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My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com)
My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com)
Posted Oct 13, 2006 23:46 UTC (Fri) by Erich_J_Ritzmann (subscriber, #39670)Parent article: My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com)
Sheesch, to think I coulda wrote something called my first 13 years with Linux and got linked to
from LWN!
I used Soft Landing Software distro (subtitled: for DOS bailouts), Linux version 0.99.xx -- I
vaguely remember having used two different 0.99.xx releases installed from 1.44m floppy on my
486/50 and being impressed enough to still be using Linux these many years later. Heck, I still
have the set of floppies that I used the second time around, dated 930619. (Though I haven't
booted from them for a while and have forgotten the xx).
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My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com)
Posted Oct 14, 2006 15:44 UTC (Sat) by Ribbit (subscriber, #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 (subscriber, #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
17xx EISA SCSI controller driver. The first version I had to hack to get it to work, and in the
process needed to use the hardware reset -- the only time I thanked Bill Gates for making sure
the reset was on the front of the computer ;-)
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 (subscriber, #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.