My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) [LWN.net]

My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com)

Posted Oct 14, 2006 17:18 UTC (Sat) by wilreichert (subscriber, #17680)
In reply to: My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com) by Ribbit
Parent article: My first 10 years with Linux (Linux.com)

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.

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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 took
me 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.