix book but sadly I can't remember the title. This time I fell in love with Unix. Man, the power. It was like DOS on steroids. I remember thinking "If only there was a way to run Unix on a PC". It was around that time that I discovered Linux. I believe my first distro was Slackware. I remember ftp'ing floppy images to install them. Then I bought a Linux book (written by Volkerding, IIRC). That had Slackware on CD. Linux was sexy, powerful and let me do what I wanted to do with my computer.
Thirteen years later Linux is even more sexy and more powerful. It runs on virtually everything and gives you choices with limitless possibilities. I have since moved to Gentoo Linux (after a short afair with Red Hat).
I remember there were so many times I would say or think "Linux will never be able to do *that*" and it seems I'm always taking back those words. Linux seems boundless, limited only by the imagination, skill, and hard work of the individuals who contribute to it. To those people I am very thankful. I'd better stop now before I cry.
My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) Posted Oct 17, 2006 12:22 UTC (Tue) by N0NB (guest, #3407) [Link] It's been 10 years already? Yes it has.
I can say that I've been learning Linux/UNIX for a decade. Believe it or not, my interest was piqued because of a spam post to the alt.music.defleppard group I was subscribed to at the time!
In Sept of '96 I installed Slackware 3.0 off of a loaned CD, but I didn't install X as I didn't have the space. I think I had something like 50 MB free on a partition at the time.
In November of '96 I picked up a copy of the Slackware '96 four CD set at the local music store and installed that over the 3.0 install. I even braved downloading, compiling, and installing a later 2.0 kernel at this time! I think I freed up enough space from my Windows 3.11 install to put Slack '96 on a 150 MB partition! I even shoe-horned X into there.
In early '97 I bought a 1.2 GB hard drive (this was on a 486DX/100 based machine with 12 MB of RAM) and could finally expand the scope of my Linux activities. I wrote my web pages in Linux as Win 3.11 presented too many limitations. By the time I finally got a copy of Win '95 installed in July of '97 I was probably using Linux 40% of the time.
In early '98 I get fed up with Win '95 for some reason (I can't remember exactly why) and decided to go with Linux full time. Other than using Xcel for a tax spreadsheet that spring, I only booted into Win '95 to try and figured out what my then ISP was doing to break the PPP connection.
1998 was the year Linux really stepped out into the spotlight. New sites dedicated to promoting Linux discussion and news appeared. Netscape made news by "open sourcing" their Mozilla browser although it would be 1 1/2 years and a complete rewrite before I was able to use it on a daily basis (around M17 or M18). Star Office became a free download so that solved my need for MS Office and booting into Win '95. By the end of 1998 being able to live on Linux full time was much easier than it had been scant months earlier.
In September of '99 I did my first install of Debian on a leftover laptop (Thinkpad 760 ED) and it all went well except to this day the built in MWave modem and sound are unsupported. The years brought new hardware and the developers have kept pace. These days I hardly worry about hardware compatibility. Over the past several years I have bought a USB digital camera, USB flatbed scanner, USB external CD writer/DVD player, a couple of USB memory sticks and a USB 2.0 card for my desktop machine and it has all "just worked".
I've gone back to using Slackware on a different partition on my T23 laptop for certain development work. Meanwhile, Debian Sid is my primary install on both my laptop and desktop machines. I have used the Live CDs from Knoppix, Kanotix, and Mepis to do various things and have experimented with Slax and other live CDs.
The polish and capability of Free Software now far exceeds anything I could have imagined a decade ago. My thanks to the developers and everyone else that has made this possible. The fun things are still happening here in the Linux Community and I look forward to what the second decade of my involvement with Linux and Free Software brings. It will continue to be fun.
- Nate >>
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