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What Did You Do First With Linux?
ruphus13 writes "OStatic has an interesting article on remembering the first time you used Linux. Quoting: 'I'm not sure if the admission that I remember my first Linux installation much more clearly than any date with my first boyfriend or my first date with my husband is a really wise thing to put in writing. I will freely admit it wasn't quite as anxiety-inducing as a date, and the long-term relationship that sprang from it taught me quite a bit about myself, how I learn, and how to passionately load kernel modules at boot. So, what was your first Linux experience?'"
Just hunted around. I was trying out different distros.
sudo mount --milk --sugar
I tried to access the floppy drive. Eventually gave up, and re-installed Windows. That was 1998. I finally installed Debian Aug 2006 and it's been running on this machine ever since.
Windows is like a drug addiction. Sometimes it takes several tries to kick it.
...it was a Mini-Linux distribution in size of four floppies which I downloaded from some BBS. This distribution used the UMSDOS file system and could be started from a DOS prompt (didn't have a spart hard drive).
I remember that I even managed to get X working after a while, but to be honest Linux looked for me as a huge step back from OS/2 Warp which I preferred those days.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
The first time I encountered Linux, it was installed on a computer that ran a stadium message board. It was at a part-time job I worked at night.
The first time I used it "seriously" was when I was working with SunOS to mass convert CAD drawings to AutoCAD. I wanted to see if I could use the utilities that we had on SunOS on a free operating system on Intel machines to avoid having to buy more Sun workstations. It worked pretty well!
My first time wasn't even an install it was just a boot of my existing computer. It took way to long to figure out I had to run sudo su to do anything cool, but once that was done I figured out how to use nmap and got friends to do a direct connect via gaim and scanned their computers for them... yeah... for them... :)
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
A boot floppy and stack of floppies, IIRC. Later, more bloated, distros required an entire CD. Getting X running with FVWM as a window manager required going into XF86.conf (or .config?) and hand tweaking mode lines.
Hand hacking the config file for the 28.8k external modem to get online. Downloading Netscape, or maybe still Mosaic?
Then came the fun of getting the USB mouse working by rewriting the USB drivers and running GCC.
Then building my own kernel (a 1.9.x, IIRC) to wring every last space cycle out of the processor, and every last byte out of 4MB.
Installing a second (!) internal hdd, a GB or so, so I could put the swap partition on the non-root drive. For greater performance.
Last week I fired up VMware on my Mac. Pointed it at the Ubuntu DVD ISO. Installed a new VM which worked fine without any tweaking.
I never though Linux would get boring.
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I just remember being thrilled at a command prompt with something other than DOS. Some early Redhat it was. And then getting an X-window up and loving the right-click.
What did I "do"? I just enjoyed the thrill. Late 90's or so.
I remember law students staring at me sideways in 1999 when I booted Caldera on my laptop... just wanted to see how wasy it was to use real-time in class. People still stare funny when they see Linux on a laptop.
I'd heard of Linux while at school, so during summer break I saw a book, "Linux Unleashed" with a copy of the latest Slackware (3.0) at the back. So, I bought the book, took it home, made the boot floppies, and proceeded to blow away the Windows 3.1 and installed Slackware 3.0 on the machine. Took a good 45 minutes (it was a 486SX2-50) but then, I was there. I configured my PPP dialer (took half the time than with Winsock dialer) and logged onto my ISP and proceeded to install ircII to then chat with my friends on IRC. I had an IRC star trek game to attend that weekend, so I logged into DALNet and then went to play my game, all the while enjoying the B&W plain jane interface. Then I flipped through the book and found the page talking about virtual terminals. ALT+F2 and BAM, I was then using Lynx to browse the web at the same time. I was in hog heaven. ALT+F3 and I was learning how to make an Xconfiguration script to try and turn on the GUI. then the magical moments, I typed startx.... and 5 minutes later fvwm came up! Rediculously slow compared to today, but compared to Win3.1 and OS/2 2.11, I was loving every moment of it.
I still have the hard drive from that old machine, still sporting Slackware 3.0 on it, with the 1.0.13 kernel in all of its glory residing as vmlinuz.orig.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
I had to copy the files onto a hard drive, change the ownership with chown and then install it on an HP 486 based machine with 2 GB hard drive and 48 MB of RAM. It was Red Hat 5.0. After I had it installed I just played around inside it to see how various things worked since I was so unfamiliar with the programs in it. That was January 1998. I had it running but could not do any work with it. Now all the distributions are work ready from my experience in downloading and trying many of them with a spare computer.
First time was kind of mandated by moneyless employer. With my own Windows Compaq laptop in hand, I flew to Atlanta and was greeted by a bunch of old Unix hippies. I was to write PHP/miniSQL code for them but had only one computer to do it on, mine. Problem was that I had windows and they wanted me to run RH. So, I totally wiped my machine and installed RH. Even at that time (years ago), I had no problem getting Red Hat installed (5.2?) on my presario.
Ever since then my tolerance of Windows has been in nothing but decline.
Long live The Penguin!!
-- A cat is no trade for integrity!
That I don't think I ever got to work, followed by either SUSE or Caldera, which I did get work, but didn't really find anything much to do with either of them. Red hat in 97 or so was the first time I used Linux for any practical purposes.
I downloaded (via FTP - since the web was barely born) Linux v0.97 kernel, tools, C-compiler, etc. in 1992 for just one reason... to play the curses-text game "rogue"
And today... I'm going to be downloading Jaunty Jackalope (yes, sorry I'm late) Ubuntu and likely playing nethack (based on rogue) later this afternoon.
Things never change
Here's a Usenet post from me in 1992 bitching about "I DON'T WANT TO HACK THE KERNEL"
http://groups.google.ca/group/comp.os.linux/browse_thread/thread/46815c0980f82296/458335391bd59a18?hl=en&q=dzubin+linux+linus
Back in 1992 when I first started off with Linux, you downloaded two floppy images... you booted off one and halfway through the boot process you swapped disks...
Since I lived in Victoria, Canada at the time, I was able to get the first distribution of a "packaged" ready-to-run Linux called SLS
Later, I started using Slackware and kept using it until Ubuntu 6
Thomas Dzubin
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
I can't remember exactly, but it was most probably either of these two:
On both occasions, my hands were shivering just of the thought of messing around on command line, it seemed so "new" and exciting!
I remember my first... I was part of a small dialup IP access trial in early 1991 using SLIP. The office wouldn't pay for a TCP/IP stack for home use, so I scoured the bazaars for something that would work. I ftp'd 33 diskette images from tsx-11.mit.edu and zmodem'd them to a Dell 486M - it was a .99pl3 kernel (!!!) (may have been Slackware - can't remember) ... It was a trial by fire - doing the install, then learning to patch the kernel to add SLIP... Worked great. A year later, I discovered that I was the only one in the trial group using IP to the remote desktop, since the others were using Windows...
Downloaded slackware 0.99.14 via the computer club at the local uni, back in 92-93. Remember it was around 30 floppies which basically took a whole weekend to install on my 386SX 20Mhz. I got X running on that machine, but basically stayed in text mode. It was used as a glorified terminal to dial into the uni to access different MUDs and IRC. Then I got ahold of a real serial terminal instead that I hooked up to the modem. It didnt make any noise at night, so my parents wouldnt wake up.
Those were the days, now I got 100/100Mbit fiber directly to the house (in Sweden).
English is not my first language, so cut me some slack -: Om du kan lasa det har sa kan du Svenska
Bought a PS3 and found out it could run linux. So, I installed intrepid ibex and loved it! If only I could figure out how to triple boot my MacBookPro...
Up to that point, I never thought of myself in any way, shape or form as a logical thinker. In some sense, I'm really not. But I learned something about myself. I learned that things go wrong in even completely logical settings for no apparent reason -- but there is a reason, and searching it down, identifying it, and solving it is actually fun and rewarding. I can't write code, but I am quite skilled in digging around in it and bending it to my will -- something I never dreamed I'd like doing.
I must say that using Linux (manpages and all) has taught me a stack of confidence, logical thinking, problem solving skills etc as well as a lot about computers in general and how they run. I even run a PC repair business now as well as setting up free Linux boxes for disadvantaged students.
Has anyone else found that using Linux has really helped them develop personally in this way?
sudo mount --milk --sugar
Caldera (before the turn to the dark side) in a 1 G partition on the family desktop.
...
I kept practically everything on the much bigger Win 98 partition and mounted it at boot.
Second install was an ancient incarnation of RedHat (6 I think) on an old Toshiba laptop.
Had to use framebuffer for the graphics for months before I got X to run properly.
It was great.
I've never used Windows since.
Installing modern distros is just too easy
Aberrations have appeared in my destiny prognostication engine!
The first version of Linux I played with was Caldera 1.3. Not a bad experience as I even managed to get X working. Had an internal 3Comn (USR) hardware modem that I actually managed to get working, which impressed me. Only reason I didn't stick with it at the time was the other family members who also used the computer. Next was a book on Linux that included RH 5 and Star Office 4 and when I finally got a 100M zip drive, I gave Zip Slack a try. Currently I'm using Gentoo since 2003 though I've been forced to switch between Linux and Windows due to school needs. My current setup is pure Gentoo with XP in a VBox 2.1.4 VM for those apps that simply don't have Linux versions.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
How about before that, trying to get the kernel to compile before there was a way to install it.
If you *must* insist, i guess i remember bit editing the kernel so it would boot off HD instead of floppy.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
First time for me was March 1995, I got a slackware on CD, but could not install it directly because the CD-ROM drive (Philips proprietary interface) was not supported. I copied everything to floppy, using MS-DOS, and installed the full set. Almost. Well, not really... I installed all that would fit on a 120MB hard disk, and I was really excited. Then I got to the command line, and typed "X", and waited...
Second step was obvious: compile a new kernel (1.2.x). It took about 10 hours.
Third step: I started waiting for other software to install on it (and in the meantime I learned emacs).
My first Linux experience was back in the day with SuSe 6.0, bought that in a bookstore with a fat manual (that was useless to me) and tried to install it when my Windows 98 SE had one of it's breakdowns. After fiddling with the installer and things for hours I couldn't get my soundcard to work and had nothing really productive to do with the system (note that "productive" back then meant playing Counterstrike). Since the sound didn't work so I couldn't listen to music, I couldn't get online because I didn't figure out how to dial-up and no game would even install I went running back to Windows. I was 16 and very silly at the time :P
In the meantime I had my "real" first time with Ubuntu Dapper and it was a fullblown success. I switched to Linux immediately and faded out Windows over the course of three months. So far I don't play that much at all anymore and mostly do Internet related filesharing and open source stuff.
The old saying is true, I guess, the first time is almost always horrible and forgettable.
Installed one distro. Sucked. Installed another. Sucked. Tried bootstrapping Gentoo. Failed. Installed Solaris. Sucked. Installed FreeBSD. Done.
Slackware, w/ 0.99 kernel w/ some long forgotten patch level. We were using SCO for named and some mail services, and even then I guess we knew we wanted to get out of that. Actually, just wanted a second name server on site, and didn't want to put out the dollars for SCO plus the TCP add-on software module. If you can imagine a flavour of *nix that actually offered TCP/IP as an option. Today it just seems absurd.
A whole bunch of floppies and rawrite. Later, tried the network based install and it actually worked. We were pretty impressed by that.
[17] Leary, T., White, C., Wood, P. R., Bhabha, W. D., and Wirth, N. Lambda calculus considered harmful. In Proceedings
It was Red Hat 6 on a pc.... it was really annoying, nothing worked.
Couple of years later: ubuntu. everything worked.
Though that was on a macbook.
The main hurdle was getting through the IIS proxy with NTLM auth, but didn't get into it
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
have been trying to get ubuntu and kubuntu installed on my comp since 7.04 each time i end up without a bootloader when i do get a bootloader,and manage to boot, the comp just hangs on the blank desktop screen, showing nothing except the wallpaper all this only when i am able to get past the partitioning wizard or use gparted to partition my HDD however it has saved me a lot of headache as well for some reason windows failed to boot and i had some critical files on the comp simply booted from live cd and copied them off to a USB, formatted and reinstalled windows have also used it to replace corrupted files in some windows installations will try the installation process again with 9.04, hopefully it will be successful config: P4 3.0Ghz with HT 512MB RAM ATI x200 integrated graphics intel D101GGC motherboard
... so that I could google the errors that I got. Why did I reboot? Because none of my network devices worked.
The last time I installed Linux, on a Dell laptop, Ubuntu this time, same damn thing.
It'll be great when 100% of Linux installs can be done without a 2nd OS installed or another computer.
You FOSS guys owe me 24 hours of my life back.
This did not inspire confidence, but I stuck with it anyway.
I remember everything leading up to it. . .
I was told after years of refinement, all the problems with Linux had finally been worked out. It was now easy to install, easy to use. Grandma could now use it. The buzz was everywhere, it was finally going to be Year Of The Linux Desktop.
I'd given up my beloved Amiga, and I found that Windows seemed like a step backwards, so I was ready to try something different.
So, I got the latest release of the most popular distro -- that would have been about Red Hat 4.0, I reckon -- and installed it on my home-built PC.
I lost interest after I couldn't figure out how to change screen resolutions, and I couldn't get audio without recompiling a bunch of stuff.
I ended up buying one of those newfangled "iMac" things from Beleaguered Apple.
The Solaris systems almost didn't have any GUI, except for Firefox. We were searching for a topic for the CS 101 project and downloaded a compressed file in the process. I spent around an hour on going about how to extract the files from the archive. It was a nightmare. Later I took on to Linux pretty well, although never shifted to it full-time because of my addiction to PES.
Here is my account of finding Linux, more specifically finding the command line.
My first install was Slackware back in '95. I had no idea why I was installing it, but I knew that I would be 7337 if I had it. I spent countless hours trying to find enough blank and bad-sectorless floppies to rawrite the disk images. Then, on disk 11 of 12, I'd have to start all over because the floppy had was unreadable for some reason. That was awesome.
Once it was installed, I had no idea what to do with it other than try to get X to run so I could watch the awesome Swarm screen saver I had seen at a friends house. I'm pretty sure that install only lasted a couple of weeks.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
Was a jump from Windows 98SE to Slackware 7.
The horrible times trying to exit xconf in pico ... just wishing that "edit.com" would magically work in this new environment.
I still have nightmares trying to get X working properly.
I bought SUSE Linux together with a new computer in a small shop near my home.
I specifically asked for it, since I was going to go to the university, and I needed a Unix-like system for my studies, to practice at home and work on assignments, without having to always go to the computer labs, where DEC machines and terminals were available.
The guys in the shop installed the OS for me, so I had everything already working. No network connection btw.
I started messing around, and soon discovered that a game called "nethack" was installed.
It blew my mind.
I destroyed the install pretty quickly. This was 1997 installing MkLinux on a PowerMac 6100. I was trying to get X11 to work and I hosed the install with my non-knowledge of vi. Installs go much better these days.
I really can't believe you had to ask!
Midnight commander on a live Debian CD from the back of upgrading and repairing networks.
It was the most magical thing ever. I could browse the windows 98 partition from the cd.
I remember installing a really early release of enlightenment on slackware on a pentium 1 laptop with 16mb of ram.
I used it to type papers for college using dosemu and a pirated copy of wordperfect. I also started reading slashdot at that time, but forgot my login so I always post as anon nowadays.
My first linux install was when ubuntu 6.06 was pretty new. I guess I wanted to try something new on my laptop and a friend recommended it. I've been using Ubuntu on my laptop ever since. My home-server started out with debian for a while but I prefer to be a bit closer to the cutting edge so now it runs xubuntu.
I first spent a few days trying to find the right drivers, then I gave up and reverted to Windows. I tried again five years later with Ubuntu and had even more driver problems!
I had tried SUSE Linux 7.1 for the first time and I was so enthusiastic about it I bought a copy, rushed home to install it on my PC and went about setting up the partitions manually.
I'd already put three Windows partitions on that machine, so of course I was an expert in partitioning. What could possibly go wrong?
What went wrong was that I entered the same value for the end of one partition and the start of the next (like: 5000, 5000 when it should have been 5000, 5001) and I lost access to all three Windows partitions.
Shortly afterwards, I remembered I had a college project on one of those partitions. :(
I set up a webserver with Slackware. In 1994, on a 486 (DX50!). Sure beat the proprietary BSDi, even though I preferred BSD (which we ran as SunOS4). Because Usenet was full of Linux people who not only happily answered technical questions, but actually knew what they were talking about most of the time, for free.
--
make install -not war
Things have improved since the old days... although I did recently dig out a mid-90s laptop and install Debian 1.1 on it. It took less than two hours with a stack of floppies and some perseverance with dd on the host machine. I was pleasantly surprised: the TUI was incredibly easy to use for its time.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
1993
386DX40
4 MB of very expensive RAM
345 MB Maxtor hard-drive
Stack of floppies that had been downloaded over BBS/FidoNet with a 14.4 kbps telephone modem
Linux kernel version was something like 0.97 or so.
I'm not sure if my first try was with Slackware, SLS, or who knows what.
It was at that time that I fell in love with the UNIX way of doing things. It was like an OS written just for programmers.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
My first foray into linux was the MCC interim release on October 1992 whilst at Manchester University. I installed it on a 40Meg Partition on my 386DX25 and the reason was to allow me to do the programming course works without been tied to going into the Unix computer lab. I still remember using 0.95 of the linux kernel and remember the excitement on the course when 1.0 of the linux kernel was released. Ah them were the days. Memories..............
I was tempted by a linuxppc cd in the computer store and thought I would check it out for my old iMac. I remember being horrified by getting 8 colors when first booting up. I don't know how many hours it took for my to figure things out (using lynx in console mode), but eventually I moved on up to compiling gentoo and now settling for xubuntu.
That was 92 or 93, I guess, I was entering high school. Pre-1.0 kernel.
Installed, and tried to connect to my bbs. What, do I need to use the terminal do connect and use? Terminal was for REXX stuff! No BlueWave?
So I went back to OS/2 and ZOC, I guess.
My first Linux was used as a dialup router. Though no one TOLD me I could do this, I somehow knew Linux of the day was perfectly capable of doing it.
At the time, Windows couldn't do it. It was the era of Windows 3.11 for workgroups and Windows95. I had more than one machine and I wanted not only to share data between the two machines, but also have both machines on the internet. Dialup was the only method of access to me at the time and I couldn't have one machine on the net and communication with the other machine or use its shared printer or anything useful at the same time. I gave pizza and alcohol to a minor to get him to show me how this is done. (I learn best by example) And once we had the machine running, it was dialing out to the internet and would redial on disconnection and it was awesome.
I gradually expanded the capability of the dialup router to include other server functions and my knowledge grew with it. Back in those days, kernel hacking and patching was the norm and so I found myself doing that as well.
My first experience with anything GUI on Linux was abysmal. It was slow and crappy and "felt wrong." Back in those days, I used my weakest hardware for Linux and my best for Windows. (Today that situation is reversed.) I didn't seriously use Linux for anything desktop until many years later and even then it was secondary to Windows because of the asian language support. But one day that changed too.
my first experience with Linux was that it didn't work. my second, third, fourth and fifth experiences, each with about a year between them and the last one Ubunti 08.04, were all the same. every time you read that Linux has now become so easy it works out of the box, and yet every time on my hardware (which changes over time) there is some component that just doesn't work (unless you're already a Linux adept or are prepared to invest hours of your time) - usually the wireless network. that's what the Linux experiene is like for me, and for many other people I bet.
I remember having installed Suse 5.1 and was trying to connect with a 33.6k modem. Good old times with pppd :)
Mine was the with Slackware, i have no idea which version; but it came with the Boot magazine CD. I remember it was almost like the old C64 days of basic, having to type in lot's of command to get it to work... From there I moved to Red Hat, and have loved Linux ever since :)
Answer: Installing.
And then?
Installing.
Well, and then?
Well... installing. Then Portage broke.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
In 1992, we had ultrasonic inspection software running under HPUX. The improving performance of PCs made the HP hardware and HPUX licence way over priced. Others in our group had lost a half year trying to port to Windows. I ported the entire application to Redhat 4.2 in about a week and never looked back.
I scream as my files refuse to unpack, at the sarcastic answers of linux forum people when i ask how, then I reinstall Windows. Im trying Ubuntu this time though!
For about 11 hours, iirc.
Then the installer continued...
I installed SUSE the first time. Mucked around a bit, liked it, but went back to Windows, due to not wanting to spend time setting it up.
It took Ubuntu being released for me to finally up and move. It really was a turning point in being usable the moment you started it.
Ironically, I now run Arch, which took ages to set up.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Seriously though, I did everything. Got my first 32 bit PC (386DX25) and immediately put Slackware 2 on it. Not my first Unix though, even 32-bit; I'd had a 3/260 with 4.1.1 which I upgraded to a 4/260 with 4.1.3. BSD-based SunOS, how I loved thee.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
i actually payed like $20 for it at bestbuy or comp usa. the first thing i tried was to do was get a working modem (i didnt know about winmodem problems back then-should have rtfm).
and becuase i was too clueless to get that resolved-XP went back in to satisfy the then girlfriends chatroom obsession...
"You can kill the revolutionary, but you can't kill the revolution."-- Fred Hampton
I did an early testdrive on an old 486/33 box, to compare it to HURD's absolutely broken installation toolkit. It was awkward compared to modern distros, certainly, but the fact that it installed and gave me a full GNU toolchain was very exciting. It wasn't stable enough yet for business operation, but the fact that the kernel did what it needed to do in a basic install was the missing component of full free software distributions, and this was very exciting for political and business reasons.
My first experience with linux was playing around with Mandrake, and within half an hour I learned having to type 'YES' (completely, in caps) means I probably don't know what I'm doing and should stop doing it right now.
(Yes, of course I typed it anyway and had to reinstall :p)
**TODO** [X] Steal someone elses sig.
The first memory that I had was trying to login as the administrator.
Nobody told me that the root account login name was root.
I went back to Windows 95 after that.
_________________
Simon
In 1998, a friend was buying a new computer and had a few parts available from his old system:
Pentium I 133Mhz
128MB RAM
we bought an 8GB drive, and bought a boxed copy of Red Hat 5.2 (because we needed SSL and you couldn't download SSL then, or so we thought).
We configured the server and co-located it with a local ISP. We ended up with 20 servers and 10 employees before hitting the wall in 2002 and selling for pennies on the dollar.
I'm still running my own servers, but now I used dedicated servers spread out at various ISPs. Not much has changed, though.
I set up a UUCP Fidonet gateway. Which is probably not the most normal thing.... this was back in 92 though, when installing X meant a bunch of extra 1.44MB floppies!
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
My first experience was with HP-UX in November 1995 at the University lab. I remember thinking that the hardware looks ancient, the command line didn't accept "dir" and the concept of moving files to rename them was a little odd. I do remember enjoying the possible window managers (fvwm95 was the one of choice in the end) and using "--display" to lock other peoples terminals or display hundreds of xeyes.
My first experience of Linux was some ancient version of Slackware a uni friend (Pete) loaded onto his PC in the dorms in 1996. They were owned by the uni and close to the labs, so it had wired access to every room. Outside of the city (where the rest of the digs were) you didn't get such luxury. It was called "Cameron" (after Diaz, I think) and had the IP address 138.253.85.33 which, oddly, is ingrained in my head to this day as it was the only way we could telnet to it.
We persuaded him to keep it running as a server and even managed to load an ewtoo based talker onto there. Although it was always quite amusing that he had to shut it down a couple of evenings a week to boot into Windows so he could write his dissertation.
My first personal experience of Linux was loading Redhat 5.2 onto my brand new Pentium 133 which I bought for the second year. It was in a shared house in Liverpool that I dual booted Windows 95 and Redhat - eventually moving on to triple boot NT4, Windows 95 (for games) and Redhat for uni work. I remember editing /etc/fstab to get the various partitions to be seen - something we take for granted now.
I stuck with Redhat for a couple of years before realising that I didn't boot into Linux often enough to make it worthwhile. I dabbled with Ubuntu on an ancient IBM laptop but it never really worked properly. These days I find that XP and Cygwin does everything I need. At some point, I may buy a Mac.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
The very first time I used linux was in the @Home days. Inside the box with the cable modem was a turbolinux install cd, it was the very first I had heard of linux. Tried installing it, but the installer locked up. There was some incompatibility with my motherboard.
A couple years later I was completely bored with windows, having to reinstall it every couple weeks(this was win98). Every few weeks the driver for my ide controller would fail leaving me cdromless. On top of that, I was trying to rip all my cds to my hard drive. I had three cdroms and was determined to have all of them going at the same time. I could never get all three to work for longer than ten minutes at a time. Between that, and massive gnutella downloads going at the same time my hard drive would become so horribly fragmented that I couldn't even view the contents of a directory.
In absolute boredom as I had no use for my computer running windows, I downloaded Mandrake(the first choice at linux.com). It installed in 10 minutes and detected all my hardware perfectly. Contrasting with windows, everytime I reinstalled I had to spend hours loading up drivers.
I was able to rip all my music in three days. After this was completed without incident I stared at my computer for about 4 weeks trying to figure out what to do. I had spent so many years just fixing Windows that I had no idea what to do with a computer that actually just worked.
I've never looked back, or missed any of the software that only runs on windows. Whenever friends and family ask me for advice, I just tell them I don't use windows anymore and don't know.
---------- Open Source is capitalism applied to IP.
I lived in Sweden, which at the time didn't have any public internet on offer. I got a couple of boxes of diskettes mailed from a friend of mine who lived in anouther country. If I remember correctly, the kernel version was 0.98.
I installed it, used it and havn't really looked back since, until 2002/2003 I defected to Apple. They have a monolithic GDI. Something Linux sorely lacks.
The X-Server has lived its lifetime. It's time to kill it off, and bring something that actually brings the Linux graphical front end into the present time. (And before you bash me, no, servers should NOT be running a graphics server)
This signature is DRM protected. By the DMCA, you are not allowed to counteract or oppose to it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Lets just say early '90s running Slackware using 3 ZyXEL modems and Vgetty for my home office voicemail system.
The whole point of the article is to tell what he did with linux when he first installed it. I read the whole article and he never did anything! I was waiting to hear that he actually did something with this linux install other than just getting it to run. No mention of any apps he checked out, how he felt about the desktop, nothing. I mean, what entirely is the point of this article? "I installed linux, got it to run, and never looked back." Whoopdeedoo. For the record, I first started out with debian and would always be stuck installing from floppies and then grabbing packages with a modem. Since I had older hardware (even then at the time) BASH was my desktop and then ZSH for a period of time. I always thought that textmode linux rocked (I still do) and is probably one of the strongest features of UNIX in general. I guess the first thing I ran was telnet, so I could get on a shell and irc for a while. See, this guy installed linux in 2001, and I've been using it off and on since, what 1997? Debian has always been my favorite distro by far and I've always liked Ubuntu by extension.
zosxavius photography
Learned to convert integer to string
R command line was heaven
Typing till my fingers were red
It was the summer of 2007
Installed Dapper Drake for school
For a project that was real hard
Set up gedit for typesetting
LaTeX documents look best by far
Oh when I look back now
Hardware problems seemed to take for ever
And if I'd had the choice
I would not have bought a Broadcom wireless card
Those were the best days of my life
Why won't my mp3 files play?
Why do I have to apt-get and then install?
I can't figure out how to set my resolution
Gotta learn this system by fall
Tedious tasks made fast
By learning how to script in bash
But Nautilus freezes on me
Every time I open the Trash!
Those were the best days of my life
Back in the summer of 2007
Googling errors messages
Ubuntu community helpful
I needed to reinstall
I guess nothing can last forever, forever, no
And now at version 9.04
Look at everything that's come and gone
Sometimes when I think about ol' 6.06
Wonder how I stuck with it so long
Now my desktop runs only Ubuntu
But my laptop still dualboots Vista
Once projector support is 100%
Then I'll say hasta la vista
These are the best days of my life
It's the summer of 2009
My first time running Linux was before the whole concept of "distributions" had even really caught hold. Back then, you downloaded a "boot disk" (a floppy disk that contained the kernel) and a "root disk" (a second floppy containing a few basic UNIX utilities.) If you wanted a hard drive installation, you used this to format your hard drive, then copied the contents of the root disk over to the hard drive over. This was before LILO, so booting off the hard drive was not supported.
Now, this was not the Linux we have today. No X-windows. No networking. No kernel modules. Driver support was ridiculously limited. But it was the first free Linux I'd ever found, and I was psyched to have it.
Then along came a couple of distros and this all began to change very fast. First distro I ever used was "SLS". (There was another one, IIRC, called "MLM" or something like that. But I never used it.) SLS was a lot like Slackware or, more accurately, Slackware is a lot like SLS--originally, Slackware was just an extention of some of SLS's basic concepts.
One thing all these early distros had in common was they came on floppies. Yes, Virginia, 1.44MB floppies. In fact, if I remember right, I think SLS would even work on 1.2MB 5.25" floppies. This was before CDR's were readily available, and I remember ... not fondly ... sitting in the Sun lab at college with literally 30-40 floppies downloading the latest Slackware, one disk at a time. And if one floppy had one fault on it, you had to go back to school the next day and redownload the image. Pain in the ass doesn't even begin to cover it.
Eventually I abandoned Slackware for Redhat, which I stuck with until Redhat abandoned being free for the whole Fedora nightmare. I found Fedora to be junk, so I decided to try Debian, as I had been meaning to do for years. Tried Debian, loved it. Then eventually switched to Ubuntu as a more "polished" version of Debian.
Man I feel old. I guess I've been using Linux for over 15 years now. Wow.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Unfortunately I don't have any experiences like the OP but for me it was Slackware 10. I think I chose this as I had read it was good for learning the in and outs of linux... I didn't feel like trying anything else so I stayed with it for a while before switching back to windows when I got into college. So I had the general impression anything on linux to install anything you had to download the tarball do the "./configure", "make", "make install" ritual, and run startx for the GUI. I thought it was quite retro.
Finally I made the jump when I moved across the country 3 years ago; I had nothing so I decided on openSUSE 10 and have been pretty happy with it since. I also work with CentOS systems so I'm pretty much a RedHat person.
Red Hat 6.0 in August/September 1999. I don't remember the very first things I did, but after about a week I recompiled the kernel succesfully. I also recall thinking that, during that one week with Linux, I learned more about computers than I'd done during the many years with DOS and Windows before that.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
No, seriously.
I first used Linux to replace the RADIUS server that would crash on a Win NT. One by one most of our ISP functions failed on Windoz and were migrated to Linux. The Linux boxes didn't break. This started in 1996.
My biggest problem was trying to get the kernel (0.x?) to recognise my bloody CDROM drive... (lots of screaming tantrums, bi-polar inducing maniacal bashing of keyboard resulting in a shower of pop-corn-keys, tears and gnashing of teeth down to the pulp, but fuckit, I rabidly refused to give up and kept returning for more).
I remember oscillating between eye-twitching dopamine drenched euphoria when something worked, and fuck-this-shit frustration.
I vividly remember finally (many, many weeks later) getting X (openwin?) to run properly and setting up my white-on-black terminals with a nice font (lucida-sans?) so it looked as close as possible to SUN's terminals (which was my first exp with UNIX).
ahh, then GCC. It was such a pleasure using a decent C compiler (for free). I eventually managed to compile GCC on Solaris (SUNOS/SPARCstation). I recall all the compiled binaries were smaller (stripped), faster and compiled quicker compared to SUN's C compiler.
Glory days.
It was 1994. I was using OS/2 on my machine at that time. At university we had DEC Ultrix ans OSF and so I configured my OS/2 in a way so it would look similar to those machines (xeyes,xbiff etc). Then a friend told me that there was something new available, a slackware distribution lying around on the universities FTP server. So I got there with 50 floppies and copied images.
These Ultirx machines were a real mess, because copying to a floppy was always successful and errors were suppressed. And a quick verify would not reread the floppy. So you had to remove the floppy fill another and then go back and do the check.
But after a week I had a working linux at home and was able to have the exact same feeling. I could use gcc and there was really documentation available for everything. LaTeX, emacs all in their nativ environment. And yes it was able to use this new thing called internet via modem. It was cool.
My flat mate envied me because his WfW was not so good at it. Especially when he saw that I can use my computer as a gateway for his machine. However, he didn't switch to Linux, which was very strange for a computer science student in those days. All the good guys tried it out and the wimps didn't. ;-)
In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centuari were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.
And yes, people tried to talk about important things on the net, like router setups and the best bars in New Zealand even though they never left their country. But nowadays every jerk is able to surf the web. It is a tragedy.
I downloaded a Knoppix 3.3 CD one week while I had access to decent bandwidth.
Then I played Frozen Bubble for hours, until I got kicked off the PC.
My first Linux encounter was with Slackware. A friend had it on 5 1/4 inch floppies, and showed me an installation. I was interested, but didn't see it as practical for me compared to DOS and Windows. I didn't switch my own computer over until quite a few years later when I got Redhat on CD from a computer swap meet - I have no idea what version it was, but it was a few years before Fedora Core. Over the years I've gradually changed from being interested in every technical detail and willing to configure endlessly to just wanting something that works - now I'm annoyed if a distro doesn't just automatically detect and work with all my hardware. I use Ubuntu at home and at work, and I'm still impressed by how smooth it all is.
My first experience with a Unix like OS running on a PC was a then new OS called Minix. The lecturer for our Operating Systems subject at uni showed it to the class and encouraged us to try it out. I looked at it and it thought it was cool, but that was about all.
A friend had me try fedora a couple of days before the core 3 release. Back then, I only used PCs for web and email (which it worked perfectly for), then, after learning more about Linux and computers in general, I've been distro-hopping for a while before settling on Debian and Arch.
I kinda installed linux because it was cool.
After that I had no idea what to do with it... run open office? Learn Perl? I ended up getting WAY more into GIMP than I thought I would, that's what took up most of my time, I had to make myself cool new penguin-y backgrounds.
spacefem.com
I downloaded it to 5.25 inch floppy from "tsx-11" using a whole row of computers in the south-sci computer lab at CSU Hayward. Having been previously jaded by waiting several years for the 386BSD project to be useable, I had low expectations.
I was pleasantly surprised. 0.95b brought in the parallel port driver, and I could make my printer work. DOS got ditched.
By 0.97 I was writing science software, and needed a more polished platform. I bought a used Sun and moved on. I checked in now and again, but never recaptured the thrill of those 0.95 - 0.96 kernels. It took Linux another 10 years to catch Solaris. Now days I use Centos & Ubuntu for desktop and commodity server duty, and only reach for Solaris for large high-scale server applications.
Not anything complex, just for playing my MP3's without freezes or crashes when playing games on my windows machine. Old PC with linux, as I learned more and more it more and more became my desktop. Browser that didn't crash. Text-editor that didn't crash. P2P that didn't crash.
The odd thing? I am typing this on Vista but in a NXclient running on a linux machine. It saves the space of two desktops, gives me big screen access to my old linux machine and even if Vista crashes NXclient every now and then, it just resumes.
Vista, you still stuck. Linux just keeps getting better and better. (Why Vista? Needed 64bit for 8gig of memory and DX10 as well)
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Ok, that wasn't my first meet up with Linux. I had tried MANY live CDs of KDE3 based live distro which were cool to play with (I enjoyed Enigma) but took an entire day to customize and by the time I had it tweaked to my likings the day was over and I had to shut down the computer.
A few yearI tried Ubuntu 7.04 and saw Gnome. The first impression was negative: so little room for tinkering and configuration... then I realised that it actually a good thing, I just liked the look and feel of the desktop. However that wasn't enough yet.
Then I found out about this compiz thing... nice but not a deal sealer.
Finally I discovered apt. Oh My Holy God. That blew my socks off. A few weeks later I finally figured out how to resize the NTFS partition (for some reason gparted didn't want to help me) and installed it.
Now I use as much Windows (XP) as much Ubuntu (9.04 since alpha6). The ratio has been swinging, but each side of the dualboot has its perks and it's nice to be able to get the best of the two.
When ideas fail, words become very handy.
Mostly used for connecting to various online services. Though it was really nice to have something which didn't crash on an hourly basis.
Deleted
This thread actually made me walk over to my cd cupboard. I am now holding a 6-year-old SuSE Linux Professional 8.2 box in my hands. A friend, an IT Professional gave it to me, cos he no longer needed it. At that time I used it mainly to do my homework on, with Windows for gaming. So yeah, the first thing I did on Linux was my homework ^^
I started using linux 6+ years ago because the computer I was assigned to when I started grad school was a debian machine. Not bad, had some bugs. It reminded me of my first date, I didn't ask it to do anything it didn't want to do and it didn't run away screaming. Along that same vein I didn't know what was going on and was too scared to ask. But eventually I came to roughly understand.
Then two years later, it happened. Like any geeks wet dream, I got to second base and duel booted my Toshiba laptop with debian. I found myself getting sucked in more and more, I didn't just want more I had to have it. Bit by bit, I stopped using windows for anything. Then after about a year after that I went all the way, when I purchased a low end machine for $100 and wiped windows and did an install of ubuntu (Warty). That eventually lead to admining and building my own machine.
However now that I've graduated and working with OSX, I feel like I'm cheating on the old girl with the attractive secretary. What can you do? A man has his needs.
Here is is hoping for another 5+ years of happiness even with the occasional exploration.
ugh. i bought Slackware at a computer show for about $20 or so. installed it on a 486 with a Pentium Overdrive chip clocked at 83mhz. The first thing I did wass read howtos on how to use minicom to dialup to the internet, then use a ppp script to authenticate and negotiate. after getting the machine online, the first thing to do was to install IrcII heh. of course after an hour or so of compiling I was finally able to chat with my buddies. back then the kernel was 2.0.36 and my friends were able to teach me to use ipfwadm. at the same computer show I purchased Linux, I also purchased my first 10baseT networking hub, some network cards, and some cat5 cables. I was sharing my dialup connection with the other Windows computers in my house using Linux as the router. I remember hating XFree86 because I thought fvwm95 was my only choice. being introduced to wmaker made me very happy after that. essentially Linux was my guide to general networking and I'm very thankful for it. even though slackware sucks. that little bit of knowledge with networking helped me to get employed at a local ISP who ran Linux on some amazing Alpha 533's running 64bit Redhat.. I learned a lot about radius, authd, DNS, HTTPD, and much more.. I'd be pretty screwed today if it wasn't for slackware :-)
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
Actually I think I first met GNOME first on a Debian live CD.
When ideas fail, words become very handy.
I made it look like windows xp.
I bought an old PC for £30 from ebay, found the motherboard didn't work. The seller was decent so they sent me another PC which did work so I then got to put the extra ram and hard drive into the new PC making it a little nicer.
I installed slackware on it just to see what it was like. It worked fairly nicely once I had found out that you need to run the startx to get away from the scary command prompt which filled the screen. I never really did much on it since I had no internet connection but I taught me a little.
I then played around with various live CD's and installed a few distro's in Virtualbox on my main PC. Eventually in February this year I installed Ubuntu on my main machine dual booting with XP. I have booted into XP about 5 times since then and am now very happy with my system. And of course I had my first OS upgrade on Thursday.
Let's see... either 1992 or 1993... it was one of the very first commercial Linux distros (Yggdrasil, IIRC). About 30 floppies in the stack, and it came with Motif so we could port our HP-UX applications (although it was mostly intended to be just another X head). I believe the system was a Dell 386DX with 8MB of RAM.
For a while we also had Solaris x86 running on it. The system was eventually stolen from the office. I'd like to think it was one of the first computer thieves to encounter a Linux boot prompt.
My next Linux install was in 1995, on an old Micro Channel 386SX. That was a classic install where you had to build a custom kernel, write your own network driver, etc. This led me to reboot the defunct MCA Linux project.
c.
Log in or piss off.
So I bought a PC - a DX4/66 and an Ethernet card (ne2K) 280MB drive and I think 32MB of RAM. Loaded the tape onto one of the sun servers we had, NFS exported the partition, wrote a boot floppy and I think 5 more root floppys, booted the PC and did the install, initially off the floppys then via NFS.
Half an hour later I had a PC running Linux, X and fvwm and it was more usable and faster than the X windows terminals I was using on the Suns we had.
Back in the UK some months later and I switched to what was then an embryonic Debian and the rest is history...
So the first thing I did with it was marvel at just how good it was! I had my own "unix" box. How cool was that?
Installed Debian testing on an old Dell and only had dial up at the time. Of course the Winmodem didn't work, so that meant a custom compile and fighting with getting a driver installed from Linuxant. AA lot of struggle and learning involved, but how do I keep the damn thing updated without tying up my phone line every evening? Through the magic of cron, pon, poff, I automagically had the it updating itself at 3 AM every day.
Wheeeh! The kids today have it easy.
I needed to provide X-term capability for a couple of users and didn't the money for X terminals (kernel 0.9 Slackware - lots of floppies). IIRC on the Windows side, it was 3.1 (not 3.11) and it required getting hold of Tatum's Trumpet Winsock to get TCP/IP working.
Couldn't be done on Windows at that time. Was blown away. Never looked back.
This is all just my personal opinion.
Linux was really good for hiding porn from my religious parents. Even back in 1995 you could lock down your computer to keep prying eyes out. It took until Windows XP before the "home" version of windows offered file access controls or user logins of any kind. Even today, file ACLs are crippled unless you want to buy a more expensive version of windows.
Since I moved out, I also realized that removing physical access is also a good part of computer security.
I remember the first time I installed Linux on my pc a 486 33mhz, 200 Mb HD. the first distribution i installed was Corel Linux http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corel_Linux [wikipedia.org]
it came whit a magazine I have bought, I used it to edit some pictures in corel picture.
Actually I remember I was crying because I erased all my data on the HD.
But I didn't started using Linux since... mmm oh yes, that was when ADSL got to my city. I remember it was dead hard to set up the friking Modem. That was the reason I didn't used Linux early.
on the other side. come on slashdot developers, is it so damn hard to set up a easy way to imput the friking apostrophe â(TM) ,i mean, how hard can it be rigth?
and then I ran startx. And was never able to get my Dial up net working going, so I played civ- a call to power.
installed it from floppies on a 486, 800 meg hard drive.
i re-call being thrilled when i was able to dial into my ISP via minicom.
oh harsh lover slackware, it's been a long time for you and i. 12.2 currently runs on my home machine, though over the years i have flirted with debian and suse. (i install ubuntu occasionally to a laptop just so i am well informed for the mocking of fanboys. if it doesn't hurt, it isn't linux.)
i even run slack on my eee pc.
it hurts so good.
I first tried Linux back sometime in 98 and I installed RedHat. The install process went fairly well but I remember struggling for hours and hours to get X to start. I didn't do much with my Linux install for a year or so and then I discovered I could get a static IP address (very rare back then) and I started hosting my own webserver. I've been running at least one Linux box 24/7 since then. As a testament to how stable Linux can be in all that time my site hasn't been down due to a failure of part of the kernel or supporting software, I've managed to screw it up a few times though :). My longest uptime so far is about 14 months on a home server, it would have been longer but I had to move house!
All in all I'm very happy with the progress Linux has made. I would like a little more focus on quality, there are a lot of really good ideas but they almost always have rough edges. And a little more consistency, some applications are fantastic (e.g. K3B which I've just used) and some, like Open Office, leave quite a lot to be desired. I feel bad for picking on Open Office but it looks and feels like it's stepped out of the nineties.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Walked into my first real tech job in 1995 at a local ISP and discovered Linux (Slackware 3.0 and I think 2.2).
We were using it to run CERN web servers on Pentium 75 desktop and 486/33 class machines on 8 megs of ram.
I remember was being knee deep in swap all the time. That were were running a .99 kernel forever, and that in todays environment we'd have our lunch eaten because the boxes were running (and using) every usable service known to man at the same time (http / SMTP / DNS / nntp / pop3).
We had to setup remote reboot capabilities because a local television station would flash their website on the screen during the nightly news and we'd get murdered when they posted an .au audio file of the evening news.
On linux specific stuff, I just remember the lack of loadable modules, answering hundreds of yes/no questions to recompile the kernel, no SSH anywhere to be seen and it being a big deal when we installed stuff like top.
My first experience with Linux was Red Hat 6.2. I installed it on some leftover hardware I had lying around after an upgrade and followed a HOWTO I found on the web to install an Action Quake 2 server. It ran for six months without a reboot until I had to take it home for the summer.
You may treat all information submitted above as wild speculation.
I never though Linux would get boring.
That's probably why I stick with Windows on all but one machine, which incidentally is a FreeBSD machine. Configuring Windows never gets boring. Even after that 23rd virus infection or when your friend goes to you and says "My computer is acting kinda funny".
First thing I did was try to get x-windows to work. Once x-windows worked (with all the glory of twm) I got netscape to work. This despite the fact that the computer I was working on (386dx-20 old even then) didn't really have internet access (outside of a 1200 baud external modem -- I was cheap back then, and lynx was my friend for a very long time.) Don't ask me why but getting netscape to work seemed like a big deal to me back in 1995.
My first real experience was trying to install gentoo on my machine, I don't quite remember when that was, but I was new to the computer scene in general. After spending an entire weekend reading how-to's and what not, I was still unable to get my sound card working.
I gave up on linux for a little while, but then I got back when ubuntu dapper came out. There was a small transition period, especially cause my laptop wouldn't quite work, but it's been a long time now since windows has "graced" any of my computers.
First thing I did was figure out how to recompile pppd to support ms-chap encryption. My uni had Windows servers for their dialup access, argh!
It was a RH 5 CD that came with some book I bought. That was my standard way of getting linux cd's back then, because downloading CDs with a 9600 modem was painful). I remember downloading netscape taking almost a full weekend.
Cedric
My first foray into linux was installing gentoo. It took a week of botched installs before I got anything running. But since then, my CFLAGS="-O4 -fomit-frame-pointer -omg_super_fast" has kept it running nicely.
I first took a look at Linux with a Knoppix live CD back in 2001 or so, but didn't really do anything with it. I first used Linux several months later when I used Knoppix to fix my MBR. Linux became my new form of open-ended play, replacing Lego.
I tried to get X-windows running, failed miserably, and went back to Windows. This was 1998-ish, I think. It may have even been earlier. Back then, you had to have actual SysAdmin skills to use Linux successfully.
I installed Ubuntu on my current machine after a hard drive crash. It works fine. There are a few web-games and videos I can't play/see because they are Windows-centric, but most everything else is good.
It must have been one of the first Slackware releases. I had to jump through hoops to get it to install, but I've never looked back since. SCO was the best you could get at the time on Intel platforms, but it was way too expensive.
I remember installing linux in '98 on my new computer which had 32MB ram and and overclocked MB with a 166mhz cpu! I was introduced to Unix in the CS lab at VT and wanted it on my computer. Found a linux distro, redhat linux colgate, Build date: Tue Oct 22 20:49:59 1996, and installed it. Didn't support my video card, had the matrox mystique with 6mb video ram. It did support the matrox millennium but I couldn't afford that. Switched back to win 95 and kept on playing Mechwarrior. good times. Came back to linux eventually but it was always hardware driver issues in the beginning.
I think it must have been around 1994-1995. I never liked PCs and always used alternative computers...so at that time I had an Atari Falcon. I used an external SCSI enclosure for the drive to host the OS and had to buy the FPU for the '030 as Linux-m68k required it.
Anyways, it was pretty 'hand-crafted' relative to even the manually installed x86 'distributions' at the time so it took some doing. But it worked like a champ. I can recall running the boot loader out of TOS, it loading the kernel, and then dumping to the console login getty for the first time. I was like, 'Wow, would you look at that.' I was stoked in the typically geeky kind of way only UNIX types can be.
It was probably around late '96/early '97. I had a friend online who I played Quake with who was constantly spouting off about linux. I've always been interested in computers, but had not really ventured outside of the realm of DOS and Windows save for some dabbling with OS/2 (which I thought was great, but lacked the needed support to be a really amazing end-user OS).
After some nudging, he walked me through downloading and setting up RedHat (Colgate, I believe). I was enthralled by the seemingly endless customization and control over the operating system. Back then, I remember having a proud feeling just being able to get things like my sound card and nic working in this... foreign thing. I felt like I had actually accomplished something when I was able to get Quake running (w/ sound!) for the first time in a non-Windows environment.
After getting used to RedHat, I moved onto Slackware. After all, RH was for n00bs! Heh. Anyone remember glibc vs. libc5? *grumble*
Ironically enough, the same thing that got me into linux was the same thing that took me away from it: gaming. See also: the directx vs. opengl wars. OpenGL lost. As more and more developers started using directx, I ended up booting Windows to access many of the games I wanted to play.
Desktop linux today? Many things have changed, yet so many remain the same. Most hardware is supported out of the box in distros like Ubuntu and Fedora. Gone are the days of having to edit a few lines of source to get your nic driver to work (mostly gone anyway). Everything 'just works', to steal some Apple thunder.
However, gaming under linux is still a terrible prospect. Most games don't natively support it. The wine project, even at 1.x, is still in its' infancy. Even if a directx game does work under wine, it's usually buggy or performs poorly.
Oh, I still boot to linux and regularly tinker. I also maintain an install via virtualbox. And there's nothing that I'd love more than to be running linux exclusively. But unless something miraculous is done, desktop linux will always play second fiddle on my home PC. Sad, but true.
http://xkcd.com/456/
I had the opportunity to use AIX or some other unix installation during my first work term in the spring of 95. I was blown away by how "awesome" the shell was (compared to DOS, the only other thing that I was used to) and how beautiful the screen savers were in X compared to windows (give me a break; I was 19 and new to the world of computers at the time). Then there were these things called "shell scripts", which really blew DOS batch scripts out of the water.
Anyway, when I returned to school the next term, somebody in my dorm told me about some free version of "unix" that I could download and install in my computer, which was a raging fast 486-66 DX2. Apparently it even had X and all of the screensavers. It took 20+ diskettes and a long session using "gopher" at my university's computer lab before I was ready to install my first Linux distribution: Slackware. Installation was long, arduous, and confusing (what the hell were all of these packages?). Getting X to run took weeks to figure out, and in the end I think I had to re-install everything from scratch again. Ah, those were the days...
Anyway, using and installing Linux has become a lot easier since then...
My first try was with Ubuntu 8.04 I got it up and running, joined a domain, connected evolution to the exchange server, and tried to install a printer. Unfortunately there were no Ricoh linux drivers for my model. I tried using a few generics but none of them would print on this printer. I gave up and uninstalled it.
Now I'm in a different company that uses Lexmark and Konica Minolta. I installed 9.04 yesterday and got it printing to the various lexmarks. I also downloaded WINE and am in the process of setting up teamviewer.
Once I get a desktop system working the way I want, I'm going to try Ubuntu server with openLDAP and Samba. Currently we have 3 servers running CentOS doing DHCP, DNS, and Squid proxy but no centralized administration at all over 3 physical locations. Its a strange setup and I have no budget to fix it, but with linux I might be able to anyway.
In 1995 I had to develop an OpenLook application and couldn't afford an Sparc/Solaris machine so I had to use the Linux way.
Well I was 13 at the time, freshmen in high school but don't let that fool you since I was also taking my first programming classes. Anyways, I didn't like windows 95 and now windows 98 has just hit the market and it really didn't impress me. I knew I was a born to be a hard core computer geek and heard about how linux is used not just on the desktop but also on servers and it drew me to that whole wild new concept of "Unix" that no one I knew had ever heard of. So I bought linux for dummies simply because it had the coolest sounding distro in the back from my local borders. Installed Red Hat 5 which came with fvwm95, a pretty twisted window manager. I started using linux more and more and as hard as it seemed and keep in mind we are talking about linux 11 years ago, by the time I was 14 it was the only OS I wanted to use and by the time I was 15 or 16 I had gone through Linux From Scratch. Also at 17 I created an encrypted / partition before anyone had printed a how to for it.
This was when roadrunner was introduced to my area and they hadn't yet capped the upload down to nothing. I believe it was redhat 7. It was an old desktop we had laying around. It ran CS (beta 6 maybe?) with 24 people in it great.
I installed linux from a pile of floppies a foot high.
Then I got lex and yacc up and running, and started doing compilers howework.
Then I accidentally rm -rf'd the root dir. Turns out that the distro I was using had 'su' aliased to 'su -' or something similar and I was in slash instead of a subdir because roots homedir was /. I realized all this about 2 minutes in, wondering why the hell the harddrive was slashing eraseing a few kb of crap.
So I picked up the phone, called the department and dropped compilers.
(I took it again the next year, with a much better prof, so it worked out!)
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
1996: I was an contract programmer. As a favor to a friend and fellow contractor, I agreed to update some ancient POS (point of sale, piece of s...) software for one of his clients. The program ran on SCO Unix. Interface was curses. I had never used any flavor of Unix before, and I wasn't about to buy a license for SCO. So, 12 hours after meeting with the client for the first time, I had installed a dual boot RedHat system and got the code to compile under ncurses, which required a few dozen changes to the least-common-API. I was using vi to edit the code, which was also brand new to me then. About a week later, the improvements completed and running under Linux, I took the modified code back to the customer on a floppy, to deliver the finished product. To my astounded delight, it compiled and worked under SCO!
The ease with which I, as a developer, was able to adapt to this alien platform, forever linked me to it. Having RedHat installed on my development machine (a beefy Pentium 166 as I recall), I kept it there and started using it more and more.
I played with it a bit but didn't really know if I could do anything with it. The first thing I really did was find "mc". I typed it in and looked at the screen. It looked like X-Tree. A little tear formed in my eye. All the sudden I knew that everything was going to be OK. From here I could do anything I needed. I grew out of it in about a week but it that flash back to something known was all I needed to take command.
Ascii artist &
ShowEQ
I have two firsts. My first load of Linux was in late 1998 with the help of WLUG (wlug.org). I wanted to try coloring my mecha sketches on this new beta software that people were talking about called 'The GIMP'. It was some version of RedHat. The second first was the first time I did a non-trivial install myself. I cobbled together an AXPCI Alpha PC and spent some long nights getting milo to boot without using a floppy and building the latest kernel.
Computer Science is all about trying to find the right wrench to bang in the right screw. -T.Cumbo?
What we really WANTED was a high-end Unix machine, but Zenith couldn't afford it, so we got a couple of 166 MHz (zoom!) Gateways and installed Slackware on them.
We (we being cable systems architecture and advance development group) used them for cross-development, as servers, and workstations. I installed netatalk on one and used it to translate between our Network Appliances RAID box and the Macs we used for day-to-day work. I recall having to change some of the disk size calculations to bigints as the size of the RAID was much larger than netatalk could deal with.
Dog is my co-pilot.
So I installed some version of RedHat. Good thing it had a wizard and everything was nice and automatic. What did I know about partitions... :)
Some friends told me it would even dualboot, nothing to worry about.
I remember feeling increasingly panicky when I couldn't find my C drive or even sane directory trees and normal dos commands. Sure linux would have these, right?
Apparently, my very enthusiastic friends failed to mention that there was a lot more to linux than just a free alternative for my recurring blue screen experience.
Ever since that first anxiety wore off though, I've been hooked. I learned that I should RTFM and that diving head first into vast new territory was not such a brilliant idea. But hey, that's always been my way. (learning how to ride a bicycle as a kid should have warned me though
Don't use Ubuntu if you want to configure things yourself... Try LFS (Linux From Scratch)... Even Gentoo is fairly automated these days.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
My first Linux app was a UPS package tracker. It dialed up to UPS and tracked it over their direct modem line. I had to reverse-engineer their checksum algorithm. I wrote it as a finger server. My co-worker Don wrote a CGI interface to it. I think it was 1993 or 1994.
Boy it blew away the big shots at UPS when we demoed it to them. They went and wrote their own.
I've been around since Linux 2.0.32.
I first used Linux when an uncle gave me a copy of Mandrake Linux. I also tried Redhat around the same time. I have to say...I did not like them. Installing software from source was a REAL bitch. I never had any idea what I was doing. I didn't have internet in my room at home (keep in mind this was when I was about maybe 14 or 15. There was no particularly obvious way of doing anything. Nothing made sense to me...even with a book about USING Linux...I could never find out where the hell things installed and they never appeared on the menus afterwards.
You know what really drove me nuts, though? RPMHell. REAL fun to deal with that crap when you have no internet...let me tell you. Trying to track down all the damn dependencies was frustrating as hell. RPMs are what kept me from using Linux much for probably another 5 years after that. Nothing was easy on Linux, nothing made sense, and EVERYTHING was a pain in the ass. Nowadays things can STILL be a pain in the ass, but having internet makes things a little easier to figure out. I will say the Ubuntu would have been damned nice to have back then as a starting point...maybe I wouldn't have ended up being so pissed off trying to play with things even if I DIDN'T have the interwebs.
After a few dual boot installs of Linux, I pretty much reserved to install it inside of a VM from then on and pretty much only played around with it just for kicks. I always loved the whole concept of Open Source. I wrote my senior paper on it (GNU, Linux, etc. etc.) even if I didn't use it as my primary OS. It's nice to see things have shaped up since then...its at the point where I actually consider it nearly on par with Windows from the nerd perspective of "I can use it and do the shit I want without much hassle." The only real issues are when I want to upgrade something...that can turn into a real witch hunt, but you know...I can deal with that now and again. Beyond a few pretty gaping holes in software such as web development tools like Dreamweaver (before you call me a noob, I use them primarily for tables and quite frankly doing things I don't really WANT to code by hand and don't need to, though I've found Kompozer recently), REAL video encoding tools (most around now can't even hold a candle to tools I use on Windows as the ones in Linux are a pain in the ass and I would like something easy that doesn't need 8 billion things set up from a command line first, though I've found avidemux2), and the random oddball thing, I can pretty much accomplish anything in Linux that I need to now...except transfer to my Zune. Have to run Virtualbox for that or just boot into Windows that I still have installed so I can play games.
Now I've got Gentoo up and I've even gotten to the point where I can help OTHER people fix shit. Of course, most of that has to do with the fact that no one can use a search engine for shit anymore. Seriously, how is it that I can find things for people when I don't even know what they are and yet...they come up with nothing?
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BenF
Back in 1996 I downloaded the slackware packages from sunsite.unc.edu ftp, which took forever with my dial-up connection. Then tried to configure and compile the kernel for at least 3 times, before actually succeeding. It was a pain in the ass to configure my sound card.
I broke it trying to upgrade.
I was in a Christian college back in '06, and heard about Ubuntu in a computer science class. After purchasing a new hard drive (being paranoid about losing my Windows data), I installed Ubuntu 6.06.
When 6.10 came out, I decided to upgrade, and I did it over the school network. Problem was, the linux upgrade had a package called libsexy2 in it which was promptly caught by the internet filter, so the upgrade crashed. Being the paranoid person that I was, I uninstalled the libsexy2 package from my Ubuntu installation.
Without noticing the list of other packages that would be uninstalled, I uninstalled libsexy2, and with it the rest of Gnome. Eventually, I had to re-image my drive because I couldn't apt-get anything (the school network required a login through a web browser).
Since 6.06, I've been running Ubuntu as my main OS, though, and it treats me well.
I already had a few different machines in my house in 92-93. One was my first PC which ran windows 95 (and later NT4 when MS was giving it away with Visual Studio Tools). One was the PC I had just built. I was also in line to get hooked up to the new high-speed internet service called "Wave" (served over the CATV system). I had already seen hardware internet sharing devices for dial-up but they were very expensive. Some of my peers said that you could do the same thing with Linux.
So I bought a copy from FutureShop (Slackware 4.0) and started installing. I've been running a Linux box ever since.
Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.
H:\>ping 138.253.85.33
Pinging 138.253.85.33 with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Ping statistics for 138.253.85.33:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),
H:\>
[FUCK BETA]
my first linux install was slackware 3.1 in about 1995, as i needed linux in order to make the improvements to samba that i could see it so desperately needed. at the time, there was no integration with the network neighbourhood, so that's what i started on - nmbd.
i walked in to the computer room at cambridge university. various students kindly held the door open for me so that i could get in. i sat down at one of the machines, pressed alt-f1 (as advised) and was able to use the command-prompt to do a wget and then a "dd" copy of the floppy disk images.
ironically, the cambridge university connection was 350k/sec (in 1995!!!) and was far faster than the speed of copying to floppy disk.
i got the first twelve or so "basic" disks, and soon discovered that i needed x-windows, the gcc compiler, and much more.
i accidentally missed out one of the x-windows disks, but it seemed not to matter.
by the time i was done i had bought or recycled 75 floppies, and had had to return five or six times to the lab, each time some kind student held the door open and let me in.
there was no way i could have installed that lot over the internet - even the local cybercafe only had a 26kbaud modem.
in the end i got what i needed - the gcc compiler, x-windows and enough to get samba compiled so that i could start tinkering with it.
slackware seemed like a good idea at the time, as i simply didn't know any better. it was only later, when internet connections became much better, that i got - and have stuck with - debian.
Yup...
I had an Atari ST when I started University in -91. I did some experimentation with MiNT, a variety of MINIX, on it for a while. Then a year later I got an old Ericsson 286 and loaded that up with MINIX. In 95 I built a new PC from discarded, begged and bargain basement pieces and loaded it up with RedHat, hated it and then found Slackware, which I liked a lot :)
Ever since then Ive been running mixed environments, macs, PC running windows and linux. Suits me fine, I like change.
Now the world has gone to bed, Darkness won't engulf my head, I can see by infra-red, How I hate the night.
Version 9 or 10 or so. I don't remember exactly why I thought, as someone new to Linux, that going with Slackware instead of something else would be a good idea, but the first thing I did was try to get it set up. And the second, and the third, and so on. Eventually I managed to get a nice little GNOME desktop running, and learned a fair bit along the way. Including that managing software under Linux without a proper package management system can be kind of annoying, and having up-to-date software is nice on a desktop, so I went on to other distros for various periods of time, including Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Debian again, and even a brief stint with FreeBSD somewhere along the way. Currently using Arch, and have been for the past couple of years.
Well, I kid you not but when I was sent out on a Solaris course for my work (around 1990 or something) I was quite anxious to learn this powerful beast, and would also really like to do something at home. Naturally it wasn't an option back then to run Solaris at home (the x86 version was either non existent or way too expensive) and so I resorted to Linux. Grabbed a RedHat 3 ("Picasso" iirc) installation, installed it without a problem and then I could start digging into all those Unix commands (naturally keeping in mind that there were differences, but still; back then all basics were pretty much alike).
I was practicing Chiropractic at the time. I was in my office looking through a Popular Mechanics April 1999. I saw an article about Linux with two screenshots, one of KDE and one of GNOME. I couldn't believe my eyes. I said to myself, "I have to have that."
A few days later, I was walking through the parking lot of a shopping center. I noticed a sign in the window of a computer store that said, "Have you checked your LUGOJ?", with a large picture of a fat penguin. I knew what I was looking at. I knew this was about Linux. So, I subscribed to the mailing list at lugoj.com. I actually already knew a guy in the group who was willing to come over to my house and help me get Slackware and Red Hat installed on an old 486.
It was awesome! It changed my life.
I sold my chiropractic practice and went back to school. I finished my prerequisites locally. Then, I drove 1.5 hours one way for 2 years to complete my Computer Science degree.
Then I figured out how to set up a router using an old Gateway PC so I could share my DSL connection back when the ISPs thought they could force us to pay for more than one single DSL connection to a single house.
I first used SLS 1.02, in late July of 1993. I downloaded a slew of floppies and booted up on a generic 386 with 8M of RAM and a 30M hard drive. The install took a couple of hours, doin' the floppy shuffle.
After getting on-line and checking out several gopher sites, I finally found all the info I needed to configure the Cyrus video card (which had 256K video RAM). When I got X up and running, I ran xgas. And then, the coolest thing: I ran xgas again. And again. Until I had the screen filled with xgas windows.
It was the coolest thing, seeing all of those xgas programs doing their thing at once. This was true multitasking, and I finally understood what the term meant. I realized this OS was so
Then I learned all about virtual desktops with olvwm. I eventually moved over to FVWM, which is still around. Man, was FVWM cool when they included the ability to use .bmp textures in window decorations.
I wrote up how to install SLS 1.03 in this article. I know I'm geeky, but it was a lot of fun to go back to see the early days again.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
In year of 1996 and it was slack 3.x.
Takes 8 hours to proper setup from floppies to a 486 dx 33 with 32 mb ram and a S3 Trio card And I can't configure my graphics card.
Today I update my kubuntu 8.04 to 9.04
And guess what...
I can't configure my x to work with ATI...
I'm too sick to fix again...
[My english is better than most other people's Turkish, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
In 1995, my pal Robert (or was it Jeff?) downloaded a Slackware distro -- via slow modem, onto floppies. It took about a week.
We all passed the floppy set around, installing Linux onto our computers. By February of 1996, id had released the Quake demo. I had Win95 on my old craptastic Packard Bell, but it simply wouldn't run Quake. I spent hours trying to get the SVGALib Quake to run. I distinctly recall nuking my system in an effort to get X running, and somehow typing (as root) "rm -rf / usr/local/lib". See that extra space? Yeah, that was fun.
I got a new computer, but couldn't get Win95 to run, so I switched to OS2/Warp. It wouldn't boot at all. Linux would run, but would crash a lot. I finally discovered that the scumbags who sold me the computer had swapped the new 486 Intel chip for a much older and slower Cyrix chip, and overclocked the hell out of it so that it'd show the appropriate Mhz at boot.
I finally switched that POS out for a new computer, and ran dual-boot Linux and Win95 for several more years. Today I use Macs, but they're mainly pretty window dressing for terminal sessions on Linux machines.
http://unxmaal.com
The year was 1996. I was young, dumb, and full of ... self-confidence.
I had been posting little Perl includes to a Slackware server at my ISP for a couple months. I was a pure hacker - everything I knew was from trying it. I was still getting emails from their admin saying things like, "Could you stop putting 'end(0);' at the end of your scripts - it's supposed to be 'exit(0);.' You're filling up our error logs."
I made a ten page static website for a little Mom & Pop computer company (Micro Trends). The owner of the company put the URL in an ad in Computer Shopper magazine and his phone and fax caught on fire. The ISP said we were generating too much traffic, and they'd have to start charging him for bandwidth.
So he decides to expand, pull in a T-1, split off... four channels IIRC for data and use the rest for voice. Meanwhile, he talks to me about working for him full time on the website. We reach an agreement and I show up. He hands me a Cisco router, a computer, and a CD with RedHat Rembrandt on it, then points me at a closet where the T-1 lands. "It should be easy," he says, "my cousin set up his own."
So I dive in. I sat in that closet (a coat closet, not a euphemism for a small server room) for the next week, my head spinning with thoughts like, "What does 'kernel panic' mean? It sounds bad." To that I added a few dozen phone calls to Cisco support, the ISP, and everyone I knew who had ever used the word 'Linux' in a sentence (all two of them -- Thanks, JY and Neil).
It is truly amazing what you can achieve when you are not aware of your limitations. I posted a test page early in the second week, and migrated traffic to the new server the week after that.
Then I started on the dynamic site. Filled with things like a a custom shopping basked that carried the order -- including the prices we would charge -- in a cookie. The customer's credit card was transmitted in the clear over HTTP, of course. But that is a story for another article.
It was a helluva lot of fun. I've never looked back, and have not regretted a day of it.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Had aborted attempts in 2001/2 with Corel Linux but wasn't that impressed.
Got hooked by Gentoo, however,around 2003/4 when I read through their stage 1 installation process. Learned more in those three days than I did in 10 years in IT about the constituents of an operating system and how it all interacts.
Was hooked even further when installed Gentoo on a chipped XBox, which then ran as my home DNS/File/OpenVPN/SVN server.
Never looked back since!!
# sudo rm -rf / && sudo apt-get install windows
installed it and used it for quite some time, then went to RedHat, Suse and now Kubuntu.. All my systems at home run Linux, most of the machines at the store I work do too. Never looked back, never regretted it.
I think my first experience with Linux was when I was around age 12. I remember installing Corel Linux on and old, unused box my family had in a closet. I didn't know what to expect at first, but once I realized it installed X-Galaga (Galaga being one of my all time favorite games) I figured it was good enough to learn more about.
I probably played X-Galaga for four hours straight at first.
Douglas Whitaker
I remember eagerly awaiting my CheapBytes disk of Red Hat 5.2 around 1998 and then spending a week or so getting everything installed and working on a way underpowered "server" that had a bunch of SCSI drives and very little RAM and it became a LAMP server and ran PostNuke to run a fairly successful Playstation 2 game review website all hosted from my home and with dyndns since we had no real static IP.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
Fired it up to see if Pron looked any different on Linux
Like the topics says: When I was at uni studying computer science, we all had accounts on an AIX cluster and on some Solaris machines.
Installing Linux as 2nd OS at home was the next logical step. Later the uni was also using Linux for some labs.
Next serious use I had for Linux was installing a PC router/firewall with ipchains/iptables etc. for our living community that did packet filtering and traffic shaping to allow online gaming, surfing, ftp, peer to peer stuff in parallel without one user using up all the upstream bandwith and driving the ping up for low latency networking apps like games that others used.
Took some time to get it right and some kernel patching etc. in the beginning, but worked amazingly well. At that time probably the best alternative to some really expensive professional solutions.
I wiped my partition table.
Ooops.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
A friend in high school introduced me to linux back before internet access was common (BBS FTW!)
I'm pretty sure it was Slackware. For several years after that I'd switch back and forth between linux and windows. As I started to accumulate computers I would keep just one Windows for games and the rest linux. I remember using Redhat, Mandrake and probably a few others.
Then I discovered the Linux from Scratch project. After I got tired of maintaining my own bash scripts to recompile everything I looked into some project called Gentoo.
I expect that I'll be using Gentoo for a while.
I installed RedHat 4.2 on my Compaq 486DX2. The BIOS wasn't compatible with LILO, resulting in a screen that was all LI 02 02 02 02 02 etc. I posted for help from the library and some smug cocksucker pasted the manual for me.
So nothing has really changed.
I had just taken on the role of Systems Manager (which turned out to be more like the role of a fire fighter trying to keep the RM M$ network under control). On my rounds I soon discovered that the main firewall/router was a bit dodgy in that it kept falling over every now and then. Attempting to locate the issue I soon discovered the distinct lack of a license to run the software. Pricing up a legit copy turned out to be in the region of £1500 so I thought "Hmm, my mate knows about that free Linux thing". Soon called him up to roll in and spent a week setting up my first Linux box with his assistance. Since then it is my OS of choice. Unfortunately the school did not take kindly to our use of Open Source software, "Open, indicates that is is easy to break into" - was the reply from the head teacher. I have since thankfully moved on from their.
In the late 1996 my friend talled me that there is a nice "Unix" for PC? I thought it might be interesting experience since I was administering some Solaris and Irix at that moment. It was Slackware (dont't remember the version but I'm pretty sure the kernel was pre 1.0) installed from a broken CD, which resulted in many packages not installed or installed not properly. It kept dumping core every couple of commands and overall experience was not very pleasant. However a couple of weeks later I gave it a second try. Downloaded most recent version of Slackware from sunsite (it took me more than one night over a modem ;) and installed. Now it was kinda working. The ethernet card was not detected (it took me couple more days to solve it) yet I liked it so much that after so many years I'm stick to Slackware... :)
That was in 2000. A friend of mine brought me a Slackware clone (I didn't even know what Slackware meant at the time) on four floppies. After some effort we managed to install it.
I noticed that the keyboard layout didn't exactly match my keyboard. "No problem", he said, "just edit that text file and tell the system to use it". I did it, and it got a bit better. Then I tried once again, and again, and finally could not save the file any more.
I had to reinstall from scratch.
It took me several years to switch completely, but Linux had won my heart already.
WYSIWIG, but what you see might not be what you need
I was experimenting with amateur packet radio in the early 90s. Used a TCP stack called "NOS" for a while. It had to fit in 640K, so every time you compiled it you had to compromise on features to make the final executable fit. Heard about Linux and ended up compiling version 1.2. Never looked back.
Ever since then there has been a computer somewhere near me running a variant of Linux, even though I have since given up on packet radio.
I used it because Partition Magic was a awful awful program, yay fdisk. And also I could use it to backup and fix certain problems with badly broken windows computers.
We messed around a bit with it in 1996/1997, but a little after that we were trying to use Red Hat 5 to provide some web services, on server-class hardware. That was . . . interesting. Compaq Smart Array support? After a lot of work. Getting a tape drive working correctly and reliably? Far harder than on commercial Unix, OpenVMS or even Netware releases available at the time. There were just a lot of bugs, and almost no documentation (as opposed to the shelves of carefully written and edited docs available for Solaris, Tru64 Unix, HP-UX, AIX, OpenVMS, etc). At one point, I remember stomping out of the system room snarling about "tinkertoy operating systems". I remember seeing newsgroup and mailing list posts at the time along the lines of "we want to support X hardware, can someone send us one so we can test it". Cool, but it didn't give you a great feeling about putting the software in production.
There are still things that it's only just catching up on. Commercial Unix releases (for the most part) solved the device persistence / assignment issue years ago. Sure, it was easier with SCSI, but they came up with ways of handling it in a consistent fashion with other types of devices as well. For the most part, it just worked. With Linux, that's only gotten better somewhat recently. If you were trying to use fibre channel storage arrays, USB backup tape devices, and other hardware that gets enumerated at boot time but isn't always available in the same order on each boot, you could have a problem.
Dealing with storage has been something of a weak spot with Linux over the years. It's a lot better now, but dealing with fibre channel on linux up until a couple of years ago was a huge pain in the ass compared to other operating systems.
60+ floppy disks and a lot of time...worked beautifully on an IBM 386. Used a modem for a ppp connection to the internet and spent way too much time reading l0pht posts.
Even if you managed to mount floppy, you would notice the strange silence and figure the sad fact when you first run xmms. Yes, no sound.
Fix was easy (I bet it is unneeded now)
chmod 666 /dev/dsp along with the soundblaster config at /etc
While it was total torture after Windows (and coming from Amiga to that land), I am thankful to Patrick Volkerding and Slackware. How? Well, I learned how the unix logic works (even the 666) and compiling things from source. I still use that bits of knowledge today on OS X.
What made me nuts after a year (no dual boot!) is the need of recompiling kernel for a freaking USB mouse. It is not Patrick's fault, I hated one thing. Kernel developers (of that time) was ignoring the PURPOSE of USB. The USB is here not because it is state of art tech, because it is massively dynamic.
it took forever to get it running. and then the mouse was unhappy. i don't know whether i want to remember or forget.
Nuff said.
I think I actually spent less time on that project than I did trying to get Windows NT installed from a couple dozen floppies at the time.
I Installed Red Hat 5.1 with "Red Neck" as the installation language, on my Pentium 33 MHz and connected to my ISP with my 28.8 modem from the command line. I learned about IRQ's and monitor refresh rates. No plug and pray at that time. Ah the good old days. Of course I was still using emacs, but you have to start somewhere. :)
"Oh drat, these computers, they're so naughty and so complex." Marvin the Martian
Didn't give up like the poster below and reinstall Windows.
My method of coping was to not turn the machine back on for two months.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
My first experience with Linux was in 1994. It looked a lot like DOS to me, but without anything useful to do. I went back to Windows 3.11.
March 1999, on an old Packard Bell with Pentium-83 Overdrive and 12MB of FPM DRAM. Installing it was an adventure, because the CD drive was on my Sound Blaster and boot-floppies didn't have /dev entries for (IIRC) /dev/hdf at that time.
Debian was the first OS I had that not only had a command-line MP3 player (FreeAmp) but it would run on such a slow machine without stuttering, which Winamp on Windows 95 couldn't do.
I promptly broke it by screwing around with chmod or something and reinstalled. Then I did something else and had to reinstall. By this point I was making dead-tree notes like a fiend and learned rapidly.
However, I had an earlier experience with Linux of sorts -- someone made a ZIP file containing "Speaker Doom", which had a minimal Linux distro, the Linux version of Doom + shareware wad, and a Linux driver for the old PC Speaker -- it was able to do a very low-fi version of the SoundBlaster sound effects, but out of the cheesy speaker, instead of speaker-pessimized effects like DOS Doom had. The whole thing was bootable from inside MS-DOS via loadlin.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I knew there was something to this Linux thing when my OS/2 software site got slashdotted in 1998, thanks to the briefest of mentions.
Somewhere around 1993-1994, a 486DX2-66, Slackware with a 1.13 kernel, a 56k leased line, and our company's new website hosted on that machine with the original httpd... Boy this takes me back....
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
Article's author is Kristin Shoemaker, a "she" not a "he" or a "guy".
It was 1995, Windows 95 kept crashing and I wanted something more powerful than DOS/Windows 3.1. I tried OS/2 but I really wanted to learn Unix. One my friends who was more advanced than I tech wise and who had introduced me to the modem and the AT command set, had a cousin who was nice enough to mail me 12 floppies and a huge dot matrix printed manual of the Slackware distribution. I spent days learning and installing Slackware on my 120MB Quantum. Then came the big hook, switching VT. After that, I knew that I was never going back and that my destiny was on the path of Linux.
ayottesoftware.com
i tried to set the resolution to the native resolution of my monitor and couldn't get it to work. i went over tutorials, i talked to all the gurus i could find. my final answer from the mighty community support? we don't know what's wrong. it sounds like you fucked something up.
If someone wants to try out Speaker Doom, search for spkdoom.zip.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Seriously, I don't remember anymore. Was something before Redhat Linux 6. Now I'm 23. So when did I start using Linux? ;-)
Anyways, playing with it led to knowing all Grub error codes and commands and I'm a confident Gentoo user now. Never liked Debian-based systems.
Redhat Linux still looks the same way it did back then. Although it had a more evil touch, now it is all candy
no one here with a really special and specific task that needed linux?
at least _my_ reason to install a linux on my pc was http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/ - I was really curious and used this later for an university project (unfortunately we had no access to carrier pigeons but everything else worked).
I used some Suse distribution and to be honest: I only stayed after that with linux as I wasn't willing to see the (at this time) inferiority of linux compared to win2k :)
Slackware v0.0something around 1994. Stored on and ran off a 5.25" floppy on a 386-25 with 256K of RAM and a 40Mb disk. Or 192K/20Mb. It was 20 computers ago and hundreds of OSs ago. I ran it long enough to say "this sucks" and went back to my brand-X SVR4 install which was installed off of about 50 3.5" floppies.
I just upgraded my quad-core box with 4G RAM/500G Rust from Hardy to Jaunty yesterday from an ISO I downloaded.
Time warp...
So, before even starting to use Linux for anything useful, I spent my time fiddling around and learning stuff.
I still have a special place in my heart for Slackware.
I installed it on my shiny new 386-25 with cyrix co processor, ran a null modem cable over to my house mate's IBM-XT and installed prolog. He did his CS homework this way.
Downoading a TON of floppy disks to run Slackware... don't remember the version. Remember having SLURP because I could get a shell account for cheaper than a PPP account, and with SLURP I could run several emulated serial sessions across that one dial-up connection.
I also remember when X sucked so badly under Linux (without any real applications) that you didn't bother to install it... and if you did, it was SO slow, it still wasn't worth running.
This was also when WINE couldn't even run Solitaire.
Oh, and then there was the joy of downloading the latest Kernel every few days and re-compiling it because it hadn't hit the mystical v 1.0 kernel yet.
Had a 56K frame line at our little college at that point.
Linux as a whole has come a long way since then.
Soft Landing Systems created the first Linux distribution.
I downloaded it through Gopher onto well over a dozen 3.5-inch floppies using a PC at the library at work -- and a 2400bps dialup connection. There were no ISPs back then. I connected to Gopher through a University of Minnesota library dialup number. If you knew how, you could jump out of Gopher and into FTP to MIT.edu.
I took the boot disk to a junk computer dealer across the street from the Minnesota Supercomputer Center. "Make me something that will boot this, and I'll buy it," I told him. I left with an 80386.
Like you, I had been running a UUCP system -- on an Atari ST. Some of us had set up a UUCP-to-Citadel network gateway. I wrote an rnews clone.
Once I got Linux connecting through SLIP dialup, I thought I was in heaven. Started patching the kernel with daily alpha updates FTP'd from Finland.
I first tried to install on my Pentium 133 PC, however I never managed to make room for Linux without breaking the existing windows 95 installation, then I had trouble getting the CD drive and hard drive working...
I forgot Linux for some time, because I didn't feel the need; in 1996 I had a nice SGI Indy, in 1997 I had a beefy Octane on my desktop and in 1998 I had an Octane, then an O2. However I finally installed successfully that good ol' slackware on a spare 486 machine (DX2 66Mhz 64MB RAM) I had lying around and it worked fantastically, so I set it as a small test server.
Shortly after that I finally managed to install RedHat 5 Linux alongside windows on my main PC. I kept using RedHat until RH 9, then switched to Slackware (for my personal desktop) and Debian (for server use).
Finding a distrobution that didn't crash. Linux wasn't always as easy to install as it is today (Have you tried to build your own Linux system? It's surprisingly easy to get a basic system going today.) Nearly every distrobution I found crashed as it booted from the CD. Eventually I discovered Ark linux, which worked beautifully. Then, for whatever reason (Ark crapped out), I installed collegelinux, which, unfortunately, wasn't as good a distro as Ark was.
I installed Mandrake Linux as soon as it was gifted to me. It was and still is the only decent linux system in a box. And the CDs! There were so many discs! Unfortunately, the distro was outdated before I even got it, so I eventually dropped it and went back to the dark side of computing. That is, Windows.
Note that this was all because of the frustration I had with Windows ME. ME wasn't really as bad an operating system as people said it was, but after about a year or two, it would crash every time you'd start it, with some undocumented problem you couldn't fix even if you knew the OS at a source code level.
So which linux distro am I using today? None; I'm running Windows XP, with all my unix-required needs and OS development tools in hardware-accelerated VMs (Has anyone ever told you how much better VirtualBox is than VMware?). SiS chips and a lack of expansion slots prevent me from running it. And I could never get NVidia's stupid driver to work, so I never even got a chance to play around with KDE4's special effects. Seriously, I've begun to think that people who say that their computers run with hardware graphics acceleration are lying - neither NVidia's nor ATI's drivers have ever worked for me.
is that this is yet another "i spent hours fixing" kind of article.
most people these days do not want, or have time, to fix their computer, they just want it to show their videos, image, play music, browse the web and read email, and type up the odd text file or spreadsheet. oh and, games. lots of games.
basically they want something that works, and if it stops working, somewhere to drop it of so that it can be quickly fixed. apple makes it clever there, with their "genius bar". even if said "genius" just follows a step by step guide for swapping out some components to see if that fixes the problem, or basically format and reinstall the os, it gives the non-geeks the impression that someone listens to them and cares about their problems.
sadly, its the same thing that fuels the tech support horror stories, where someone comes in with a explanation like "i tried to insert the thing, and something showed up on that screen followed by it going black and not reacting to the dohickys. i want it fixed, now!".
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Uninstalled it and went back to Windows ME.
How strong would you say your relationship with your husband is? Would he be offended if he knew we were dining together?
My Gmail is makebinutils@gmail.com
My short (happy) start,
Back in 1993 or thereabouts I had one computer graphics course where we had to do a 3D project in PHIGS / SPHIGS (remember that?). The lab had about 20 NEC colour X Terminals - beautiful beasts, by the time - which, of course, were shared by many students; in short, the lab was always packed with people and it was not the most confortable environment to give the first steps in UNIX graphics programming - noisy and very often with no available seats.
A friend got hold of Linux in what were maybe 15-20 3.5" floppies -- that would be slackware, IIRC -- which we managed to install on a non-branded PC. I recall having trouble in getting X to work and fiddling with the modelines to acheive something like 800x600 with probably 8 bits per pixel! :)
In the end it was a great learning experience. We did most of the work at home and, from time to time, tested it at the lab.
Later (or maybe that was the initial trigger?) we had a different course where we had to program directly on top of the X API and also on top of Motif - we also used our home PCs (now that I mention it, I'm not really sure if we had Motif on Linux by then).
Well, there you go: that's my "how I started".
Since then it has been a very rich experience both using Linux and commercial UNIX solutions at a professional and personal level. The distance between what Linux was by then and what it is today is huge in every aspect, but it was already very useful and valuable by then.
Let's see what the future holds for it. :-)
See linux, format the machine! Install Windows! :)
When Windows 95 came out I was using OS/2 Warp. A friend of mine was operating a BBS and suggested I try this operating system called Linux. Going to bookstores I found some books that included some distribution or another, I tried Slackware 3.0. The only challenge I faced at first was configuring X11 to work on my S3 Virge, once that was done and I could use more than the text console the flood gates were open and dove completely into this free 32-bit alternative. It's been a very long painful road to take, but the joys of never getting a computer virus, or having a coherent system with files dating back to early 1990's far outweigh the pains of setting it all up. I use BSD for server duties, but I still use Linux to fix Windows machines and as a primary desktop. Compared to 10 years ago, Linux is dream to install, configure and use pretty much any distro.
Wrote a screensaver for xlockmore, which was then picked up and continues to this day in XScreensaver. Main reason for trying linux (was 1994ish) was to learn programming. Took me almost 2 years to port my screensaver from Applesoft BASIC to C after reading all the X windows programming books I could find and learning C.
I find many first experience stories saying the same things: "I couldn't do this so I went back to Windows." And the reality was at the times they majority are stating, these things were all quite doable if only they did a bit of searching and reading.
I am not faulting all these people for "giving up too soon" or simply lacking ability to work problems through, but I am indicating that even these "techno-elite" people have serious issues with change and things that are difficult or otherwise not obvious to resolve. This experience should be multiplied by the masses of non-technical people and that should offer a strong indication of what Linux needs to become before it can become any potential replacement for Windows.
First time I used Linux 6 months ago at Uni. The PC's were running Kubuntu and it made me want to kill myself using it. Generally doing anything on it was a complete hassle and not worth the effort put in to it. Alot of the other people in my class felt the same (BSc Computer Science) and we've now only ever used that Linux lab once :V
I think it was about 95/96 I was an undergraduate student.
A friend of mine in the lab installed Slackware from floppies, complete with doom, on a pentium 120MHz. It was the only lab computer with a serious game. Linux seemed both alien and magical to a DOS/windows 3.1 user.
At the end of the year I was running c++ code on a Alpha station with RedHat 64bit installed, it was buggy (no X, console garbage) but faster and more useful than NT.
To think that it took me almost 10 years to come back to 64bit Linux on my workstation :)
The very first time I saw Linux, it was about 1997-ish and I encountered Enlightenment DR-0.13 (the one with the ray traced window decorations and the little TV screen virtual desktop managers) running on a monstrous 21" CRT. At a time when Windows 95 was still widely considered a huge improvement in UI design, seeing this "lye-nucks" thing utterly blew me away with possibilities. It was beautiful, it was pure evil... I had to have it.
I spent months in what I would eventually find out is called "RPM Hell" trying to get that evil desktop on my own machine... all in vain. The closest I ever got were some cheap DR-0.13 knock-off themes for various, less fiendish window managers.
To this day, there is a small, ray traced hole in my soul that may never be filled.
Early 1992, Manchester Computer Center (MCC) distribution on a half-dozen floppies, on a laptop with a 20 MHz 386 with external floating point unit, 4M of RAM, 40M hard disk, 640x480 monochrome display. Added a port of (then) Bellcore's MGR light-weight windowing system.
On an evening flight from New Jersey to Denver, I had the machine out with an analog clock in one window, was compiling something in another, and editing a document in a third. A guy headed back to his seat from the restroom stopped and yelled up the length of the plane, "Hey! This guy's got UNIX on a laptop!" Next thing I knew there were half-a-dozen people hanging over me, elbowing each other and some of the other passengers, all trying to see and asking questions at the same time. The flight attendants were NOT happy.
IIRC, recompiling the kernel on that machine took about 45 minutes.
Yeah, I remember when I picked up my ordered box back in 1998 from the mail office, looked at the odd interface pictures from behind the cardboard box and fiddled with the cool manual and stickers that came with it.
The first steps were very odd, installing with the boot disk and several CD-ROMS. I remember being very excited about this totally new system. Beforehand I had only experience from the usual MS-DOS and Windows. The road to 100% Linux use was long and hard. So much new commands, new way of thinking about things and these strange source code packages you could download.
Lots of compiling the kernel trying to get my SB32 and ISDN cards working .. the ISDN setting up was a lot of manual work back then, I even wrote a document on how to get it done in Finnish as nobody else had done before.
Playing quakeworld, ircing and listening to mp3s at the same time, nice :) Also the quality of the developer tools and environment really surprised me, compared to the MS-DOS counterparts I was used to, like 64-kbit segments of memory.
After that I guess I tried every possible distro available. Slackware was my pick of choice after moving away from Redhat, and after that Gentoo, then Debian and now Ubuntu if I have to use Linux. Mac Os X is so much nicer on the desktop.
I remember all the years that were supposed to be the 'year of Linux on the desktop' .. I guess their approaching that now :)
GeoKone.NET
My first Linux installation was Ubuntu Breezy Badger, and I looked up the Ubuntu forums to get sound working. Finding a solution (namely, killall esd) so quickly gave me the encouragement I needed to find fixes for the other issues I encountered (screen resolution, DVD playback, CD eject, etc.).
I wanted to show off my fancy new linux headers.
But the first thing I typed into the shell was:
man woman
Then I giggled.
The Internet is generally stupid
my first linux experience was in 95, we got e-mail at the school i was attending and i learned how to use pine and lynx and talk, after school i left for quite a while until i installed mandrake 9 on my only pc and wiped out windows, my wife didnt like that, so mandrake was abandoned and windows prevailed... i used knoppix and backtrack until i got my laptop and installed ubuntu
There was no issue of "switching back to Windows" because the only other OS on my 486/33 was DOS! In DOS, I used Turbo Pascal, Turbo C and Turbo C++, telemate, GLITE(a word processor), a really cool TSR French Translator and a few games. /usr/doc/HOWTO, wasted ridiculous amounts of time playing nethack, and occasionally ran dosemu. I remember I installed Slackware (which I liked), and Redhat which put this weird grapical thing in between me and the terminal, and Debian. I eventually stuck with Debian and now on to ubuntu. Compiling the kernel to support a new network card took a full working day (and we liked it!).
So what did I first do with Linux? I ran gcc, vi, started learning Perl, used minicom, spent many pleasant hours in
Eventually in my pursuit of a CSE degree, I had to install Windows 95 in a dual-boot configuration to run LogicWorks. But I did put VNC on the lab computers and just VNC'ed into the lab after they were closed from my SLIRP'ed dialup at home. And whenever I had to work from the Lab computers, I was VNC'ed into a terminal on my home machine. (This was before the ubiquitous putty)
We thought 1 GB HD was big back then and we liked it, now get off my lawn you whippersnappers!
This is the worst possible explanation I've ever seen on this site for the failure of Linux to Just Work. Somehow, through all the crap, it is OK, because you learned to waste your time configuring something that should have been done for you.
But, hey, you got it for free, you can't complain, right?
I used it to set up a demand dialler and firewall on my old 486.
It was interesting because there was an error in the diald package. The distro included a newer version that used different file locations, but the install script still used the old file locations. I learned a lot figuring that one out!
Set up a console only DNS and Mail server on Slackware Kernel version 1.2.13 for a company to prove that Linux can handle the job.
Had to combat several Sun and Windows developers who where trying to sabotage by exploiting early vulnerabilities. All in all, it was an experience that I would repeat again.
It was 1999, and I was still using DOS with Win3.x, having refused to jump to a Windows-based OS. I had been eyeing linux for a while, but there was one Win3 killer app that I didn't want to abandon - Visual Batch Script, a scripting language for connecting and automating GUI applications. With VBS, you could get info on all the open windows, scrape their text areas for content, and feed them mouse clicks and keystrokes, which meant that you could automate just about anything. My Linux-guru buddy insisted that scripting was linux's greatest strength and that I could do similar things with tcl-tk. So I bought a new computer, installed Mandrake, and starting migrating everything over.
Of course as I discovered, linux had nothing even close to VBS, and ten years later it still doesn't. But I learned to embrace what linux could do, and left VBS and Windows behind. I now use KDE's DCOP for GUI automation, which is horrifyingly limiting and frustrating, but then life is full of compromises.
Installed Debian in 1998 trying to get IP masquerading to work so we could play Rainbow Six in my dorm room - over dialup... It was funnier in '98
Or in the words of Krusty the Clown: : "I'm a freaking moron!!"
I remember being freaked out during the install because I had to know the Horizontal and Vertical refresh rates of my monitor and the warning said if I didn't enter them right my monitor may be damaged.
The other was the desktop, if you moved your mouse to the right it would scroll over, a virtual desktop I guess it was called, it was fvwm.
I think it was Redhat v1.0, I had Redhat a Cheapbytes CD but I'm not sure if that was my first distribution, it was hard to download any big files because of dial-up a smokin' 3 Kbps on a good day.
I started out with Red Hat pre-installed on a computer from Penguin Computing, but none of it made any sense to me. Reading the manuals, I found that nothing was where I expected it to be, so I gave up on that.
I installed Slackware instead--found that things were where the manpages and web pages said they were, and liked it.
After a few installs, and a lot of help from the community, I was able to record video to CD-ROM using an iomega video capture card (zoran chip) I got from ebay for $25.00 There were no windows drivers, but it worked fine in linux.
At the time, though, there just weren't enough CPU cycles to process video in a timely manner--so after making 2 or 3 videos, I gave up and just used the box as a general purpose computer.
Word processing, web browsing, etc.
Linux was fun and I learned a lot when I had time to screw with it.
Now, I mostly use windows XP because it's easiest and I've got better ways to spend my time (wife, job, house, dogs, cats...).
I still have puppy on a microSD card, though, because there are some things that are easier (or even possible) in linux that aren't in XP.
Right tool for the right job.
Ideologically, I prefer G/L/X, but rigid adherence to ideology is expensive in many ways.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Used to provide NAT to a dial-up network of 5 computers. Yea, I shared a dial-up connection with 5 other computers back in 1996.
To install it I used something like 60-80 1.44" floppy disks on a Packard-Bell which I created using the network connection and computers at school. I successfully installed it, but I never got the video past 800x600 (though I played with modelines til my eyes crossed). My only network connection was a modem. I can't remember if I had ppp at that point, but something makes me think I did because I was so excited to have multiple shells connected to the school machines.
The whole reason for even trying was to get a unix environment at home to run LaTeX. I was in graduate school in the math dept at the University of Kentucky. I've been running some flavor of linux at home ever since (slackware, redhat, debian, centos, ubuntu).
I had been using Windows forever but I had thrown up ProFTPd a few times on a Mandrake machine to serve up music on the local dorm network...
I knew the reputation Windows had and it was frustrating to use sometimes even when I used it primarily. One of the really irritating parts was having to reboot at the drop of a hat. By early 2005 I'd been using that FTP service for a year or so and I hadn't really gotten together the initiative to make the jump to Linux full time. Then I was reading one day and I found out about Windows Palladium and NGSCB and TPM enforced DRM and all the bullshit that was supposed to be possible with Trusted (Treacherous?) Computing. That was the straw that broke the camel's back. I went to the book store around that time and found a Fedora Core 4 book. It looked nice and I got it. The summer of 2005 is when I went cold turkey to Linux and I have never looked back.
The first thing I remember doing after really moving to Linux was setting up a network between my laptop in the living room and my desktop in my bedroom. I played music on my desktop loudly enough that I could hear it in the living room and I telnetted [sorry SSH :(] into my desktop and killed the process that was playing the music and it stopped! Man, that was so exciting.
Since then, I've gotten more into it. I've set up software RAID and LVM volumes and compiled custom kernels and all that stuff. I've been using Slackware the last two years or so and I really feel comfortable. I have all the tools I need in terms of programming C/C++/Python (those are just the ones I use), serving FTP/HTTP/SSH/etc. , the RAID stuff I was talking about earlier (mdadm is a godsend)... I can even play a lot of the games I like under WINE (because the games I like are Starcraft and Diablo 2) (my gaming 'career' became stunted when I moved to Linux but my programming skills and knowledge of my hardware shot through the roof!).
I know this wasn't supposed to be some evangelical Linux thing... but I really enjoy and appreciate Linux. If I want to make backups of my hard disks, I don't go buy some expensive Windows software. I use dd or add the drive to my active soft RAID volumes long enough for it to sync and then remove it... If I want to modify or transcode audio or video, I don't go buy some expensive software, I use MEncoder. I don't go buy compilers, I use gcc and g++. I didn't have to beg the writers of kasteroids to make bullets last forever and fire more frequently, I downloaded the source and made them do that myself!!
Linux just allows you to control your machine on a level that's just not possible in Windows and I hate hearing about how Linux users "just don't like to pay for things." I can't afford to pay $30-$80 for some crap utility to convert gifs to jpegs. Why not just use GIMP? I'm not going to pay $80-$100+ for some utility to sync my drives when I could use a one line command to do the same thing (dd,rsync). It's like a bad joke.
I'm finished with my rant. Sorry for letting my "first linux experience" turn into "linux fanboy hour".
I first installed Debian somewhere before the potato era. On a 386 I had to put the hdd on the same cable as the cdrom otherwise it wouldnt boot.
I installed it and accidently got in to `top` which was the most unbelievable KEWLLLLLst thing I ever saw !!!!
In that time people still took the time to properly write a manualpage grmbl..
Exploded with joy when I finally got my modem to work in Mandrake 3.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
My first "experience" with linux was when it killed the Mark Williams Coherent unix clone I had been playing with for about four years. It seemed like they were on a roll. Graphical user interface was in play and they had deals with Lotus and WordPerfect -- _the_ spreadsheet and word processor at the time.
And then they folded around the end of '95. How do you compete with free? Coherent should be recognized as the first OS that linux destroyed in the marketplace.
I went full-immersion at home in '01. Red Hat and then Debian. The Coherent experience certainly helped even if dial-up UUCP was a thing of the past.
After getting used to RedHat, I moved onto Slackware. After all, RH was for n00bs! Heh. Anyone remember glibc vs. libc5? *grumble*
I upgraded from an a.out system to an ELF system by hand. I didn't want to blow away the system (and had no place to copy my /home to), and so had to do a delicate balance of upgrading the toolchain, system compiler, and then libc. Then all the other installed components of the OS.
A little later I had saved enough money to buy a second drive, and so I copied my homedirs to it, and then did a clean install of a new OS on the first.
My first experience with Linux was back in 94/95 in the attempt to start a MUD. I did get one going, but it was all the playing with linux that got me going. I started out learning about SLIP, some networking stuff, compiling software, minicom, and the shell. Ah the days past. Now I'm the Sr. Systems Engineer with an online media company, and we are entirely Linux based for the site. Of course between point A and point B were Linux, Solaris, AIX, True64, SCO (ick!), and HP-UX...
1998, spent an age trying to get some random distro (old Red Hat?) to play nice with my graphics card. Never did succeed. I'm glad that such fruitless struggles are (mostly!) a thing of the past...
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
The first thing I ever did with Linux was remove it. It had no appeal to me. Lack of driver support and just boring compared what I can usually do with Windows. It wasn't anything special or unique. It was just blah.
The first thing I did was find the source for and compile the "passwd" program. The SLS distro on several floppy disks didn't include one.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Was around 2003 - and that was just monkeying around with Fedora Core 1. I didn't have a clue what I was doing and quickly gave up - went back to whatever version Windows I was using. I later tried and gave up again (after a bit more time) with Fedora Core 3 (2004).
First time I did anything actually useful, was around Fedora Core 4 (2005) - but it wasn't actually Fedora that I did it with. I wanted to backup/resize my Windows NTFS partition, and make new partitions, and I wanted to do it without using proprietary software (I had no money, and don't agree with using pirated/cracked software). Through clueless fumbling and googling, I came across Recovery Is Possible (RIP) Linux and Knoppix, with ntfsclone and QtParted. That was pretty much it...I've had dual boot systems ever since, though I only really keep Windows only for games (which I never have time for anymore). For the times I really need MS Office, I have one legal copy that I bought and installed in a WinXP vm I run in VirtualBox. Unfortunately...I think because of MS Office, I'll never be able to quit windows for good.
I started with Linux in 2002, my first distro was Caldera Openlinux 2.3, the company that later morphed into SCO:) I then moved to a variety of distros: RH 9--->Debian--->Slackware/FreeBSD. I'm very happy with Slackware; it meets my needs.
My first Linux distro was Mandrake after reading an interview in PC Authority (1997?) with RMS and another article about Linus and Linux. The auto-partioner set up roughly 8 or 9 partitions for me (one for /, /etc/ /boot/ /home/ ...). I was thrilled when it finally installed and I was playing Frozen Bubble and had a stack other free software immediately, but I soon nuked it in favour of Gentoo - then SuSE and then Gentoo again.
I'm on Ubuntu now running ion3
"Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing." -- Salvador Dali
I have always been a big Solaris user but back in 1995 I heard of this new x86 "Unix" so a buddy gave me a copy on floppies I tried it thought it was "neat" but then just switched back to Solaris running on my Sparc LX (hey it had built in ISDN). Would be another few years (~1998-1999) till I switched to Linux for my desktop (first RedHat then Debian).
Still miss my Sparc LX though :)
It was late 93 or early 94.. I was at DEC and there was this Toshiba laptop kicking around that nobody else was using. I installed Slackware 1.0 on it from floppies, and if memory serves I could either install X or gcc, but not both. It had 4MB of memory, a 40MB hard drive and a grayscale LCD. It was probably a circa 1990 laptop.. very early
Never actually used it for work.. and never had a working Ethernet adapter. I think I had SLIP working.
I can't remember the exact year. Mid 90's. I installed Slackware from floppies on a Xerox laptop with 10 MB HD and 4 MB RAM. I used it to write and compile c code for school.
I still have that laptop, but nowadays not even DSL will run on it :(
My first linux machine was a 486. I used it to handle my internet connection. Whenever I tried to do something online, it would autodial my ISP. When I was done, I'd run the script to shut it down.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I really enjoyed that. Been a Linux user ever since. Until then, I had no idea that chicks dug guys who ran Linux so much. Why didn't anybody tell me?
I did the install and the first few things I remember doing were configuring a script to use my modem. Dialing my friend up and using ytalk to chat while rebuilding the kernel to get my video driver and sound card working so I could use X and Netscape.
Now days the installer does everything for you except wireless well. I still have some problems with soundcards and video cards in this modern era but it is mostly due to closed source drivers and not having configured the kernel wrong.
Push harder towards Open Media/Content
400MHZ Celeron
32 MB Ram
4 or 6 GB Hard Disk
It was a Slackware 7.1 I got from a local magazine I used to read. I was around 12 years old back then, so time to work on my projects wasn't really a problem. It took me 2 days (at that age that's like 16 hours of uninterrupted work) to make the X server work. I also remember making work the SpeedTouch 330 USB ADSL modem was a nightmare, and took me at least 2 weeks; but I really can't recall if it was with Slackware or Debian.
3 days ago I installed Ubuntu on my new laptop, it took around a minute for the live CD to automatically detect every single device on the computer. We're definetly not that far from Skynet.
The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.
Seconding Web Server.
It wasn't until I was finished with PC gaming that I tried Ubuntu as a desktop. Before that it was just easier to pirate windows.
Then I had to make room on my computer, which had something like a 120 meg ESDI drive. I removed some junk, shrunk the partition, made a new compressed partition, shuffled some stuff there, shrunk again the partition, compressed it, etc... until I had something like 5 DOS partition and enough room (something like 30 megs) to put Linux.
Now, bear in mind that my first ever home machine was a homemade 6809 box running Uniflex, so Unix wasn't exactly new to me. In fact, I spent the previous few years swearing at how DOS was stupidly useless compared to Unix, and I just could not afford to pay $1000 or so to get Xenix or SCO. So I endured.
Anyways, I finally installed Linux, and wow! wow! wow! I finally had a Unix machine to work seriously on. I eventually got myself a 320 megs ESDI drive and so I was able to have a cleaner system with more space, and I started to try X-windows (but on a 386-16 with 3 megs of RAM, it wasn't exactly a success).
Eventually, I was able to have a second (then a third) machine, since then, and I always have had at least one machine running Linux.
First tÃte-Ã-tÃte with Linux was with Puppy Linux on my old laptop... LiveCD.
Linux was something I'd heard of which sounded cool and was free so I thought I'd try it out.
I downloaded the three RedHat 9 CDs, read the installation manual very carefully and then installed it on the family PC, hoping like hell I didn't break windows or make the thing unbootable (backups? what backups?).
I messed around with it for a bit, liked it mostly but was too attached to windows software. Later I received a PC for myself from a family friend with a hideously broken install of windows ME. I didn't have a Windows CD at the time so I installed RedHat 9 briefly, then found, downloaded and installed Ubuntu and never looked back.
I wish to remain anomalous
My first experience was Slackware in 95. By then one of my friends and I had downloads all the packages and had well over a hundred 3.5" disks to install from.
One thing I remember was on my machine X never was working. I probably spent well over 100 hours trying to get it to work, but I had a very obscure video card at the time. I finally went back to windows, but kept my eye on linux. In 2000 I was able to create a server with a P166 that ran linux. It was amazing. Since then I've used linux for servers and backend work and windows for all my desktops (for games and ease of use for visitors).
A girl, a girl with a boyfriend and later a husband actually meddled with Linux. Fanatasize about such things, but if you want to post them, please do so at the appropriate venue like Penthouse. /. is for real down to earth stuff. bah!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
A friend mailed me some Red Hat CDs, but they broke in the mail, so I bit the bullet and spent a week downloading replacements. I stayed on windows, but it was great as a web/ftp server.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
First linux I downloaded was early 1.x Slackware. Many floppies. The first I recall messing with was Yggdrasil. I ran minix on my Atari ST at the time, and UNIX at work so got my *nix fix there. When I bought an x86 machine for home, I started with NetBSD 0.9, then FreeBSD 1.*, 2.*,OS/2 Merlin, Warp, Solaris x86, Redhat 5,SuSE 7.x,Fedora, and now Ubuntu (under Vmware on the Mac). Next step is Angstrom on the Beagleboard....
-- My brain is just a BUNDLE of nerves...!
I couldn't figure out where the GUI was. All I had looked like a DOS prompt to me. I wiped the drive and tried again. The next day I got to the part of my book that covered X.
Hey!!! the parentheses are good for something
I had to get a HLDS for Counterstrike 7.x to run and I wanted this shiny penguin to appear in the local game server list.
I started out with wuftpd (*shiver*), SSH (of course) and HLDS/CS obviously. This took me quite some time. Back then I used RedHat 6.3. My first contact with Linux was Corel Linux (1.0?).
So i started with linux in 94, and have been using it ever since until recently. I started using Windows for the first time..and I am so impressed I feel like I've largely been missing out. It is exciting if not more exciting than when I first discovered linux, a completely different ecosystem, with both bad and good sides..I don't think I'll be switching back though even if it was a good ride.
I also remember the hullabaloo when the kernel source started to approach 10MB! We postulated that the linux kernel source could destroy the Internet! There was much debate about removing less-used drivers from the main tree...
Now get off my lawn, you damn kids!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Back in 1998 (I was a college student) I bought a copy of Corel Linux at the campus bookstore. After installation, and a frustrating hunt for how to run the desktop, I gave up when I was not sucessfull getting it tom work with my high speed internet.
I trued again in 2006. I started with A Knoppix live CD, and a Harv's Hamshack Hack (a custom version of knoppix with many priograms removed, and lots of Ham radio related software pre-installed) live CD. Then I found Kanotix. I ran that for a while, until sidux came along, and there hadn't been a full update to Kanotix for more than a year. I still run sidux, as well as having tried quite a few other Distros (mostly Debian based) along the way. I do have a multiboot system that includes Windows XP. Xp is only used for games, and is blocked fron the internet by my router.
TTYL
Destroyed the partition table on the family computer. This was about 10 years ago before there were easy ways to handle partitioning, and I used some nice friendly programs that allowed you to directly manipulate cylinder/head/sector numbers. At 12 years old, I did not have the necessary skills to do this correctly the first time.
My parents weren't thrilled about that one, especially since once you've messed up your computer by manually editing the partition table, most technicians will scratch their heads and say "lol wut."
you insensitive clod!
My lawn, get off it ;)
I switched to Yiggdrasil Beta as soon as it was available to order and then Debian 0.93 (IIRC, need to check the CDs). I still have the pressed CDs for all the distributions I installed until broadband finally became accessible in my neck of the woods.
What did I do first? I fell in love with Linux and changed career path from code monkey to console monkey. No regrets whatsoever, those years have been a blast and brought me cash aplenty.
Yes, I was addicted to EFNET and I had tired of the 'winnukes' (port139 Windows NETBIOS DoS), ping floods, and all the other Windows based problems that caused "error 42: connection reset by peer".
I tried BSD 4.2(??), and RedHat 4 (again, ??) Those memories are pretty slim, though.
Ironically, the second thing I did was compile coke.c, and pepsi.c. Heh.
Redhat 6's graphics setup auto-configured a very bad screen resolution for me using VESA or something. So I was trying to set it right. Then I tried to use my Winmodem (an internal dial up modem which had no drivers). Then I tried to mount my windows partition.
Heroes die once, cowards live longer.
I've been a Windows user/programmer since 3.0 in the late '80s and have had various machines at home, all running some form of Windows, from 3.1 thru 95, 98SE, 2000 and currently XP Home and Professional.
In 2008, I got a wireless router from my ISP when my broadband got upgraded, so I tried using my old laptop for using MSN for video calls with the webcam. Performance under Windows was not great, so I thought I'd try out Ubuntu, as I'd heard (time and time and time again !) it was more efficient than Windows on older hardware.
Downloaded the ISO for 8.04 and the Live install was the first stumbling block. The screen seemed split into three or more vertical strips. Solution: enable 'Safe Graphics' mode and try again.
I have to say that the partitioning/installation phase was very smooth and friendly - well done, Canonical.
Using all the supplied apps was a doddle, too - just like any other self-respecting desktop OS.
Right, now to get serious and get ourselves online ! Plug in my USB WiFi dongle - nothing. Nada. Zilch. After a lengthy dig around the net (using my Windows desktop machine), I bit the bullet, steeled myself and attempted a recompile of ndiswrapper using the Windows drivers for the dongle. Well, I didn't bargain for having to install build-essential (thankfully available via apt-get and the 8.04 CD) and other crap. Let's just say that this stage was not "ready for Joe Sixpack". (To be fair, Ubuntu has progressed and 9.04 detects the same dongle out-of-the-box - very impressive).
OK, now to get my USB Webcam working. You jest, right ? Moving on...
I have to say that I really can't tell any difference in performance between Ubuntu and Windows XP on that laptop. If anything, video response is better under Windows - YouTube full screen makes the fans go into overdrive all the time with Ubuntu, whereas they pause for breath every now and then with Windows.
Music software/hardware ? Forget it ! Even something simple like getting a USB MIDI interface to talk to an app is a lost cause.
So is there anything I like better under Ubuntu on the laptop ? I have to say no, not really. An interesting geek experiment, but Windows 'just works' and actually 'just works better' for most things. I've since reverted to XP SP2 on that machine.
At the same time as I installed it on my laptop, I decided to partition my desktop machine and make a dual-boot between XP SP3 and Ubuntu 8.04. This installation went a lot more smoothly, with all attached hardware being detected out-of-the-box (no Wi-Fi, just an ethernet cable straight into the router). I set myself the goal of using Linux exclusively by the end of the month (really to force myself to find a non-Windows solution rather than taking the path of least resistance and just booting back into the familiar territory of Windows) and started compiling a list of tasks that I use Windows for on a day-to-day basis.
Office apps were every bit as good as Windows, which is no surprise as I use OO.o on both !
Printer drivers were a bit less intuitive and a bit less WYSIWYG in Linux; I still prefer Windows when I want to get a photo or document 'just right' these days. The scanner on my HP all-in-one printer/copier/scanner required a package from the repository, IMSC, but after that it behaved flawlessly.
Once again, music hardware and software was a dead loss. Even something simple like playing a General MIDI file from a webpage eludes me to this day. Forget something more involved, like running Propellerheads Reason on a Digidesign M-Box interface. Musicians/producers/DJ's who value their sanity should stick with Windows or OSX.
BitTorrents are a joy, and one of the things that I've stuck with Ubuntu for: Just click on the Torrent link and Transmission fires up immediately. You can throttle download and upload speeds very easily and the overall sense of control is excellent.
Apt-get - or rather the GUI equivalent, Synaptic - is another joy to use. It's just like an all-you-can-eat software buffet !
Squirrel!
It was about 1997 and it was the tenth time Windows had crashed while I was trying to write a ten page mathematical paper in Word. The equation editor had created an embedded formula of infinite size so I could not save the file. I did n't know which equation it was so I had to save bits of the file at the time. My colleague Eddie Wilson helped me install Red Hat 4.2 and I vowed only to write in LaTeX and not to use Windows from then onwards.
Sometime in late 92 or 93 I downloaded a copy of Linux from a BBS onto 13 floppy disks. I was able to get it installed and running, but since the only exposure I had had to a unix command line was from using the internet I remember sitting there not knowing what to do next. Eventually I started poking around and saw some reference to an alpha version of xwindows so I got to work installing that. After some hours X was working and I was again in unfamiliar territory, staring at a black and white screen with an X cursor that would move around with my mouse. Eventually I got the one X app that was included in the distro running. It was a 3D wireframe app where you could draw shapes and articulate them. About the time I finished making a wireframe snake that was pretty cool, I noticed that I was bleeding from my eyes and ears so it was time to quit. From then on I made it a point to check out a version of Linux a couple of times a year. Finally, after 15 years of checking it out, I switch over from $MS Windows and started using Ubuntu as my main OS last fall.
The first thing I ever did on Linux (RedHat 7.2) was find out how to unpack a driver tar.gz for my KyroII graphics card.
Then I had to find out how to compile drivers.
Then I had to find out how to install development RPMs.
Then I had to find dependencies for the development RPMs.
Then I had to find out how to start X.
Then I had to find out how to configure X.
Did I mention I was a Mac user before this?
Had to install an early Solaris 10 on a PC some years later....
C-x C-s C-x k
I downloaded my first SLS distro, also as 1.44MB floppy images via 2400 baud modem, from a BBS in Dallas in February of 1993. This was at my first job fresh from college. Only three of us at this office were into Unix, and we all knew that this was the beginning of something big. Later that summer when Slackware 1.0 was released, it showed up in one of the local bookstores in a book/cdrom package, but 1.0.x has issues with the HP Vectra hardware we were trying to run it on, and by the time Slack 1.2 was released in spring of 1994, it would run good on the Vectras.
Ubuntu 8.04 looked pretty sweet, and seemed to be a good way to get away from Microsoft Windows. I spent months Googling how to partition a hard disk and dual-boot a computer. It worked very well; never had any major problems. Sometimes GRUB would break or something, but that was always easily fixed, and it probably always will be. :) After extensive Googling and talking with my Uncle (who knows a bunch about Linux), I finally installed on...I think the date was 3 January 2009. And it was beautiful. I'd been playing with Live CDs, but installing to my hard disk was such a great feeling. :D
Last night, I wiped my whole hard disk and let it install Jaunty using the default option. I have a 1.66 GHz dual core CPU, 2 GB of RAM, and 36 seconds from power button to login screen. I don't know if it's Jaunty's optimizations, the swap space that I've never used before, or the fact that it's sitting closer to the edge of the hard disk, but this is beautiful.
Makes me wonder why Microsoft doesn't do a feature freeze and focus solely on optimization, stability, and security for a version or two of Windows.
P.S.: I have learned a hell of a lot more about computers in the past three and a half months outside the classroom than I have in it. Linux is like a mini CS course, I think.
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
As crazy as it sounds, it's true: there was an NLM for accessing through X a certain NetWare admin application (whose name now escapes me). So I tried to install Slackware 3.something and succeeded at first try, and off I was.
The whole Slackware experience was so surprisingly easy and consistent, that later RedHat Linux felt very clunky and buggy. Yeah, it kinda worked and tried to be kinda user-friendly, but it has dozens of unpleasant bugs, inconsistencies, and generally, it didn't allow me as much control as Slackware.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I tried to make Gnome look more like Windows. I tried an Ubuntu live CD (version 4 I think) that was on the front of a magazine, I still muck around various distros from time to time but the only use I've found for it is as a rescue disc.
It was RedHat 5.(something?) for me... I know. I'm a freaking noob here it seems. I installed using a CD, not the floppies like all you.
But my first experience after getting it up and running, was getting the NIC drivers loaded (I had a classic tulip card). That was easy. I then wanted to figure out what I was going to do... So I logged into one of the IRC channels that I normally talked on, and got immediately booted because I was running as root.
That was my first lesson in computer security.
I got a new PC and figure I could finally get around to play with Linux now that I had a spare system I could mess up without affecting my workflow. So I downloaded the latest Ubuntu distro, a couple of years ago, I didn't want anything complex.
It took about 6 hours to install and it refused to recognize the serial mouse. It was also sluggish as all hell.
OK, I told myself, this is an 8 years old system and Ubuntu is asking too much of it, even if it does run more smoothly in an older system than an equivalent Windows system (which would have been XP SP2 at the time). This machine used to run Windows Me without a hitch (yeah, I know, I know, but I never had any problems with it).
So I got Xubuntu and tried again. And to make a long story short, after several days of 6- to 8-hours long installs that wouldn't recognize my mouse and would run slower than Me, and endless hours spent rumagging around help forums, I gave up.
Last year I gave away that old system after installing Me again on it.
Eventually I installed Fedora in a newer system and made my peace with Linux, but that first experience made me really weary about it all.
it's been almost a decade ago- .idx" which wound up removing a whole lot more than it should have...
I took verbal instruction to type
"rm *.idx" which somehow became
something like "rm *
it's been so long, I forget exactly what the extra character was...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I still remember my first time with Linux... it felt like a bag of sand.
Installed the SLS distribution some time in early 1993, from a shareware CD-rom "Night Owl".
At the time, I was using DOS, and without fully grasping the potential, Linux was like "DOS with multiple screens" (the virtual consoles). It was my first experience with any Unix-like system, and I was sold to it immediately. I read all the shareware texts I could about Linux and Unix commands, and saw what a big step-up it was from DOS scripting + Turbo Pascal programming.
I went momentarily back to DOS, and then OS/2, and then very shortly Windows95 - until in 1995, when I made the jump onto Slackware. Today its Ubuntu, but have had Linux as my main system since then.
My daughter and I installed a print server years ago. Just the other day I tried the lastest distro of ubuntu. I still ask my self why people act like linux is something special. It's just an OS that isn't as useful as other OS's. A decade or so ago it was lean and quick, now a full install with the GUI is shockingly slugish on my old machine.
In the 1997th year, much Quaking was being done by myself, a young 2ltnapalm. I fragged and it was good. Yet not all was well in the land of the rocket launcher. There was this fell beast, Windows 95, which ever was watchful for any joy in the world, existing only to bring the blue hell to the screens of the earth.
"Surely, there cannot be this misery alone for the computers of the earth. For in the earlier days of home computing I cast off Windows 3.0, who was then but a pretender operating system, for DOS 5. But Windows has grown more ambitious if not more useful and its infection spreads wide and no retreat to DOS does it permit. Tell me, Quakers, are their no alternatives to this dreck? And speak not of MacOS, for it is a joke."
Out of the depths of IRC, from the servers of EFNet, the oracles of #quake did speak.
"Linux. For it is stable and the Carmack has decreed that Quake shall run upon it with joy in its heart."
"Carmack the Wise is a powerful programmer and much does he understand. Hark, I shall give this Linux thing a shot."
To the merchant Computer City, I did go and they had a boxed copy of Red Hat 4.2 (if my memory does not betray me) which I did buy. Upon returning to my abode, I did begin preparations for the installation upon my whitebox. Partitioning was simple enough. The choices which one needed to make were not difficult, but to one who was but yet a pup it, it was so foreign. Eventually, perseverance and much RTMFing did triumph. Linux was installed. But one other thing must be done. X.
Many were the incantations invoked and the curses hurled due to X. Long days were spent editing text and typing that accursed startx only to find my work in vain. And yet did I endure for I knew that Windows 95 was cackling in the darkness of Redmond, awaiting my defeat to consume my soul should I fail and never again would I be able to hold my head high amongst the geeks of the realm.
Always teetering on the edge of disaster, but never managing to destroy my machine (which the pages of man ensured me was possible), I one day found something new. Something unexpected. For after messing with mode lines and color depths and other things arcane, startx worked. A graphical user interface was mine!
"My heart doth rejoice in this success! I shall install Window Maker and Enlightenment and many others besides so that I may never be bored with the look and feel of this machine, for that is the crowning glory of this victory: I can have any UI I desire."
Feeling very pleased with myself, I looked over all I surveyed with great confidence, yet the victory was not mine alone. For this unnamed box had endured much in the trials of installation. Yes. "Endured much beyond the reckoning of the typical home computer," said I, "and not just endured, but thrived and in the coming days shall have many challenges to overcome, so henceforth let this machine be known as tankgirl!"
Many were the adventures of tankgirl and, now, ltnapalm. Running a website over a cable modem, a MySQL database server, and numerous other tasks that tankgirl did perform, singing all the while with her K6 233 and 128 megabytes of RAM. In time, helper machines were obtained so that less interesting tasks tankgirl would not have to do herself, for her processing time was valuable and wasted on other tasks. A 486 there was, scorned by many as out of date and useless, now raised from its nadir to its apex with Linux installed and became a mighty wall of fire, shielding the local area network from the depredations of script kiddies and other wearers of the black hat of crackerdom.
Many were the nooks and crannies that cptnapalm and tankgirl delved into together, from dabbling in C programming and shell scripting to kernel compilation and switching to Debian. Together we witnessed the horrors of sendmail.cf and learned the mysteries of bind. And Quake there was, of course, too.
After long years, time did takes its toll and its toll was death. Impoverishment prevente
My first experience installing and using linux was with Red Hat Linux 4.1. It was mostly out of curiosity as my younger brother had been using linux but I didn't expect much from a free operating system. At the time I was running Windows 95, Windows NT 4 and OS/2 Warp 4 on the same box so I was already well prepared the difficulties of a multi-boot setup and using a diversity of operating systems.
Its been awhile but I don't recall any major issues with the installation. It definitely required more tweaking than the other operating systems to get a working desktop, but as pretty much anyone in this forum knows there is a high probability of install difficulties with almost any operating system when you build a custom system rather than purchase a pre-installed system.
I don't recall the window manager I used at the time but it was a functional desktop albeit not as polished as Windows or OS/2. But something interesting happened, I found Gimp.
I had a large flatbed color scanner on a SCSI bus that I used in Windows and OS/2. In Windows I used the applications that shipped with the scanner and for OS/2 I purchased an image editing program, I don't recall the name anymore, in both cases the applications absolutely refused to use the full size of the scanner. The scanner was a full legal size 8.5x14 but the proprietary applications would only allow up to 8.5x11 scans. With a little research I found there were applications available for purchase that would use the full scan size but I was not in dire need of full legal size scans so I held off on the purchase.
When I used Gimp+SANE with the flatbed scanner it allowed complete legal size scans! My eyes were opened. In the proprietary closed source software world the extra scan size required extra cash, which seemed ludicrous and disingenuous as I doubt it required any significant code changes to implement, but in the open source world the software was written to take full advantage of the hardware's capabilities and it was FREE!
At that point I was sold. By 2003 I was only running linux based operating systems, my laptop, three desktops in the house, a couple of firewalls/routers and a few servers. During this time I have become progressively aware of the ridiculous demands of the closed source proprietary software vendors. They have become sick and demented on their own greed to the point where they've twisted the purpose of Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution from "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" into some bizarre protected and perpetual revenue stream. In this upside down world created by closed source software vendors research and development capital is spent not to advance the science or art but instead to create false limitations on there proprietary applications capabilities to create equally false product price points.
Way back in the day, I decided that I would figure out what this unix thing was. Someone had given me a copy of some version of it. I spent two weeks getting that damn thing running, and that was with an exhaustive guide. Course most of the time was spent compiling everything on a 386. Once I got it all running, I was too ignorant of such things to really accomplish much more than basic tasks with it. So I quickly got frustrated with it and went back to windows 3.1.
Fast forward to today, where I run Ubuntu for my main computer, debian on my servers, and my windows computer only gets used for gaming.
In a move that, in hindsight, was eriely prohpetic i set up a uucp mail server. I was teaching myself C when a coworker gave me a copy of this disk based unix tutorial. I thought it was neat and then began hunting around for a full version of the os. Mind you, this was 1992 or so. I even remember sending 3 boxes of 3.5" floppies to someone somewhere who copied a version of slackware for me and sent them back. Loved the OS ever since.
--- I was far from home, and the spell of the Eastern sea was upon me. -Lovecraft-
PS: That 386 box is still operational today (over 17 years later)! It's just not connected to anything anymore.
Linux user since early January 1992.
It was around 1997-98 and I just downloaded a version of slackware on floppy to mess around with. Boot, Root, and a bunch of other disk images. I had worked with unix and xenix so it wasn't alien to me. I seem to recall driving around trying to find a PCI based 56K hardware modem around that time and finding none.
A couple of years later I looked at many of the distros that were being given away on CD. I put a Redhat box on dialup duty first off, and had it route a simple LAN on a cheap 10Mb hub and even acted as a firewall. I remember trying Mandrake but wasn't much interested in a desktop linux box. Gaming required a Windows98 box and later Win2k and later still WinXP and my work box went from WinNT4 to Windows2000 to WinServer2003.
Today I try to keep an 12GB Ubuntu install on anything with Windows and internet access. It's just too useful to not do it and IMO stupid not to. A lot of my stuff in the background is Linux (HTPC and servers). I spend about a third of my time on the Ubuntu side now that it's got semi-proper support for videocards and most filetypes. However, I like to set most of my machines to suspend to memory and that often determines what I run when I sit down at them...
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
The university I went to school had a Unix system but to access it you'd either need to be in the CS building or access it through a 14.4 modem via the terminal server. When crunch time came the thing was always overloaded. At about the same time Linux was just hitting 1.0 and supported gcc which was perfect for homework. In this case, necessity was the mother of installation.
The first time was the two-disk boot/root SLS set, the 1992-3 equivalent of a "live CD". Being in college, this tryst lasted about three days and SLS and my PC went their separate ways.
By the end of the week, Slackware had moved in with my PC and kicked Windows to the curb.
That relationship lasted until around 1995 when Slackware wasn't interested in a menage a tois with my PC and DEC Alpha machines. Slackware was out on the curb and Red Hat moved in for a good run. They eventually formed a commune and had many more machines and eventually the young stud Fedora took over the place and Red Hat went out to pasture.
I screwed up my first install and left the hard disk unbootable. Easy recovery, right? Boot from floppy and reinstall lilo.
Except there was a BIOS flaw. If the boot order was "C:, A:" instead of "A:, C:", the system only booted from floppy if the hard disk was not present. If it was present but not bootable, it would just halt and never failed over to try booting from the floppy. (This was late '95, with a 486 that had never heard of booting from CDROM.)
Oh, did I mention I'd passworded my BIOS and forgotten the password?
Yeah, not so smart.
My machine ("jefry", with one "f") spent the next month completely dissassembled. I knew I had to clear the CMOS memory, but couldn't figure out how. There was supposed to be a jumper I could use. Eventually I figured out that the jumper contacts were present but the pins weren't installed (in '95, tech support had access to motherboard specs!!) and managed to bridge the contacts with a paperclip.
And that was just to get the machine to boot from the floppy drive so I could get back to my Windows install. Even after getting lilo installed properly, it took another couple of months to get to a working slackware install. I learned a lot, though.
And I never passworded another BIOS.
Yes, I remember the first time I used linux.
It was 3 days of pain and frustration.
I couldn't get the kernel to compile no matter what I did.
After a couple hours of hair pulling, I called a friend of mine who had installed linux hundreds of times. He was with me for the next several days as we both went insane trying to get that to work.
In the end, we had to give up, linux wouldn't work no matter what we did. It definitely wasn't ready for users if professional techs and consultants couldn't get it to work on a standard machine.
Of course, things are much better now. I haven't had a problem like that in ages, and the installers are infinitely superior now. I'd even let some of the moderately adept users install linux if they wanted to. So before going off on a rant about the (imaginary) perfection of linux, just remember that it wasn't that many years ago it was a major pain in the @** and impossible for a non-techie to deal with.
in 98ish, i ran a warez ftp site (affiliated with RNS and APC release groups), using slackware and glftpd
The first thing I did with Linux was backup the 3 floppy disks it came on (Redhat, circa 1995)
and she can get a date? I'd sooner expect a tear in the space-time continuum.
I actually just installed Ubuntu 9.04 for the first time, on one of my two installed hard drives. The installation appeared to go well, until it rebooted. Grub then gave me an Error 21, which was great.
When I finally got past that and was able to get my computer to boot again (earlier today), I realized that Ubuntu wouldn't support a standard widescreen resolution for my video card (GeForce 6800 GT PCI) and monitor (Standard Acer Widescreen LCD). It took 2 hours of fiddling with an Ubuntu super-user to get the display working right- and he's still not sure how he did it.
My Windows XP installation still works fine, as it always has. ...but Linux is better, amirite?
I forget my Red Hat 5.2 installation (relative latecomer) and haven't looked back since and still continue with Fedora and unable to get past the Red Hat way. I remember learning the fundamentals of computers from the ground up as it should be... However, Linux was more profound in my life since it enabled this Political Science/History to have a career. A lot of employers were impressed with the fact that I knew Linux well because when you learn this sublime OS, you learn a lot more like Apache, Mysql and more importantly the Open Source community. It can be said that next to my son's birth the Linux installation is the most important moment of my life...
like many others that i've read here, my virgin experience with linux came in the form of many sleep deprived nights of reading and recompiling the kernel of a Slackware 8.1(9?) install. i did this at the recommendation of my peers as i was green to *NIX and the only experience i had with anything other than windows systems at the time was hacking my class projects on Solaris dummy terminals.
i joined the RUSLUG(http://ruslug.rutgers.edu/w/) and the great majority of them suggested this route. now i realize that this was a nerd hazing....however, the knowledge and familiarity with the inner workings of linux that i gained from those first couple of weeks is now priceless. not to mention that, once i perfected the process of configuring that machine, my sh!tty compaq presario laptop ran better than the day i brought it home...another added plus, my non-techy friends in the dorm were so thrown off by fluxbox, none of those virus magnets ever even tried to hop on my box anymore.
anyway, what first became of that introduction is something that still makes me proud to this day: the Prism driver. thats right, i as involved with the project that brought many of you wireless g in linux for the first time. i was responsible for the config/admin tools and the sh!tty documentation to help you script your settings.
no one who is familiar with it believes me when i tell them...until i make them bet on it and dig up notes and archived irc discussions...that got me many a free lunch over the years!
while that was a great learning experience...it is not something i want to ever go through again. which is why i must say this: what i first do with linux now is discouraging considering how long it's been since i worked on the prism project, how successful it was, and how far linux has come since then.....most of the time the first thing i do after installing linux on a system is hop on my VISTA box and scour the internet trying to figure out how to get my god damned wireless working!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?
seriously....WTF!!!!!
It was 1996, I was 14. It was a Slackware 3.x CD from a PC magazine that I don't remember the name of. My PC was a 486.
I gave it a try mainly because of its network capabilities.
What capabilities? Malicious of course.. I was able to nuke'em all on the IRC!
My first intro to Linux was in college. I'd been learning on a Solaris box at school and was having trouble with something... bash or awk scripting, I think. Anyway, I asked around if I could get my hands on a cheap copy of UNIX so I could study at home and a class-mate suggested Linux.
My first Linux was a copy of Pygmy Linux (stripped down version of Slackware) which I downloaded onto five floppies. Pygmy was shell-only and ran on a UMSDOS filesystem, so no re-partitioning was required. Great way to learn the command-line basics without being thrown full into the Linux world.
My first distro I experienced with was Red Hat Linux. My dad was into Linux and we got together and installed it on his brand new Toshiba Tecra 8000 with a 300Mhz PII processor and the RAM upgraded from 64MB to 256 (the max !!!).
(That computer is right next to me trying to repair it's hard 8GB hard drive, btw, as I found it in a closet while cleaning out my house)
I don't know exactly when the release date was on that but that was around that time.
Later he showed me SuSE 8.2? (maybe 9.2), which I didn't really like, couldn't get it to do what I wanted to in WINE, and gave up rather quickly.
I started becoming a hardcore linux user 2 years ago, when a friend of mine's dorm mate was becoming a hardcore linux user. He told me about ubuntu (feisty) which didn't work well with my ATI card. Then Gutsy came out and I used it solid up until the recent Jaunty release - where I'm having incompatible hardware dilemmas. I still keep windows around for compatibility sake (ie. new OS's on my black berry) and games, but I realized (and tried to tell others) that day to day daily activities can all be done in Linux. If you think about what a typical user does:
- Listen to music
- Watch Movies
- Browse the series of tubes
- get/send e-mail
- Calendar program
- Office suite
- Folder view access (to porn)
- IM
ALL of those things are covered (some things, like music organizers, covered in HEAVY) in linux, among THOUSNADS of others GNU and other OSS programs. There's no reason to not use it for a day to day system. My usual method is keep windows on a big partition (games take up a lot), Linux (whichever flavor) can reside on a smaller, 20GB or so partition with no complaints, and then I make a big partition in the middle (usually format it as NTFS) for data storage, so both can access it. And it works great.
I 3 linux, but I got really bored trying to get WINE to play my games correctly, so I always keep an XP install handy.
Although my first exposure to Linux was much earlier, and was mostly spent learning how the basic commands differed from what I remembered from DOS, my first time actually doing something with Linux was during my undergraduate research, when I ran simulations of high energy particle collisions for the now depressingly delayed ATLAS experiment.
Using X and XV on a 486 to view images generated by POV-Ray on Sparc 10. I learned a ton of stuff about bash, gcc, Linux, ftp, make, X. . . just so I could view a picture I created. And it wasn't even a good one. This was sometime in late 1994 I think.
and I was looking for some version of UNIX that I could afford to use at home as a computer science student. Someone pointed me to a thing called "Linix" posted on one of our departmental NFS servers. Turns out it was just kernel source... but it was like a light bulb going off and I asked around for more information.
Soon enough I'd picked up a 386 machine from the university's surplus department and fitted it with 4MB RAM, 2MB of it on an ISA-bus memory expander card, and I was downloading floppy images from a local BBS. As I recall it was only a few boxes worth, not the hundreds of floppies that were required by the Slackware 3/4 era, when it was literally an all-day, all-night project to install linux, one floppy image at a time.
My system had a 160MB ESDI hard drive that cost me a fortune, 4MB i386, with a 640x480 Tseng Labs VGA card and an old, square, super-clicky Logitech serial mouse. The satisfaction of seeing X+TWM+Emacs on my home display was sooooo immense I thought I'd faint.
Within a number of months I'd expanded to a 640x480x256-capable card and gotten ahold of Mosaic and was using Term from a shell login to create an RFC1918 IP address for myself and connect to the interweb... where almost nothing existed, so mostly I still used Gopher, Archie, Veronica, Jughead, etc. and used Linux mainly for the "work" of getting a VT100 login session to my school, so that I could code and test my code on their superfast supernew Sparc 10 machines. :-D
They were fun days.
I still have the Sun3 pizza box that was *meant* to be my first home UNIX box, before I heard about this "Linix" thing.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Once, some critical .dll files had been deleted from the Windows XP Operating System on one of the shared computers in my house, rendering the system un-usable. Nobody had made any backups, and the XP Installation DVD was nowhere to be found.
I didn't want to leave my family with an un-usable machine, so I bit the bullet and installed Debian Linux with Firefox(which I believe was branded IceWeasel at the time), OpenOffice, and some other essentials. After hearing feedback from my parents, I switched to Ubuntu (with the same apps) for the sake of user-friendliness.
http://xkcd.com/456/
The first time i used Linux was over a dialup terminal connection from a 286 running DOS, in Brisbane, Australia, in about August 1994. I quickly learnt about 'screen' and (for some inexplicable reason) i was a fan of emacs. I used lynx to browse what i could find of the web in those pre-google days.
I installed Linux on my DEC (Digital Equipment Corp) Hinote laptop in 1995. I downloaded the files for the installation floppy disk set via the FTP by mail service that, as far as i remember, DEC operated in those days. That was a lot easier than FTPing them direct, over my dialup connection - as the mail only had to be downloaded from my ISP's server. I was in the UK at the time, and the ISP was Demon.
I used the command line exclusively for a few months, until i bought a Unix book from a bookshop in Madras, India, and worked out how to set up X. And i've run Linux on all my laptops since then.
sometime in 1997, first thing I did after I got it was discover none of my devices were supported and uninstalled it.
...uninstall it. I'm a PC!
I vividly remember the first thing I did when I fist installed Linux - Reinstalled it.
And again. And again.
Eventually I got it configured installed the way I wanted it, and it was ossom! \o/
What did I do first with Linux? Install it.
I gave yggdrasil a go, I guess that it was early to mid 90s. To be honest, I wasn't all that impressed with yggdrasil so I abandoned it fairly quickly. You've got to remember that I was used to Micro-Port Unix (a port of Sys V for the PC), which was more stable. It didn't have the X Windowing System on it but that wasn't a real problem for me back then.
My next stop along the Linux trail was Redhat, circa version 5. That was a keeper. What did I do with it? Learn its web and database server capabilities. Learn how it differed from the various flavors of Unix that, as a software developer, I was already familiar with. I remember being pretty happy with the -R command line switch which Unix didn't have.
Spring 2000, iirc. I'd been running a home NT4 mail / web server for about a year, and it was a royal pain in the ass. Half-life of about two weeks between bluescreens. Wednesday evenings dedicated to patches and defrags and reboots. Intermittent, unexplainable IIS freezes.
I was contemplating dropping a couple $K on new hardware, mostly out of desperation. At the same time, I'd played with Linux a few times, liked it, and it already had a well-established rep for stability. This was also the time the first commercial distros were coming into their own. I finally decided to take the plunge and bought (yes, actually paid for) a copy of SuSE, v.5 I think.
Steep learning curve; much swearing and regret; but when I finally put the beast online, it ran. For 14 months, and what finally killed it was a power failure too long for the UPS to handle.
In the nine years since (going from SuSE on a slot-A Athlon, to Mandrake/Mandriva on a dual Athlon XP, to nine Ubuntu VMs on a pair of triple-core Phenoms) I've had exactly two software-related crashes, one due to a misconfigured driver, the other from a runaway app that filled up /var. Uptime for this latest interation, which went online in Dec. is 100%.
And patch-the-server Wednesdays are a distant memory.
Life is like surrealism: if you have to have it explained to you, you can't afford it.
My first linux experience was installing (bootstrapping, iirc) Gentoo.
Believe it or not, it wasn't my last!
My UID is prime. Is yours?
Wrote some C code for faculty class in Operating Systems ... that was in 2000
First thing I did when I set eyes upon that weird Bash-shell was porting Clippy to it.
Your mom!
Don't use Ubuntu if you want to configure things yourself... Try LFS (Linux From Scratch)
Holy shit I hope your not a doctor:
"That cut is too deep for a band-aid, the only other option is to amputate the limb"
Dude, there are a bunch of other distros out there that allow for far more configuration than Ubuntu while also having nice amenities like an actual package management system. I personally have been using Arch Linux for about a month and I have been able to do a lot of customization that Ubuntu makes difficult without having to search the web for every single library dependency in existence. It's a little irresponsible to dump LFS directly on somebody who is just getting proficient with Ubuntu... in fact, LFS is cute if you want to get the basis for beginning your own distro, but frankly it's a waste of time for most end users since you really don't learn anything more about Linux by fighting incompatible package versions, despite what the ricers say.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
I had a boring job at a contract lab in Switzerland. It was the middle of winter in 1998. I installed slackware on a laptop and learned C and Perl. I moved back to California to another boring job, but kept up. After two years and a lot of work, I became the head of bioinformatics at a startup biotech company. I taught Perl and bioinformatics courses at the local universities, but have stayed in industry ever since. I picked up a lot of skills along the way, from building HPC pipelines on clusters, RDBMS (postgres), serving up information through LAMP, and building novel pattern recognition and visualization systems.
Linux is now second nature and my whole family uses it for computing and on various devices around the house. I can't imagine going without it
First entomology, then virology, and finally bioinformatics systems. Bugs follow me wherever I go.
Slackware circa 1996.
Found it a bit difficult, but decided it was worth it. Had very limited disk space, so downloaded it and installed it in stages. It was going on the same computer it was downloaded on, so setup partitions for dual booting, downloaded very base system on my super fast 14.4k modem, copied it on to 3.5" floppies, installed. Now the base install had no inet support. sooo.... reboot back into windows 3.11, download the next package, copy to floppy, reboot, install, repeat. Eventually had enough of the system installed to do it directly in linux, however had to copy to floppy as I went to keep open disk space. Of course not everything worked right, X11 video card, sound card, etc... so began the kernel recompiling...
MARK! fully installed system working within 2 weeks.
Back in 1996 I had a friend (just one) - did windows tech support for a living. One drunken night he was raving about this new OS - build your own machine, install your own free software!! ETC ETC. The upshot is I learned the hard way to build my own machines (I'm a chef) and got RH 4.2 installed with X after approximately a year of confusion. :-) - loved it! Even had a dude who's high up in Amazon now come help me out of my ignorance one day. It's a small world. I've never looked back.And thank you all those hackers.
I first tried Linux last year. I was in the US Air Force doing my 4-months in Iraq, and had just inadvertently destroyed my USB drive. The cable plug inside the drive housing had snapped clean off, I wasn't skilled (l33t, perhaps?) enough to re-solder it, and to my chagrin the Crazy Glue gambit met with limited success.
When I took the USB drive apart however, the 2.5 inch drive itself was fine. Thought I,
1: Cool, A 2.5 inch PATA. This drive will fit inside my laptop.
2: The dudes over in the IT shop have a Drake version of Kubuntu floating around on CD. They'd probably let me borrow it.
3: ...
4: No profit whatsoever. I hated that crap. I could not figure out how to give myself root in X. Instead of prompting for [Password:], the X interface in Drake took great delight in the [You do not have permission to access this drive. Ha ha, you're screwed!] Learning to even use the interface was a task in itself, I JUST WANTED TO LOOK AT PICTURES OF WOMEN ON MY COMPUTER! I kept at it though, because learning new things is fun, and switched over to Ubuntu once I got back to the US of A.
And then dual-booted on my home machine.
And then began installing it old computers around the house.
And most recently, installed it on the toaster... seriously, though. I found that once I got past the learning curve, it was mostly easy to work with. Objectively, I can't even say the learning curve was worse than the Windows 95 curve was.
Internet scofflaw
Installed Yggdrasil on my awesome new 486, 8 Megs of memory, 250 meg drive with the cool "ftape" tape drive.
Anyway, to shrink its memory footprint, I recompiled the kernel with no networking. When I noticed that there was still networking code in it, I took matters into my own hands and started ripping out all the networking code that remained.
After I compiled and booted THAT, it was noticeably smaller! But stuff like X quit working. Phooey.
Ecce potestas casei!
Nothing in ubuntu really stops you from compiling your own kernel if that floats your boat, it just means that other people can be productive on it if they choose without having to learn to do all that stuff.
I installed LPMud 2.4.5. I learned C style programming using on a mud.
one and a half year ago. i asked a friend to install Debian for me, because i did'nt even know where to put ram or disks then. this friend of mine is a very lazy person and additionally a Ubuntu fan-boy and dualbooter. he said he got no Debian, only Ubuntu and that Ubuntu is Debian and that i should also install Windows (on a pentium II!). i could talk him off the windows idea, which i found was a very bad one, but was still left with a primitive Ubuntu install, which means no config nor firewall etc. the first thing i did was changing the root password in gnome, after which i got locked out of my box and had to call my mate again. i really hated Ubuntu. it was ugly and stupid. at this time i was without internet access and it took me several weeks to get a Debian install cd (i stole it at a guys place - it was a Debian/Etch multi-arch DVD i teared out of his brand new Linux magazine...:-)). well, it took me severeal two weeks to manage a working Debian installation. since then it just got better and better. in the meantime i've learned tons of stuff and got me some nice Athlons. i write my own iptable/ebtables, compile my own kernels, installed Virtualbox and KVM on several computers and even got a working HURD installation (in a virtual machine with ssh!). on my lan there are: a backupserver (amanda), a web server (nginx), a web proxy (squid3), a diogenes server (for the TLG-E), a TNT server (for the German Wikipedia), a file server (proftpd, which i use to mount filesystems with curlftpfs/fuse on my desktops), a virtual machine (KVM) on which i use to start detached screen sessions automaticly to download tons of bittorrent stuff with aria2c, which again i suck on my main machine with netcat, a time server, a package cache (apt-cacher-ng), postfix/nmh for mail and all that shiny things for free! if i would have known what fun computers can be, i'd have for sure started earlier (i'm 31 now), but better late than never. the fun thing is, that my friend, an it guy who took 50 bucks for an crappy Ubuntu installation comes now to me, if he needs something with linux. i don't charge him though. linux is not about the money...
modded my xbox :D
Seems that everyone has their own story. 4 pages of posts so far! Guess I'll throw in my two-pennorth It was 2003, and I was taking a basic IT course in which Linux surprisingly made an appearance. Back in the late 90s I had heard of this mythical creature called Linux (which I had only read about, and thus pronounced it Lie-nucks), and how amazing it was that you could customize anything you wanted. Unfortunately, I never had a computer to try it on back then, so when I finally had a computer, and an install CD, I was on my way. I'll never forget the trepidation with which I put the CD in that drive. The calm confidence as I found that a lot of my GUI knowledge in Windows transitioned very well, and that my programming experience treated me well on the command line. Before long, I had a working file and print server through Samba. That server has gone through a lot of iterations over the years. But, even after moving residence 4 times with the server, it has still maintained a 99.8% uptime from that very day. It now runs an apache web server, my personal email server, a proxy so I can browse the web from work, and a few other things. Also, I've run Linux as a desktop on and off for a number of years. First was Gentoo, then Fedora, then Ubuntu, now I'm onto Kubuntu, and I'll probably stay here. Kubuntu 9.04 is everything an OS should be.
Middle of 1993 the Yggdrasil CD came in the mail. Took a fairly new PC (386) and dumped the Windows install and used that for Yggdrasil. Spent many nights playing around inside while learning Linux. I really can't remember but think there were five or six Windoze boxes that came and went while the old tower running Linux kept chugging along. Eventually ended up with a Sun Ultra 10 from surplus and found myself constantly wondering why Solaris didn't some of the things that Linux did. Testing some desktops to roll out at the University now. Liking Ubuntu but am letting the IT leadership team attempt to achieve the same result with OpenSolaris. For work productivity and compatiblity I use a Mac.
lynx hotsex.com
I compiled a new kernel. It was in the old dark days of Linux 1.2 and the module system didn't yet exist, so you had to recompile the kernel to get support for your hardware.
was tri-booting with Red Hat Fedora Core, Win XP and Slackware, eventually killed everything in favor of Slackware, my computer got nuked from 6 months of inactivity and I have never gotten Slack to run quite right since.
I was told Unix systems are very complicated. This delayed my first Linux install for about two years. Then I saw a SuSE release installed by a friend who is not that smart at computers. I had ugly problems running the Microsoft C++ compiler. I remembered the neat C compiler of some university Unix workstations and got out buying a Red Hat release. I had to read to manual to install it and make some trial an error but it was overall quite easy. I installed the X server and ran the KDE 1 graphical interface. Then I rushed to the C++ compiler and... oh in heaven and grace, it accepted all my source code. No bugs, no problems. If something halted, it was always my fault and the solution was clear and immediate. One month later I started using the Qt API and planned that about six months would be necessary to get it under the knee. That same evening, everything I planned to do during those six months was finished and everything was a delight.
It's actually a similar experience with seeing DOS the first time. What the fuck I can do with this prompt..
If you delay pleasure infinitely, the pleasure will be infinite. (YM)
I used Mepis Linux first, the liveCD version (which was also an install CD). I had been making a concerted effort for some time prior to use only OSS on Windows, and had pretty much succeeded with that. So I thought it was time I checked out an open-source operating system. D/l'ed and burned Mepis, booted into it, and viola. I liked it and though I hadn't planned to, went ahead and installed it on my HD, which was pretty painless, thank goodness, because I didn't have much of an idea of what was going on. I did, at least, understand what I needed to about partitioning.
I think the only downside to the whole experience was that out-of-the-box KDE wasn't terribly well-configured back then and I thought it was ugly. Fonts, especially, were hideous. It was sometime later before I figured out that KDE can look quite nice, but I've never been much of a fan probably because of that first exposure.
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality;..."
ppp service wasn't yet available. The concept of an "ISP" was limited to business with frame relay. BBS's were what people with modems dialed into- and my university had their own that ran off a SYS-V/R3 Unix box.
They also had a connection to something called the arpanet. There was something called gopher that let you navigate all sorts of information on how to make anything!
I used my first linux install (kernel .9x) to create my own slip connection to that SYS V r3 box and ftp files right to my computer!!! Then in a few years I discovered Mosaic, and when it was too slow, Lynx. I think the first web site I ever visited was the NCSA web site- the second may have been an early version of Yahoo run out of stanford university.
... which was not particularly easy those days (no internet at home).
It was an early SLS distro on a 286 IBM-clone.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
I was an engineering student at UNLV in my early 30s. I was practically computer illiterate until I got a desktop system with Windows 3.11. I spent about a year fiddling with it, and read "PC's for Dummies", then got into some classes where I learned that most of the serious engineering work was done on something called "Unix". Someone told me that there was a version for PC's called "lynex" (or something like that). After a little research over the internet (which was still new to practically everyone), I ordered the Slackware 96 cds from Walnut Creek. I installed that on my desktop and then curiosity took hold of me. I couldn't resist hacking around to see how to make my machine do things that according to most of the competent PC people were too difficult to do without using expensive proprietary software. 13 years later, I've run Slackware, Red Hat, Suse, Debian, Ubuntu, and several times built Linux from Scratch systems. I got a new laptop a few months ago. Step One: Installed Kubuntu, Step Two: Removed Vista.
It's the Walnut Creek with 2 CDs from 95, before that Yggdrasil and SLS were other popular choices. But the first memories I have of linux were of kernel compiles, trying to optimize every BogoMips out of a Cyrix 486DLC system. That was back in 1993 when the kernels ran in the 0.99
Some other fun memories were modifying the assembly code to support a Bocaboard IO AT/66 because I could support 6 external modems with this baby and migrate my BBS from Deskview to linux. Ah the pain trying to allocate 6 IRQs for all my serial needs.
It was 95 or so, and I got a computer out of the garbage that used to belong to the chair of our department (new phd student), slapped RH on it and loaded up LambdaMOO. THose were the days.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2013.808365
I started with Linux around RedHat 4.something. I'd subscribed to cable internet in 1998 and needed a better way to share the connection across the network. I took an old Compaq Presario 200MHz Pentium Pro machine and installed Linux on it and used IP Masquerading so all my machines on the network could share the connection. It wasn't until later that I heard that getting Linux to work on Compaqs was considered very difficult. I think I got lucky.
Anyhow, the machine ran quietly under the shelf for months, to the point where I even forgot it was there. I didn't start using Linux on the desktop until around 2005, and have been using it almost exclusively since 2007. Yes, there are plenty of hassles, stupid problems and other annoyances, but after using Microsoft products for more than 25 years (I even used DOS 1.1 briefly), I know I'm definitely not worse off in the long run, and I'm not subject to the utter arrogance and contempt with which Microsoft treats its customers.
When something doesn't work in Linux, it might be to misconfiguration on my part, incompetence on the developers' part, lack of documentation by a hardware manufacturer, sabotage of standards by Microsoft or some other company, or any of a number of reasons. However, it is never because the person who wrote the software is trying to lock me in, restrict me, force me to pay money for things I don't want or need, or maintain their monopoly and avoid competition. That knowledge alone makes the inconveniences, hassles and difficulties I experience with Linux far less burdensome than when it happens with Microsoft.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Well, I started using Linux about a year ago, I installed ubuntu 5.10 on my old dell '98 and the first thing I noticed was that I didn't have to install any new drivers to make it work right!!1 I'm still a complete newbie at Linux, but I enjoy learning more about it, and know more than the Microsoft fanboys who tried Linux and said it was too difficult to use because they couldn't upgrade to openoffice3.0 or install anything. I now have ubuntu 9.04 on a 3 month old PC that I built myself. I think the first thing that I actually DID with my first Linux install was to immediately try out every single program that I could find. Of course this became a problem because most of the new programs don't run on 5.10, and that became a problem which as since then been resolved.
The first thing I really remember on my first installation is that, while trying to get a server working, I chmodded something poorly, I think 777, which, besides the obvious security problems, sent my computer into a kernel panic next time it booted. If we're talking distros, I think it was a Red Hat version.
Yup, n00b
Installed it to its own partition, used the OS/2 boot manager to start it. First thing I did with it, of course, was use vi to configure Xfree86.
and beginning an obsessive hunt for compatible isa network cards so lynx could get to hotmail
I set up a web server and found my first customers. I designed their web sites, hosted them and realized that I preferred software engineering and the technical aspects to web design and hosting. I suppose that if I had had better resources I could've had a better time in the hosting parts.
Oh yeah, it was Slackware all the way on a 486.
It was 1999, I was 12 years old, and someone online whom I had never met told me I would be cool if I used linux. I guess I wanted to be cool, so I got a copy of mandrake something point something from best buy.
I didn't know what a partition was, but I guessed and it worked out okay.
The first thing I did? I installed snes9x and played Super Mario World.
A few years back I was at a slightly geeky party.
Me and a few friends were discussing different distros, debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc.
At which point a fairly inebriated guy turned around and proclaimed in a loud voice.
"I've been a Slackware user since 1996 and I'll be a Slackware user till the day I die!"
I can't remember the rest of the night but I seem to recall some people complaining about a certain GCC patch.
I stole this Sig
I installed it on an old (even for then) POS 16MHz 386 PC we had sitting in a corner at work. Mostly I remember running 'find /' over and over again, marveling at how outrageously fast it was compared to the Sun Sparcstations (1+'s or 2's?) that we used for real work. Not an entirely fair comparison, since the Sun's used bitmapped graphics for everything, whereas Linux in console mode gets to use character-mode video hardware. Still, it was a revelation.
A few years later, I was developing an early web site, and damned if that thing didn't run faster on underpowered Compaq Aero 486SX than it did on the Sun boxes we had there. At that point, Sun had just switched to "Slowlaris", and I really can't think of any Sun box since that I've seen match Linux for speed. They did/do still support larger, more enterprisey hardware, of course.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
My first Linux attempt was with Slackware something on other, on a 486 DX2 66, 8 MB ram, and a huge 40 MB HDD (I think I had a Creative Soundblaster "gaming package" or something with a 2X CD-ROM drive). This was in 1995 I think. At that time I was running DOS with Windows 3.11 for Workgroups.
I got a Slackware CD from a friend in my Polytechnic (Ngee Ann, in Singapore for those who care), and I nuked my Windows installation trying to get slack to run.
I never did manage to get X running but it was great fun trying to edit and figure out various features. I had to use Windows for school work, so back I when.
Since then, I have experimented with various distros such as Redhat (I think I bought the Redhat 5 box version), Debian, Gentoo, and others.
Currently my PC runs Windows mostly, whereas my laptop is usually running Ubuntu.
Let's see. OS X Server 1.2 won't count because that was NeXT-based which itself was UNIX-based so it would have to be some distro of Yellowdog I installed on a pre-OS X G4 PowerMac. After that it was Xebian on an XBox. I've got a thing about making technology do things its not meant to to, so installing Linux on a PC seemed a bit pointless...
To experiment the first thing I decided to do was to install Ubuntu (Hardy at the time) on a 4GB flash drive. For the most part this went well, but for one thing: this being my first try with Linux, I skipped the "Advanced" button on the review step of the install. Turns out that's where you tell the installer where to put grub, and that it defaults to hd0 even if installing to a flash drive.
This resulted in my hard drive having GRUB on the MBR, but /boot being (correctly) on the flash drive. Of couse, with only half of GRUB on each, neither would boot. After some time, it finally occurred to me to run fixmbr off the Windows XP disc (it was late, I was tired), and with my system working I later got Ubuntu correctly installed to the flash drive after asking a friend who knew about that option to choose where to put GRUB.
BTW, it worked well off the USB, except FireFox, which ran like tar and locked up a lot (multiple times loading a single page in many cases). Opera worked well though, and I was even able to rig it up to install the correct graphics card driver prior to loading X, since I ran it from multiple PCs for a while. Since swap on a flash drive is a bad idea, I put a 2GB swap on the HDD of a low-end PC I used it on, and on the ones with good RAM simply used no swap at all.
I first installed ubuntu on my computer in 2006, everything was easy. Learned the basic stuff, how to use the shell.
For like a day....
Go Slackware!
Just logged in to /. for the first time, I have been reading this Site since 2000. But to the question at hand when I first tried Linux it was Debian "Woody" after reading some articles on the net about Linux.
It lead me to Distrowatch.org which made me go "whoa" as I looked around and read the many reviews, viewed the numerous sites that each had their own version of the Linux Kernel (they seem to always make their own custom kernels) and a never ending array of Custom config tools and such.
I finally decided on a version calling itself "Ice pack Linux 1.75".
being on a Dial up connection, I placed an order for This linux distro with my debit card and 3 weeks later I got a package in the mail of 8 CD's all bearing the Debian Logo needless to say I was pissed off at first, then I thought well mistakes are easy to make in a large company knowing that a lot of companies distribute a lot of different brands of similar Items.
So I sent them an Email stating what the problem was and how to go about making an Exchange for the "Correct Version of Linux" that I had Ordered and they sent me an Email telling me that I had the correct version that I ordered and that "Ice Pack 1.75" was nothing more than a Re-named version of Debian Woody.
so after reading some posts on LinuxQuestions.org about people with similar hardware to mine, I found for the most part my Computer was supported all the way Except for the Modem that is (that when I learned a new terms Winmodem and softmodem) so I went out and bought a US Robotics 56 K external Hardware modem that plugged in to com port2 on my ancient P2 - 300 MHZ with 256 megs of ram and a 2GB hdd and a creative labs CDrom/sound card setup.
So the first thing I had to do was boot the computer from the CDrom no easy task even in the bios after finding it and enabling boot from cd option it would not boot the damn machine at all so after a week of trying to figure it out I gave up for a while and decided to give a rest and try again later on in the week.
while hanging out a freinds house and helping him upgrade his computers CDrom Drive to a brand new CDROM Burner drive he got a best buy for $149.99.
he asked me if i would like his old 24x cdrom and i said "sure, maybe it would work for installing Linux on my machine" and he looked at me said "Linux ?" and i started telling him all about it and he said "well it is just a flash in the pan like OS/2, it will never last long enough to worry about don't waste your time with it dude."
That's when I looked at him and said "well I would at least like to try it out".
so with that I took the cdrom drive he gave me and headed home.
when I got home that night I installed the new drive and got rid of the creative labs drive put the cover back on my PC and turned it on and booted in to windows 98se and Placed the Debian disc #1 in the drive and reboot windows after what seemed like forever the cdrom drive started flikering like mad and there was was a black screen filled with white writing wizzing by pretty quick and then a blue screen and grey screen with welcome screen and ton of lang options.
well needless to say it was a breeze to install until I got to the X Server setup part there were all kinds of options and tried each one till i got one that worked for me.
then i had to use a tool called vim to edit a file that X used for Configuring the itself to my video card a TNT Riva 128 and change the resolution from 640 x 480 to 1024 x 768.
but after all that it just worked it was like the greatest thing I had ever seen it was fresh and exciting, my first Installation change was KDE and I spent days going through all of its options (which there seemed no end to) but I did not mind that as it was cool to play with.
I decided to invite my buddy over to look at my Computer and let him see a working installation for himslef thinking he would change his mind about it. Well he came over looked it over and I showed him all the stuff I had discovered and could do with it. he just sat there and said "where are the games at ?."
and for a
modded quote "what's that he's talking about? Windows , Never had a problem with Windows till I tried to use it."
In the end, I got her a Mac Mini -- still Unix and safer & easier to manage for me than Windows... And I got my Linux install on my work Laptop, that I use almost exclusively. And as a result of learning, I was able to do some really creative work at my job, & the work I did with that knowledge got me a promo.
I was a programmer working mostly in Unix and embedded systems. I'd actually quit for 3 years trying to write science fiction but my money ran out and I had to go back to work as a programmer at the end of 1993. My home computer was an Atari 520ST purchased in the late 1980s which I still have, tucked away in a closet. I'd used CP/M back in the 1970s and early 80s, but had very little experience with MS-DOS or any other Microsoft product. I remember not buying that original IBM PC or Apple II because they seemed so overpriced for their underpowered CPU chips.
Anyway, once I had a programming job again, and started to catch up on the changes in the world of computers while I'd been away, the point came where I purchased a laptop with Windows 3.1 installed. Coming from the Unix world I found it very awkward and strange. A colleague at work showed me an ad for linux, which was supposed to be unix-like. I called the place up and ordered it. When it arrived I reserved a Saturday morning to install it on my precious laptop with its 250MB hard drive. The distro was slackware 2.0. It came on 50 diskettes which I still have.
It was a pretty scary experience. At one point the windows system was gone, and linux hadn't been installed properly and I wondered if I'd just trashed my whole laptop. But I went back and booted the install diskette from the linux distro and went through the process all over and finally it was working, and I was happy to have my familiar programs like vi up and running on the laptop.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
It was 1993, and I installed Slackware Linux 1.03 (Linux kernel 0.99 pl11, I think) on my '386 PC. I was still a physics student then, and was starting to do more with computational lab analysis in FORTRAN77 (random sampling of data, R-K simulation, etc.) I used to make frequent trips to the UNIX labs to do my analysis there, which was actually better than using the (shared) systems via the campus dialup.
Before moving to Linux, my primary platform was MS-DOS. I used WordPerfect 5.1 to write term papers and lab write-ups, and As-Easy-as 5 (a shareware Lotus 1-2-3 clone) to do my spreadsheet-driven data analysis (linear fit, std dev, etc.)
Moving to Linux certainly made my lab analysis easier (using 'f77') since I could now do it all from my dorm room with no trips to the labs. I could run X Windows (using 'twm') same as the labs. I had already tinkered with LaTeX before then, so it was easy to switch to that to write the rest of my college papers. I don't remember what I used as my spreadsheet under Linux, but I know I had one. And I had a terminal emulator (looked a lot like ProComm) so I could dial into the main computer lab if I needed to use Mathematica.
Later, DOSEmu let me run MS-DOS under Linux, so I eventually moved back to As-Easy-As until I graduated in 1995.
I remember that the success of Linux, even then, encouraged me that we could get a free version of DOS off the ground in 1994, when Microsoft hinted that DOS would "die" in 1995. :-)
Tried to install it, found out a lot of my hardware was unsupported, couldn't figure out how to install needed drivers, gave up, watched TV. Not exactly a great success story in my case :(
Hikery.net - The best hiking site ever. Made by yours truly.
Bootstrap it. That's the first thing I did. I started with GNU/Linux rather early in the game with yggdrasil linux in '93 (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux). The first thing necessary to use it was to bootstrap it. That was an exercise in patience to say the least.
Many of you young'ns with your yum -y install this and aptitude -y install that and your Gentoo this and emerge that, don't know how difficult it is to actually *build* a GNU/Linux distribution.
The documentation from the LFS group is a thousand fold better than the documentation back then! So there! Take that!
I had to buy a Red Hat book to get my hands on to the linux install CD that came with it. It took me (and one of my other friends) a whole night to figure out how to partition the drive. Basically, it was something like if you install linux in the partition beyond 4 or 8 GB (dont remember exactly), then you can not boot linux from that partition. We had windows installed in the beginning of HD. It took us a while to get it running, but it was fun.
There was no internet in our dorms at that time. All the computers on our floor were connected using the old coax cable with terminators at both the ends.
My first experience with Linux was with circa-1995-6 versions of Red Hat and Suse. Red Hat lasted merely minutes, due to my inability to get sound or internet working at all. Suse lasted a few days, sound but not internet and then I decided that it was fascinating, but not worth it.
My first extended experience with Linux was also Suse, in 2002. I got a professor to let me teach myself how to use Linux for an independent study project; this time I got everything working except for printing (printers, amirite? Seriously, I looked it up later, and the problem was that the HP model I had wasn't supported through cups until a year and a half after the ISP was over ;-). Then I went back to Windows.
Then, in the middle of my thesis, I essentially went mad and decided that the best thing to do in the middle of my thesis was to switch operating systems. Originally I ran a Knoppix hard drive install, and have since poked at various Debian-based distros (Debian, Mepis, and (X|K)ubuntu, sticking on Kubuntu.)
Before they became the Microsoft/SCO turd? The installer let you play Tetris while you waited...so the first thing I did was was literally a little gaming. ;-)
Quack, quack.
This is basically my only Linux story until I installed Ubuntu in 2007 (try #2). I installed Slackware in 1996 or so after painstakingly downloading and copying it onto at least ten floppies, and all was well for awhile.
Until I tried to repartition my drive and failed miserably at it, nuking my DOS partition. As this was the family computer, my parents were none too happy. My dad complained for a long time afterwards about LILO coming up at boot when Linux was no longer there, and I don't remember how I eventually fixed it, but yeah...
Thus it took me about ten years to get back to Linux again after that disaster, but I have Ubuntu now and haven't looked back to XP after I replaced it.
Back in my senior year of high school (3 years ago), I was doing an intro to Python via independent study; my advisor's office had a Fedora machine in it.
I had kinda been willing to try Linux; the catalyst for actually doing so came with my underpowered Vista laptop. (I figured installing Linux would be a good way to fix that.)
So I gave the guy an email, and he suggested wubi. (As straightforward as any other Windows-app install, and it uses Ubuntu, certainly more newbie-friendly than some other distros)
I loved it. The laptop started running a LOT faster, it it was fine for what I was doing - I was [and still am] using that laptop mainly during class - take notes, relieve some stress/kill some time by surfing or playing gnome-games. [My home computer, an XP desktop, is still working quite okay, so I've been sticking with that as my main machine.]
I got around to doing a real/full OS install when it came time to upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10, and I'll do something similar when I get around to upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04
Yay for legal uses of BitTorrent (fetching the ISO)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
It was in 1999 I first installed linux (i believe it was redhat). After several failed attempts to immediately get all the hardware running during install, I chose to do a bare install. So when the distro was on my box I tried to compile the kernel, drawing my install useless. After many attempts (and many weeks later) I got it right and used it to do fun stuff with bash. I browsed with lynx (I sometimes still like to do). The first useful thing I did was learn programming C on linux. And I still think linux is the greates power user / developer OS.
... when I worked for Boeing, engineering was (still is) done on *NIX workstations. Office applications at the time were available on Apple Macs. Microsoft was actively trying to get something onto our desktops, but the Windows of that era was a complete joke (still is). My primary working desktops at that time were a Sun and occasionally an HP (shared by our group).
One day, the PC guys started dropping off Dells, equipped only with DOS. The desktop support people would be along Real Soon Now to install Windows. In the meantime, the damned thing just sat there (and for most people would for another year or so as they couldn't actually get Windows to run). Meanwhile, the Linux kernel had hit 1.2.13 and was available with X/Motif. We had an approved install image on an engineering server, so I got the OK from management to try it out. I never looked back. When the PC guys came around with their Windows floppies, I just told them 'Don't bother'. I could run anything I needed from my X desktop hosted not only on the local workstations, but on remote systems. Additionally, many of our engineering apps were available as source and it was pretty easy (with the occasional Makefile patch) to get them running on Linux.
I recall one instance where I had to parse a bunch engineering documents (hosted on NT servers) with a natural language recognition app and populate a knowledge base on a (remote) Oracle db. In keeping with my philosophy of getting computers to do all my work, I wrote a simple Perl app to fetch each document (using Samba), parse it locally and insert the results using an Oracle::DBD driver. So I started the script and kept one eye on the console output while screwing around, surfing the web. About 20 minutes into the process, one of the NT admins came running down the hall, yelling at me to stop whatever I was doing. Evidently, I was fetching documents faster then the poor little NT server could handle. And my stupid little Dell was running the NL parser and Oracle client without breaking a sweat.
I continued to be exempt from having a Windows system forced upon me. It was actually possible to run a full Windows desktop, hosted on a remote NT system, on X, which is what I'd do whenever one of the PHBs complained that we all simply HAD to have access to one. It was interesting to note how infrequently it was needed. This continued until Boeing pushed most of their engineering out to subcontractors and foreign subsidiaries around 2004 when I left.
Have gnu, will travel.
All you puppies... you actually saw Linux *running* before you tried to use it. So cute!
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Storm
I started with RedHat 6.2 (late 90's) on my first homebuilt box (AMD k6-2 400mhz and 3dFX voodoo 3000). The winmodem i had didn't work so i dug out an old external 28.8kbps modem that stayed connected 24/7 on our second phone line. So cool. I downloaded everything needed for Enlightenment.. took a week. I kept the checklist in my pocket at ALL times and checked on it at school (through telnet, it was like magic).
The first time Enlightenment came up i had a geekgasm. Just knew that i was a linux geek for life. RPM hell drove me to Gentoo and i've been there ever since.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
Red Hat 5 on a Sparc 1+. Worked fairly well. It was only a curiosity and I gave away the machine soon after.
Second experience: Red Hat 7 on a Compaq notebook. It was tricky to set up (especially the sound drivers and supporting the native 1024X600 screen) but it ran faster than XP and did what I needed to do. This was soon followed by Red Hat 7 on an old Celeron box, which hosted the family website. The website still exists, and has been hosted on successive versions of Red Hat (currently Fedora 10) ever since.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Two floppies: one to boot, one for the root fs. What apps? I just wanted anything but windoz.
When I was twelve I decided to try GNU/Linux. I was running Windows 98 at that time, and I didn't like it when it corrupted my partitions. Quite naturally I chose a distro which could be installed on top of a FAT file system, and I opted for Dragon Linux, which was slackware based. It was quite a mess. I never actually got X running with it, but I got doom running, though (albeit without sound).
"Back in 1992 when I first started off with Linux, you downloaded two floppy images" - by thomasdz (178114) on Saturday April 25, @08:32AM (#27711553)
Yes... the "RAWRITE" startup disks! I had the same experience using Slackware 1.01 iirc, & around the same timeframe.
I obtained the Slackware distro from a local "computer fair" we have periodically @ the local NYState Fairgrounds (the city I live in on/off hosts that event also), & I nabbed it because I wanted to have a "PC UNIX" basically, & it was VERY cheap (4 CD distro too).
I was a WEE bit 'disappointed' when my Diamond Stealth 24 ISA board wasn't supported in "X" though, & I was 'stuck' doing tty work (still, overall it was a good experience that got me into the *NIX commandline more, so much so, that to this day I still haul in *NIX commands/programs ported to Win32 (my favorite)).
APK
P.S.=> The next time I used Linux @ home was Redhat (or, was it Mandrake?), & I liked it well enough... iirc, it did finally support the vidcard I had @ the time this time (NVidia user here almost exclusively, because I like OpenGL based gaming & coding too @ times), & KDE 2.2 iirc, was the desktop shell (I liked it), circa 2000/2001 iirc...
HOWEVER: I'm still more of a "Windows user" here mostly, because it is what most of the softwares I use run on (coding doesn't matter to me either way, the compilers I use in C/C++ &/or Delphi/Kylix are from Borland & run on both platforms (Linux &/or Windows))... apk
PII 350 mhz, SuSE Linux, installer a really bad mix of English and German, shitloads of options and a badly written "dummy's guide into linux".
Got it installed, but really just fubar. Never looked back into Linux until 2 years ago, when my Windows install crashed beyond repair and I needed some files from my harddrive. Don't know why, but among my dad's "Windows Rescue CD's" was a copy of Debian live-CD. Booted that up, and was able to recover my files. Never got a real linux setup till a few months back, since I never could either Ubuntu or Debian to work on my Radeon 9800. It always crashed booting.
My distro of choice is EEEbuntu (with the cool blue theme, instead of the manure themed vanilla Ubuntu), and works pretty nicely. Also found myself using windows-r (run box) a lot more since everytime something is broken in Ubuntu (and that happens a lot to me), it's usually fixed by dumping commands into the terminal.
My only grudge with linux are the poor UI's of some of it's programs. I would never trade in photoshop with GIMP, Blender is shortcut hell and some things are not so intuitive, for example, double click on something in windows to select only the connected regular a-zA-Z0-9, triple click to select all the contents of the textbox. I use that to for example select a word out of a url, or select a whole word quickly in a word processor, while this feature is missing from most distro's I've used. Anybody found this anywhere else?
When I moved in with some friends that wanted to split an internet connection back in '99, there weren't too many all-in-one routers, and those that did exist were either expensive or sucked. One of my roomies and I figured "hey, we can make our own router using linux!" So we dug through a trash bin near the CS building, found an old 386 with a dead disk controller and patched it up and added 2 ethernet cards. With a few bucks we bought a cheap 8 port hub and installed redhat 6.0 (it had just been released, and it was all that was cool in those days). We had done some internet research beforehand to learn ipchains enough to set up forwarding, and away we went. It worked so well we eventually started using the linux box as a common fileserver, name server, print server, web server, etc.
I've been a RH/fedora user ever since.
CAPS LOCK IS THE CRUISE CONTROL OF AWESOMNESS
Reboot back to Windows.
Cinépatas.com - Locos por el CINE
We got Linux (Caldera 1.0) for our home because I have children and I didn't want endless squabbles about "he did this to my stuff" With Linux, each person had their own stuff and none could trespass on the others. They could also not accidentally invade my work files. It has worked great for us for all these years. True, we have some windows computers, but they're game boxes, period. It's also really nice not to be a full-time admin in your own home. Linux essentially runs itself, compared to Windows.
1996. Slackware 3.0. Kernel 1.2.13. A whole stack of effin' floppies. Installed on a Pentium 100MHz with 12MB of RAM.
I was just getting the hang of this Internet thing when I ran across Slashdot and other sites talking about this Linux software. Windows was both frustrating and a bit boring, so I decide to check it out. I spend a good month just researching and reading docs before finally attempting the install. And then it took about another few weeks to get a working install. It was an odd feeling, booting an OS on my computer for the first time that wasn't MS-DOS or Windows.
I clearly remember logging in as root, getting a shell prompt, and then saying to myself, "Okay, now what?"
The biggest challenges were getting X and dialup PPP working. Back then, there was nothing in the way of hand-holding when it came to configuring something. You basically had to open up a text editor, write your config file, pray that it worked, debug when it didn't, etc. There were a few HOWTOs and docs online, but most of them were written by Unix/Linux experts who assumed you were as experienced as them. There was no googling for an error message and getting your solution on the first hit. If you didn't understand how something worked, you had little chance of getting it to work the way you wanted. Nowadays you just pop in an Ubuntu CD and a few clicks later, you have a fully-functional system and answers to most any question right at your fingertips.
It's been a fun ride, actually.
When I was in high school I learned that an SNES Emulator existed (only for Linux at the time.) So I excitedly went down and bought one of those big ass howto books with a Linux CD. An hour later me and two of my friends jump in excitement when we saw the opening sequence of FF6. My P75 at the time wasn't even fast enough to display the frames and music properly but goddamn was that awesome.
Firewalled and NATed an ISDN connection with no fuss. Piece of cake
Early in 1998 I bought Red Hat 5.0 at Best Buy ($49.95)a couple of weeks after I bought my first computer. It had emacs, Tex/LaTex, C/C++ (I really wanted Tex/LaTeX, and I couldn't get a Windows version). I had used Unix earlier (twm circa 1995, anyone?). I had trouble with X (apparently Xresources was in the wrong directory), which I wanted for xdvi, so I bought Sam's Red Hat Unleashed. I bought a Hayes external modem (still have it) to get on the internet. The first sound I played was a Mission Impossible CD. And all the kernel tuning, who could forget?
My 386 had a CDROM. You were probably just new to computers and didnt know what you were doing at the time. How did you not have the manual to your motherboard? A simple BIOS update would have fixed that for you.
More than 10 years ago I installed Linux on a tower, got some thing setup, and then tried running SaMBA so I could get to all my files on Windows. After a weekend of working on it with 2 "Getting Started with Linux" books it wouldn't work and there were no diagnostic tools to figure out at what level it failed. So Linux was worthless to me.
My title is misleading since as long as people are paying me to use Linux, I've used it. Ubuntu makes it fairly reasonable as a stand-alone server, but drivers, FS, and other compatibility problems mean it is worthless as an everyday OS for me.
If I'm going to use an alternate OS, I prefer something fun and useful like BeOS!
8-PP
1998: Had Windows Millennium and the hard disk crashed. Got another disk, installed Slackware (first time in my life to touch Linux -- printed the installation instructions).
2 days later, I installed and configured Apache, Mysql & PHP.
Ditched Windows after 6 or 8 months.
I have normal blood pressure now.
Mod points are a dangerous tool. Abuse them wisely.
The first time I installed Slackware or SLS Linux was in 1993 on a 486DX266. I was developing an X interface using motif for a neural network toolbox that my employer had developed. I used slackware in a follow on project a couple of years later for decoding a telemetry stream from a small jet-powered UAV and then multicasted the data out to other computers that displayed virtual instrumentation that could be monitored during the flight.
I cannot remember exactly which release, but I was about to embark on a SCADA project on a Sun box running Solaris and I was entirely ignorant of unix. So I downloaded a four floppy disk set which installed a linux filesystem into the DOS structure on my 486DX2 running a whole 50MHz.
The infection has been with me ever since.
tried packet injection to crack wep :p
I'm not the only one, I'm sure...
Frozen Bubble was the first thing I played after installing Mandrake 9.2.
And honestly, for the longest while, accounted for half of my time on my linux partition.
Good times.
"I'm a well-wisher, in that I don't wish you any specific harm."
Red Hat 5.2, sometime around 1999, I installed it so I could compile my homework, for a C programming class, instead of having to use hyperterminal to connect to school, from which I then had to telnet to the CS dept's Solaris system. Later moved to Debian and never looked back, and now using Debian & Ubuntu on different computers. Wow, 10 years using Linux! :)
I have a very small mind and must live with it.
-- E. Dijkstra
My first experience with an actual distro was The Auditor Collection...long before Backtrack. Backtrack is amazing though now. So much more developed.
I got some Slackware dist in summer 1996 (probably 3.0). I had a modem connection to the Internet, and Linux came from InfoMagic's 6 CD sets. (The 6 CDs included Slackware, Red Hat and Debian, and still enough space for Sunsite archive and tons more! I hear you may need a few more CDs if you want to put the same material in the same package these days.)
Basically, I had heard of Linux a long time before, and what I wanted to do at the time was to run the same free software that I was starting to enjoy on Win95 and MS-DOS: Emacs, GCC (I was learning C and was using DJGPP) and TeX.
I had some rudimentary Unix knowledge from some book I got from the library (I can't remember much, but it was probably about some commercial Unix brands) so it wasn't really all that painful.
Literally.
I was downloading Slackware on 1998 and had no broadband yet, so I used the university's sun server to download the 50 diskettes needed to install it with all bells and whistles. I left it downloading and went home, when I came back the next day I had filled the whole /tmp volume with the download.
(not that it did stop me, I just limited the amount of data to download at one time and kept firing the downloader)
And, yes. That was all the space they had for students at that time.
GPG 0x1B479C78
I was an accountant who was drafted to become a Xenix sysadmin in the mid 90s. Didn't know squat about it but they showed me the server and said "you're responsible for this" so I taught myself enough not to completely screw it up.
Loaded Caldera OpenLinux on my home PC somewhere around 1998, and it mostly sucked, but I have run a dual boot setup ever since. Over the years moved to TurboLinux, then Redhat, then Ubuntu. Not sure why I have preferred to use Linux all these years, because it's only recently that it isn't just a pain in the neck a lot of the time. It must be a form of self loathing to have spent all those nights trying to make stuff work in Linux that already worked just fine in Windows.
After a friend convinced me to try it out. Needless to say, after the installation (which remained in English) I was absolutely baffled.
(there were 3 installation images, a .iso and a -ja.iso. I assumed it was a newer version and ...)
By the end of that year I had 2 kernel patches in though.
What Did You Do First With Linux?
dir[enter]
for one reason or another i tried slackware first about five years ago. it took about a week to get to where i learned that startx was the way into the gui and another two weeks before i got it to actually load the gui without erroring out.
i eventually got the network link up and managed to configure my machine so well that if i moved the mouse the wrong way my browser window would simply disappear.
i've since become a debian loyalist, but i feel like i got it right by starting with a really hardcore system first. it really helped me learn linux properly and made using any other flavor after that a snap.
I first installed Linux on my laptop in the Spring of 1995. The distribution was Slackware, on 32 floppies as I recall. I had been using Unix since 1982, so for me this was not an introduction to Unix but rather, to my great relief, the ability to use Unix on my personal computers.
In 1999 I was introduced to Linux. I got a copy of Caldera 2.2 and bought a new machine to try it on. There was a fair amount of pain to get Apache and Tomcat up and running, but after a couple of weeks I had a working system.
I had to leave it alone for three months after that, and figured that it would crash after a few days, a week at most. So I come back to it, and its running fine. Suddenly my thinking changes. Previously I thought it was the computers themselves that were unreliable. Turns out it was the OS - Windows - all along.
In 2002 my primary machine - a Windows box - got a virus. I had to decide whether I would reinstall Windows or make the move to Linux on the Desktop. I installed Red Hat 7.2 I believe, and never regretted it. I still use Windows for a few tasks though - video editing.
I thought linux was going to be something I tried that one time back in college. Now its a lifestyle. I installed mandrake in college (ca. 2002), and tried dual-booting for a while. Being a literature major, I was not able to make heads or tails of it, although I was able to play supertux a few times. I installed Ubuntu about 1.5 yrs ago, and removed windows about 2 months later. Its not just that I never coded, or couldn't edit a config file (both true: don't have time to get that involved). Its more that Ubuntu lets me learn things gradually. I went from saying "I don't care how easy you say it is; I'll find a gui way to doing it" to being a reasonably capable user. Mandatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/456/
Decided that I hated dpkg.
Leela: "Is all the work done by children?" Alien: "No, not the whipping."
but my freshly installed Slackware played them without any trouble. It was what got me started on switching everything over to Linux and that's where I've been for the last few years.
Probably 1994, I was maybe 9 or 10, I don't have any idea where I got the Redhat install disks (CD?). Nope, had to be disks because all my friend and I had was an old computer which was surely a 286 or 386.
We had a book. Once we finally got it installed we had no idea what to do with it. Ended up messing around with some commands and that was it.
It probably wasn't until a year or two later that I had a distro that fit on a 3.5 floppy that I used as a router to share our 56k modem throughout our house that I actually USED linux. Still didn't know how it worked.
It was probably 3 more hobby installs over the years before I ever had a semi-permanent use for Linux.
Now I use it every day. I run a cluster of ubuntu servers on EC2 and a custom FC6 server running a tuned version of asterisk capable of a lot of simultaneous outgoing calls.
This is the back end of my company, Talk Life, which offers on-demand phone access to counselors and therapists for those times when you just need to talk.
I used to have a computer in my bedroom, about six years ago. It ran Caldera OpenLinux 2.4 with KDE 2.0 while it had Linux. I can remember making a link and thinking that it would magically become an application at one point. At another, I remember trying to get Flash to work and giving up when Bonus.com hung the machine.
I was eight.
Replying to your question about what's wrong with X11, I can say that one thing that puzzles me is how a protocol designed form the ground up to allow you to open windows transparently over a network connection can be *so* *much* *slower* than AJAX, which is an unholy (but impressive) melange of techs never designed to do remote apps.
I know that X11 does a lot more than AJAX, but still, couldn't anyone figure out how to split up the client/server workload so that I don't get a multi-second delay rendering every drop-down menu when I work across my 600+ kb/s connection?
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
Computer stuff...I couldn't afford Windows at age 14-16 so I used what was available
It was in a college/university computer lab (not CS') with an old /. member from our college days. He showed me Linux (Red Hat? Slackware?) and telnet (no SSH yet). I fell in love with the text mode programs like Tin (still use it and test some builds for Urs, the maintainer). I also used Pine, SLiRP, TIA, FTP, etc. on a production machine for school's e-mail services on 14.4k - 56k (only up to 28.8k) dial-up (useful for text modes!).
I did not run Linux on my own computers until 486 DX2/66. Then, I got stuck with the Red Hat Linux v6.1(?)'s Disk Druid because I didn't know about disk partitioning and stuff. I was scared too. Finally, I got through it with a dual boot setup. Then, I didn't do much. Got bored and frustrated. Then, came v7.1(?) and loved it. Had an extra box for it to be run it for 227 days of uptime because no more Kernel updates and stuff. Then, came Debian which was even better and still use it today.
I noticed I like all computers and OS': Apple and its Mac OS X, PC with Windows, DOS, and Linux.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Wow - brings back memories ;) I think it was 1993 at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. A stage 2 computer science source said we could use the lab for programming, or we could install this thing called Slackware Linux that had gcc and everything we needed for out projects. So, of course I did. Mmmm, floppy installs. So, it was mainly used early on for COSC assignments. A few years later setup Red Hat as a DNS and webserver in 1996 for our fledgling web development company. In later years after I stepped out of the IT field continued to use it for servers in our small business, although starting to fix it up with OS X as well. Never used it as a desktop - have primarily been Windows, and over the last nearly 5 years OS X (which seems to be a fantastic compromise).
But yeah, the first thing was COSC programming assignments in '93.
Slackware 2.? I think? I did what I still do, Install, explore, attempt to install new apps, fail to get it right, erase the HD, install mainstream OS. Linux is getting better, but not for me. It's not as if I don't try, I would istall a new distro about every 6 months, love Ubuntu, it's going down the right path, paying for RedHat is OK, but not if you already have an OS.
And installed XP. An SSD with an OS I can do stuff on. Woot.
You ask "Why the fuck is X11 so damn slow?" I answer "Producers of modern X11 toolkits don't design with low-bandwidth connections in mind." Try running something like xpdf over your 600kb/s connection. :)
Anyway, on to the X11 vs. AJAX question:
My understanding of the deep internals of X11 is a little fuzzy, so what I'm going to say here is not completely correct. Please correct me when I fuck something up.
With AJAX, you have a remote server that pushes all of the UI and the instructions to render it to the client. The client handles the rendering. (This is why some AJAX apps are completely fucked up on some browsers and not others.)
With X11, you have a remote server that pushes the state of a remote app to the client. The server handles all of the rendering. (This is why -assuming that your app doesn't require some X11 extension that you don't have-, remote X11 apps look the same, no matter what local X "server" you're using.)
Now, we could do a *much* better job of offloading a lot of work to the client. This would allow us to write X11 apps that would survive being connected to a new "server". Ask google about this:
aKademy06-KDE_and_Consumer_Electronics_-_The_Lost_Momentum_-_Holger_Freyther
for an example of (IIRC) a GTK app which was written to survive connection to a new X "server".
Curse. Later, I managed to use it and even like it.
My first linux was Slackware 2.1.0 dated 1994 onto a 4 meg. 386sx with a flaky keyboard and flaky 1.2meg Floppy drive and no cdrom. The files came from a cdrom that came with massively overpriced book mostly consisting of the freely available documentation cut and pasted onto its pages. It took all day to install because my keyboard would often register 2 returns for a single key press. As a result I ended up making choices i didn't want and would have to start all over again. This was kernel 1.1.59. X was impossible on this machine.
...then because none of the apps I used were available in Linux, re-installed Windows. Nowadays if I did the same, I'd run Firefox and Thunderbird a bit, then re-install Windows for the same reason as before.
I had a 5 meg 386DX-40 that I ran as a DNS server for ham radio. I loaded the entire net-44 into it. It responded nicely. 150ms average. Back then there was only SLS and Slackware and I got Slackware from a buddy on floppies.
I re-installed, because it was barely functional, from me screwing most of it up in the first attempt.
On the bright side, it's still running today...
Slackware Linux, pre-1.0 kernel, roughly 1992 (my memory is hazy)... I was using it to run Common LISP much more effectively than the unfortunate ones who were using the class-provided DOS-based version of LISP with horrible memory management limitations.
This let me solve larger problems in a much more friendly development environment (including basic X windows w/ TWM) than they could. It made my university days much more tolerable and productive, right up until I was forced to use OS/2 2.1, which I also fondly remember for no other reason than I could communicate with the actual developers via email and they'd respond about issues I was having writing device drivers.
Good times.
My first linux install was at Easter 94. A friend of a friend was back visiting his folks in Canada, and had left his dorm room unlocked. So me and the friend (hiya Mandel!) put linux on his machine. Couldn't get it out of 40 column mode, though...
Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
I installed Linux in April 1994, when the current Slackware kernel was 0.99pl14. A friend, Hal, had been encouraging me to use it for months since he knew I liked UNIX and hated Windows. I had a deal to deliver a C++ course and I needed tools to write it, so Hal gave me Slackware on a dozen or so floppies. I installed it on a 386 with 8 megs of RAM. I learned LaTeX and wrote a 200+ page course, viewing the LaTeX output with xdvi and compiling the lab exercises with g++. It worked wonderfully, no problems and no crashes. I remember that emacs took a long time to load, about a minute and 15 seconds, because it did floating point ops for font scaling and the 386 didn't have a FPU. So I would load emacs when I brought up the window manager (OpenLook I think) and then just let it sit there until I needed it. I think that Metafont (part of a LaTeX installation) use FP ops extensively too.
At the time a friend was authoring a C++ textbook on a 486 with 16 megs of RAM, using MS Word on Windows. He had constant crashes and problems because, among other things, it was too much for the machines of the day. But LaTeX easily handled my book, because of it's tight coding and it's data streams in, data streams out model. WYSIWYG word processors just weren't a good idea for large documents at the time. I would then print LaTeX's dvi output files on an HP LaserJet IIP for reproduction at a copy shop. I taught the course for the first time in August 1994 and several times after that. LaTex was a bigger learning curve than Linux by a factor of 5. I've been a Linux user and advocate ever since. I no longer use LaTeX but no one's holding my data hostage -- I can still install LaTeX and make changes to the course 15 years later. The only difference is that on today's machines it runs a lot faster!
"If you're not passionate about your operating system, you're married to the wrong one."
There's no way I'll spell this right, but my first distro was off a Yggdrasil(sp?) CD, back in 1994. I can remember trying to get it to work with the SCSI CDROM I had connected to my Pro Audio Spectrum sound card, of all things (what a way to do a SCSI controller...) Once installed, I loaded FVWM as my window manager, and instantly went to work trying to overhaul its appearance to look like the Motif window manager (mwm). That included digging into the source code and... changing it a bit. :-)
jas
Jason Van Patten
IIRC, my first Linux (or might've been UNIX) experience went something along the lines of:
telnet
$ dir
command not found
$ help
command not found
$ quit
command not found
$ help
command not found
$ exit
Was '95 and, as I recall, would've been a Mud server running on a 386. Went back confused to the admin, was pointed out to try "man", and was on my way.
First time (late 90s) I swore a lot and gave up. Things just weren't how they were "meant" to be... I couldn't access floppies, couldn't access CDs, couldn't find the settings I wanted, couldn't get help I could understand...
Thankfully things have improved since then (and I've learned a lot) and I now run linux on all my computers, but the culture shock of trying to migrate from a cpm/dos/win95 upbringing to an alien GUI requiring much CLI coddling on rather crappy (even back then) poorly supported hardware was not a pleasant experience.
First thing was to copy over my BBS news server and database from a Convergent Technologies MiniFrame to a big shiny 486 linux server. http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/BBSLISTS/bbucket9201s.txt
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
And i had my last argument i would ever have with windows about the stability of my computer. I was to the point of buying a new computer, which i couldn't exactly afford to do at the time. In a last act of desperation before doing so, i remembered the handed down copy of Redhat 4.2, given to me by a friends brother who had tried for weeks to get it running, to no avail. I tried and was more successful, taking ONLY two weeks to configure my Soundblaster AWE64, Rockwell 28.8 ISA modem (FULL hardware modem might i ad, cant beat an ISA modem with a chip count in the teens weighing 2+ pounds!) and VLB 1MB S3 virge video card on my AMD K6-166 with 32MB RAM and a Quantum Bigfoot 2.1GB HDD (who remembers the Quantum Bigfoot!!?? the thing was slow as xmas and ran hot enough to warrant a custom dremel and fan job). The two weeks it took to get everything running were at the same time, the most exciting, and the most frustrating times in my computing life. I learned by feel, running commands and seeing what would happen, thereby discovering man, and all else is history. Besides the excitement of learning something new, I gained new stability. I went from 10+ blue screens a day, corrupted hard drives, various driver problems to a SINGLE unexpected kernel panic till the day i retired the machine due to a misplaced coke perched above my open computer as well as uptimes in weeks. Like many other here relate, it changed the way i think about computers, and just things in general. It made me a better problem solver and a more critical thinker and now, 12 or so years later, Linux is my profession. I vowed from that point to never again pay for the privilege of badly written software when I could run software written by people passionate about computing for the advancement of all us, rather than for the advancement of stock price. Not to mention, I was legally able to modify and extend my new operating system and contribute my changes and ideas to a worldwide community that shared my new found passion. In short, the first thing I did with linux was actually be able to use my computer, and enjoy doing it. As a side benefit, I found i didnt need to smoke a pack a day. Linux saved my faith in computing and my lungs!
Picked up a copy of "Linux Configuration and Installation" with Slackware 3.something CDs in it for a buck at a bookstore going-out-of-business sale in 1998. The price was right, and it seemed like a good way to prove my 1337ness and learn something about "that UNIX stuff" at the same time. After a mere month of fiddling with and waving dead chickens over it (hack the kernel to probe the correct IRQ for my ne2000 ISA NIC, download a newer Xfree86 release that supported my video card, pay Opensound their outrageous $20 for a driver that would power up my AD1816 card's pre-amplifier, etc) I had a working machine.
The first thing I did with it? Install samba and xsmbrowser and start downloading music off the dorm LAN!
0 1 - just my two bits
The year was 2001. I went out and bought a cd with Freebsd 4.x, then borrowed a 1G Quantum hard drive, quite old at the time and installed it in my Pentium MMX 200Mhz 32Mb Ram alongside 2Gb seagate circa 1998. I didn't know about a possibility of dual-booting, so I installed Freebsd on a separate hard drive, and to switch between freebsd and windows 98 on the main system, I had to tweak some bios settings.
I didn't know anything about shell, for that matter I didn't know any better, but did I manage to type 'startx' after I logged in as 'root' and for some reason X worked the first time, that I was able to log into kde that displayed a rather nice red theme with warnings about dangers of running as root. Then the only thing I did, I played 'bomberman' with my buddies three people at a time on the same keyboard. I heard about the game, but couldn't find cd for it and Freebsd had a decent clone of it!
Eventually I had to give back that quantum disk, and my experiments with alternative operating systems ended at the time.
I returned, this time to Linux, in 2004 I started with Mandrake 9.* then moved to Fedora 4, and when my dual monitor setup, failed with an upgrade to fedora 5, I finally switch to Debian, which I've been using since.
I ran the distributed.net client for a couple of projects because I wanted to help them out. In July 1998 I was still running Windows 3.1 (true story!). Distributed.net didn't have a client for Windows 3.1, I still didn't have Win9x, and their DOS client, well, was unitasking, like DOS. I couldn't enjoy my PC and help them out too. I repartitioned hard drive space and started dual-booting with Caldera 1.2 (kernel 2.0.33).
Ran on a AMD K5-166, 96 or 128 MB RAM. Task switching was so much smoother than Windows (preemptive instead of cooperative multitasking, IIRC). I was hooked!
Today I spend 95% of my time in Linux (and 5% in XP).
Back in 1991 or 1992, before _any_ distributions had been on the market, i did download the 386 kernel and the neccessary sources to replace our (student living community) SCO Unix server. So the first thing ive done with linux was compiling it and then using it as news and mail server. I am actually still doing this today.
The first time I tried Slackware on an 80286 in 1992 in my residence at university. I didn't have a 386. I just wanted to see what would happen. IIRC, even the boot sector code required a 386.
In 1994, while installing from floppies, I decided to use tsch for the root shell as I was more familar with it from Sun instead of bash. It failed miserably as Linux looks for a bash shell to run the startup scripts, I was also locked out from root. I had to start over again. That was my first lesson about Linux. One of the most rewarding learning experiences in the late 90s was to install a bare bone version of Slackware on a 386 laptop with 5 MB of RAM and a 30 MB hard-drive. Got X windows up and internet access with a web-browser. It was painfully slow but it worked. Determining which programs were absolutely necessary and which weren't was quite an eye opener.
w :_O
It was in the days of OS2 which I was experimenting with, It was SO better than windows.. however, I had a dream of creating a great new multi player game with THOUSANDS of players, using this internet thing.. and I needed good multi tasking but I was really poor.. I think it was 0.98. They said that you couldn't run it on 4 MEG of ram, but it worked.. I think I was running about 32 hours for a kernel compile.. but MAN Linus.. I had something to look forward to didn't I :) So, now years later... I never did get that game online.. but LinuxMagic was borne...
First contact with Linux was Mandrake in a PC magazine i bought. Installed, clicked around, saw nothing special but was still very interested so i tried RedHat 7 when it came out in another issue of the same magazine.
Clicked around a bit, played konquest and then finally figured out how to change my window manager, i was now hooked. Then i hacked my ISP and got an angry letter home to my mom about 'netiquette'.
I was working in a Sun shop ... a buddy asked me to sit and type some commands ... worked ok. He showed me it was a pc. (Blush) I asked him how in the world he got Solaris working on a pc.
Regards,
Bill
I don't remember which version it was, but I remember it was such a pain in the arse to setup that I finally gave up. It wasn't until later that I found Mandrake Linux and was able to finally install it. I liked the GUI and the install was actually very friendly. I used it on an older PC and set it up as my home router/firewall. Never had a problem with it until my hardware finally failed from old age.
This was the purpose for the box. In my defense I was asked to send the spam to our customers by management and the term spam didn't exist yet (but it was spam)... It's still probably performing its mission locked in some closet somewhere. I moved on over a decade ago...
First installation was SuSE (don't recall the version, but it was maybe 1997 or 1998) - pretty much was just messing around with it. First actual use was setting up SuSE for an Apache web server on a new Dell server at work to replace an old DEC Alpha (True64/Netscape FastTrack).
SUsE 5.2
I remember reading so much about how tough Linux could be to get up and running, but I remember how easy it was. I was up and using it within an hour or two.
I remember how psyched I was that it breathed new life into an older computer that I had. I was hooked.
The system has failed you, don't fail yourself. --Billy Bragg
Well, I was hired to maintain the OS/2 company file server; no sweat, since I was quite familiar with OS/2. When I showed up, they said: "Oh, by the way, we also have a penguin server you'll have to take care of; its admin guy is in the States for a couple of months". My reply was: "Waitaminute... what is a 'penguin' server?"
Of course the guy had adopted the "X11 in servers is for sissies" policy, so for two months I was frantically browsing man pages in the morning and (also) frantically sending e-mails to the admin guy in a timezone six hours away from ours to ask the simplest things. And, believe it or not, the second day I remembered a silly joke I had read somewhere and not understood: "man woman". From there I discovered the most useful command in Linux.
Nowadays I am the main admin of six happy corporate penguins, plus two at /home/tirs, er... I mean, at home.
P.S: X11 in servers IS for sissies.
Strength, balance, courage and reason. If you know what's this about, contact me!
I fearlessly cruised Russian sites so toxic they crashed the Windows boxes that my ISP used. .ru sites.
For days on end the (Arizona ) dsl service known as Frontier would be down every time I crustily cruised some
1997, a 166MHz P1 on a 2GB hard disk, slackware, 2.0.0 kernel. Ran fvwm. Worked very nicely. Mostly I was doing website design, using nedit and netscape. they were the days!
Interstitial spaces are filled with cream.
Every Linux geek remembers their first time - the feeling is not unlike that "other" first time (indeed, I lost my Linux virginity a decade before my "other" first time occurred).
Back in the days of HTTP1.0 and Netscape 4.76,
before WEB 2.0 was even conceptualized, in the
grand year of 1997, yours truly grabbed a free
copy of Redhat Mandrake 5.0 (I believe), which
came with the newly developed 2.0 kernel and all sorts of goodies.
I was reading either PC World or some other piece
of computing literature when I saw something that really caught my eye as a budding Internet (yeah,
not just the WWW, EVERYTHING) geek, game geek, game developer, game modder and first-order code geek; Linux.
Something about a free OS that I could install on my own computer that was based on UNIX tickled
the neurons in my brain.
I was forever hooked on Open Source software and the raw, feral command-line driven experience that was Linux.
I believe I wiped my hard disk and tried to dual-boot it (successfully, I might add) after installing Windows 98SE (for games, primarily).
I spent hours trying to figure out which packages I wanted to cram onto my (then huge) 1 GB hard disk.
Eventually, it was installed and I spent hours programming, running programs and bash scripts in more or less the same way as the Forefathers had done in the Age of Bell Labs.
I was 17 then; 12 years later I still love Linux, and have a solid Slackware distro installed and am planning on installing a secondary hard disk
to make it a Linux-only install, as opposed to dual-booting it.
Sometimes, I wish I could relive those days...
Ahh well.
=- Gravitron -=
wow. 600 comments and yours is the only one mentioning SuSE. I started with suse as well, 6.0 I think (or 5.2 - the one with the 2.0.36 kernel). I had a spare machine (amd k6), and installed suse basically to play with it. The first thing I did with it (don't remember why) was installing openssh-server, so I never played with the old X desktops.
I had little trouble configuring the machine, initially I did everything via yast - which is still the best system configuration tool I think. The machine started out as fileserver for my dorm (samba), then I moved my modem card from my desktop into the "server" and setup pppd for dial-on-demand. It ran like that for almost a year, then we moved to ADSL (pppoe was hell to set up). When support for the distro stopped, I moved to manual compilation of all packages. The box moved to a 2.4 kernel, glibc2 and samba3 before I moved out and retired it.
I never really used SuSE on my desktop. I bought the last pre-Novell version (9.3?), but when I installed it I also picked up interest in LinuxFromScratch and so it almost immediately got replaced. After that, my desktop went to Ubuntu Breezy, and remained that way until Intrepid scared me away (Jaunty is much better). Now I'm running Debian testing.
Oh, and I love apt. I'm currently mixing and matching packages from Debian (testing/unstable), Ubuntu (jaunty) and Mint (felicia), and apt can update them all from their respective sources.
It was in January 2006 when I made my first REAL expreiences with linux... back then i decided to try gentoo first as i thought i'd learn most by installing this distro and getting it to run... back then there was no automated installer... "the installer is YOU" they said :)
I think my first interaction was visiting webpages served up by Apache/GNU Linux.
After that, a Mandrake Move GNU/Linux Live CD I ordered online.
Some time after that, I ordered an Ubuntu GNU/Linux CD, after that, I downloaded my own Ubuntu install CD
It's been a great experience thus far, although I do wish some guys would have exercise more pride, integrity, and responsibility in their work related to many of the applications . . . that's what gets me, I am neither talking about an "ugly" GUI (who cares) nor asking for rocket science so to speak . . . stupid little fuckups that are never paid attention to . . . I have said it before and I will say it again: I would shoot myself if MY product (in any field of endeavor) were that shoddy! Never. Better not release than release something shitty, I don't mean an early release, I mean releasing something decent, even if in Beta.
SARAVA!
I first tried Linux in... I don't know, the mid-90s or so, probably 95 or 96; IIRC, it was SuSE 4.2.
However, it didn't last long: when I tried to install it, YaST would always die with an assert failure at a certain point. I didn't know anything about C back then and had absolutely no idea what this meant, so I just took the box back to the shop where I got it and returned it.
A few years later, I tried again with SuSE 5.3, and that actually worked.
I bought Slackware at the local computer store and installed it on my machine. I had to dual boot because the CD-ROM was connected to the sound card. However, all my engineering classes used UNIX instead of Windows, so I was happy to start poking around my own system and try to figure out how to make everything (or most everything) work. It was fun.
I'll never be as good as I want to be. I can only be as good as I am.
I was trying to get through tech school using Windows ME for school work and web surfing, I had heard of Linux and ordered a copy of Mandrake 10 and installed that. Never looked back.
Anyone remember Yggdrasil? Beautiful CD with graphical installation. I think it came with a boot floppy (maybe two), and a CD. Don't remember too much about the installation, because it was about 1993/4 when I first started with this, but I can remember the first time I read "kernel panic". My brother and I, who shared my fascination with linux, sat there and laughed when we read that. After reading the thick book that accompanied the installation software, we figured out what was wrong, and started again. Finally got everything installed and running, and then we were hooked.
Thanks to all the developers along the way, who have kept this hobby interesting for me.
Why did I post this? Ask me now!
The very first thing I did was to try to compile freenix on my Amiga. It didn;t work. Later I did install Caldera on my then dual boot windows/OS2 machine making it triple boot. Not bad for the time :-)
to track my mutual funds and write a journal (miscellaneous Thoughts and where or when I had caught pike bass pickerel or whitefish or partridge or planted or dug up potatoes etc.) Slackware 2.1.
... was from a SuSE 5.2 CD that came with PC Plus magazine *years* ago. I installed that on a Pentium P100 with 64MB of RAM, and just about got it working. Then I gave in and went back to Win98 for a bit.
In early '01 I had a play with Linux From Scratch, installed that on a Toshiba T2130CS laptop (486/75, 8MB RAM, 2GB hard drive and an 800x600 colour passive-matrix LCD) and used that for a couple of years. Did a few upgrades on the home desktop machine (which ended up becoming a 500MHz K6-II box with an 8GB HDD) and pretty much left the laptop alone. Truth be told, it ran Linux far better than it ran Win98... The desktop box ended up running Slackware.
Some time in '05 I upgraded the desktop machine -- that became an Athlon64 3200+, with 512MB RAM, the same 8GB HDD, and some other bits. I ran Slackware on that for a while, then switched to Fedora in mid-2006.
Last year I switched to Ubuntu (after seeing it running on a friend's machine and exclaiming "I don't believe it, they tamed Debian!") and I've been running that on two laptops (an IBM T42 and an Eee 1000H) and the desktop (overclocked Q6600, 4GB, Geforce GTX260, 2x500GB fakeraid-1 + 500GB + 500GB USB).
On top of that, I've got a neat little Jetway mini-ITX board in a 1U rack-case, running Ubuntu Server on a 2x500GB softRAID. That thing is basically running my home network -- Windows domain control, file sharing and network routing. Installation took about half an hour, and most of that was down to my repeatedly screwing up the RAID configuration and partitioning...
I still use Windows, but not as much as I used to (I basically run Linux all the time on the laptops, the desktop runs Windows most of the time because I'm too lazy to reboot into Linux after I've finished playing with XP).
How could it be any different? First thing I did on my Red Hat 6.0 or so was to fireup xbill and enjoy squashing the bastard for hours.
-><- no
We'd been running OS2 Warp beta's next to Slackware with kernel 0.99 hacking around in the university lab, where we managed Win 3.1, MacOS, Netware and AIX for the past year. I was a pine addict after shaking my elm addiction, and had sworn off emacs for vi forever. Then, we started doing digital video editing on Windows 3.1 with Adobe Premier and some nice capture card hardware... ...and then I found CU-SeeMe live video reflector. But it wouldn't compile on Linux, so I hacked it grunge style to eliminate the errors, and, LO, it worked.
We did a live streaming internet video broadcast in 1994. Thanks Linux!
I grew up in California, and had a friend who worked on the FreeSwan project. I would hang out at his house and sit in the computer lab downstairs. All his machines ran some flavor of *nix, and I used to just oogle at them (mostly because I wasnt quite smart enough to understand GNOME on his laptop running RedHat 4) however one day i got the gusto to sit and use it. He gave me an account so i could work, and I started messing around with KDE and such. I was a child with linux. However I wouldnt consider that my first *real* experience with Linux, as it was a pass-bye.
my first *real* experience with Linux came when I moved from California to where i am now. I had been given a fancy new 2.9Ghz Athlon machine running Windows XP back in 2004. I loved the machine for all it was worth, but decided to run Linux on it. I had picked up a copy of RedHat 5 with a book from my local used computer shop. It wasnt fancy, and it wouldnt install because I was using Bill Gate's Crap FileSystem NTFS. I installed it onto an older machine (a K6 3DNow! box, chugging along at 900mhz) and got to know the shell pretty loosley, however i could never get to compiling the kernel. This lead me to get Mandrake 10 from the local bookshop, which had a few linux books and such. I installed it on my main machine and was building things from source in no time. All this has lead me to run Ubuntu on big fancy rack-mounted server machines with 64GiB of RAM and 3.4PiB total disk space, but to appreciate the simplicity and run Debian on 200Mhz Compaq servers with 64mb of ram.
If anything, What did Linux do with me? Linux taught me the zen of simplicity.
Oh Ya
Ubuntu 4.1 on a 768Mhz desktop
There are some hardcore old timers on this page ... my first brush with Linux was RedHat 5.1 in 1998, paired with an Oracle install. RAID card wasn't supported at the time. I had a baaaaaaad time and had to crawl back to NT 4.0 instead. I remained interested and when the chance produced itself in 2001 to setup a bunch of Linux servers, I lept. I've had at least 2 machines running Linux since early 2001 and as many as 2 dozen at one point, spread across a bunch of data centers. Linux is just sooooo nice on servers ... absolutely love it. I did Linux on a laptop for about 5 years too, but use a Mac now since it has the same UNIX goodness underneath.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
I got an eeePC 1000 with Xandros. First thing I TRIED to do was open a terminal. It failed. Miserably. The first thing I did on the MACHINE was install the eeePC Ubuntu kernel from array.org. Then, the first thing I actually DID was install Opera, get it connected, and surf the web while surfing the web (on my XP desktop). Taking pictures with both webcams was another amusement.
Rolling a d20 is not grounds for investment.
My first Linux experience was Redhat 6.2 on a Pentium 100 with 32MB RAM.
I spent two days tweaking my XF86 config file to get it to display on my monitor at 800x600, including the time it took to learn emacs/vi. When I finally got it up and running, I tried to play some MP3s in the background with something that looked like a copy of Winamp, but unlike Winamp, the sound stuttered if I did anything more than simply play the file, and multitasking seemed to result in a kernel panic.
Since then, I've tried newer Redhats, Dragonlinux, Phatlinux, a few Mandrakes, Gentoo (never became bootable), and a few generations of Ubuntu... I use Ubuntu on my OLPC XO-1 because it beats the Sugar interface, and the package manager is first class... but that's about it. Elsewhere it's still XP and OSX.
It was the start of the second semester of my Freshman year at UIUC. After using the student unix machines for half a semester and getting a basic understanding of this unix thing thanks to playing and some friends on IRC, I wanted to learn more, so I figured putting it on my own machine was the way to go. (Also, too many of my dormmates kept taking over my computer to play Dune II, so it was side benefit.)
I had a 486DX 66MHz with 4 MB of RAM and a 120MB drive, and borrowed about 20 floppies from a warez friend of mine to copy slackware down to. I can't remember which version, but I do remember a .98pl kernel. Luckily, we had a net connected computer lab in our dorm, so downloading the floppies was fairly quick and painless. Well, as painless as loading up 20 floppies is. Seemed painless then, now I'd hang myself. A friend who had already been running linux for awhile helped me with some n00b questions like "What the hell does this partition stuff mean?" After a few months and getting my feet under me, I quickly upgraded to 8 MB RAM so I could run X without swapping when the mouse moved.
As others have stated in my thread, my career and computing life would have been radically different without the deeper understanding of how computers work, how to debug, how to read logs, etc that Linux helped me develop. Of course, there was a price to this knowledge, I did not get laid nearly enough at college. :)
Now I have a quad core 2.4Ghz machine with 4 GB of RAM and a 1TB harddrive. Now get off my lawn!
first thing i did with linux, was
share the dial-up modem, enable masquerading,
then setup samba so i could invite over my friend
and hunt for sexy girl pics ; )
Hi,
it was a Slackware distro and the time was... Hmmm 1995 or something. I installed it on a 486 and I had some "media player" running an animation file, I think it was a .flv file, where you could see some huge ship flying over what looked like a desert. It only lasted a few seconds and I wish I could find that animation back.
But the amazing thing, to me, was that it was smooth. So frigging smooth, and I could two of these animations at the same time. And issue commandes in an xterm. On that same machine Windows 95 was a dog, a super slow dog.
Besides that I was "compiling" (?) big LaTeX documents and that was taking ages :)
Oh, and I set up a PLIP network using a null cable between my two desktop to share my dial-up Internet access.
These were the days :)
1994 .tgz slackware files to download through my 14400 modem
spent a weekend waiting for the X11R6
nobody in my family got to use the phone that weekend
My first contact with Linux occured in 1996. I was in high school and I opened a telnet connection from a DOS box to a RedHat 5.0 server and used lynx to browse the web and pine to read my email. During the next three years (1996-1999), the Internet was an all-Linux all-textmode world for me.
Anybody remember "boot" magazine? They were kind of a computer power user magazine in the late 90's. One month they ran a feature on alternative operating systems, and included Debian 2.0 on their demo disc.
I managed to get it installed and dual-booting with Win 95, although I never got X working. Played a little Nethack and some light programming but didn't really touch Linux for a couple more years. Later I dual booted Red Hat 7.0 and SuSE 8.0, finally went Windows-free with Mandrake 9.1.
After that it was Fedora, then Gentoo, then Ubuntu - which I'm currently running on my desktop and netbook.
My heartfelt thanks to Linus, Stallman, and all the people who make open source possible and successful.
In 2000 or so I managed to install SuSE 6.2 on my spare P400 box, and somehow made a connection through my ADSL modem thanks to Roaring Penguin's scripts. I was absolutely thrilled, and ftp'd into my web provider, tried Alt-F2 to start other sessions, the works. I shut it down, and the Internet connection never worked after that.
I then battled with X-Windows, fiddling with the contents of the configuration script, all the while very wary of blowing up my one CRT with the wrong Sync values. The system wasn't usable, and I had no idea what I was doing, so I shelved it, and remained a Windows 98 guy running VanDyke Systems excellent ssh and ftp clients into my employer's machines.
Really, I knew so little when I set that original SuSE box up, I'm amazed that I got it working at all. I do plan to install SuSE 6.2 again, just to see if it's as clunky as I thought it was. Should be amusing.
Wait a second ... let me get this straight.
There are females that use Linux?
Proof that "command line" operating systems are used for nefarious purposes, and therefore it is legitimate for law enforcement to put all "black screen" users under arrest proactively.
Ubuntu Dapper on a rusty Compaq laptop. Worked great, except it took me forever to get the wireless working. After that, tried every distro I could get my hands on, including the weird ones. Now, back with Ubuntu Jaunty.
in 91, I got linux 0.99 up and running on a gateway 386. No gui, but had a 80x50 terminal. The highest res terminal in the office.
My first personal pc was a Dell 486DX. I purchased it to run linux and got dell to not charge for the ms os and ship w/o os. Was able to get X running on this machine.
Ran RedHat for a while until they went commercial. I bounced around trying several distros until settling with debian. Ran debian for several years.
Today I run Ubuntu throughout my home network. I have a NAS, Firewall, MythTV server and my desktop all running Ubuntu. No windows in sight other than the emulated one I play WoW in :)
Wayne Hogue
what else? The question was bsd or linux, I was not going to run a webserver in VAX VMS or a Mac 9 (other coleagues did) and the owners of the three NeXT workstations in our lab where not going to donate them. So linux was the answer. It worked.
System had to run faster. Remove support for all devices not absolutely needed (and, of course, add my sound card).
Kernel 2.0.24 on Red Hat 4, circa 1996ish. Special shouts out to |ferret| who got me into it :-)
cd /usr/src/linux
make mrproper
make dep
make clean
make zImage
make modules
make modules_install
sheesh... now it's just sudo apt-get upgrade....
My first experience was an installation of Minix. The main purpose was to figure what the fork() system call was doing. This foray leads me to research for my phd on modifying the scheduler for increased energy efficency.
I was triple booting win 3.1 Solaris 2.(something) and SLS something or other. I hard the network card running under windows and Solaris, but it wasn't found under Linux. So a friend at work suggested I look into the network card drivers. I found what looked like where they were probing the io ports, and saw they weren't probing what my card was at. So i added it, recompiled the kernel, and it worked! WHAT A RUSH! (notice how this is STILL impossible with windows (and Solaris) today).
Then another time I was trying to get Linux to start Xfree86 on a weird monitor I had. I ended up hacking the timing values in the .conf file.
It worked.
At that point it was all over but the shouting.
GRIN the ONLY thing I use windows for (besides work(sigh)) is for playing EQ. And for a while that worked under Linux and Cedega too! (until they dorked up EQ so it wouldn't run any more)
Oh well.
OBTW. I don't necessarily want Linux to be everywhere. The more places it is, the more the Gov will want to control it . . .
Ahhh, memories.
My first Linux use was a failure. Back in the day, I'd guess the rate was much much higher. I had no *nix experience, but I managed to get the stack of floppies made, and followed step by step through the book (Linux unleashed, 1st edition, when it was first released, which included Slackware), and finally had a working machine. Well, working that it booted. Failed in that I had no clue where to go after that. It's not like I could Google answers like, how do I connect my modem? find me an example of a chat script. Oh ya, we didn't have much there either. Internet connections were limited at best, so I would have been using BBS's with it. :)
My next attempt was the one that stuck. I could actually install from a CD (oh my gosh), and I got it installed. It was a few months before I got that mystery of X windows working. I explored the net with lynx, and with my 386/16 Windows machine sitting nearby. Finally, I had X working, and my life has been downhill since then. :) I made a working NAT firewall with it, and several months later, it was needed by my office for a gateway, so it became the first server I had worked on too.
One Linux machine became many. Thundreds, or possibly thousands of machines later (mostly servers), it's a rather odd thing for me to have someone ask me a Linux question that I don't know the answer to, usually through experience.
I've used just about every major Linux distro, and many minor ones, and many other *nix OS's. I always come back to Slackware.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
The first thing I did was get a MUD called Godwars to compile and run the server. Oh MUD.
The first I did after I installed Suse 6.3 or something I started testing all the programs on the desktop, especially the tons of games that came with it. :)
Later on playing Counterstrike...
For my undergraduate dissertation I studied conservative lookahead algorithms in parallel and distributed simulation of discrete event systems.
After reading about Beowulf clusters I networked 8 Pentium 90 boxes and installed Red Hat, wrote everything in Java and ran some experiments.
It was the stupidly hot summer of 2001 and I lived in an loft room with little ventilation. I wrote most of my paper in my underwear.
J1M.
That you like spending time on these things every time you install a Linux might be fun to you. But, not everyone has that privilege. If, I have to spend time on getting my X running, my mouse working and all that, then I would have very little time left for writing code and plotting graphs.
What did I first do with Linux? Struggled, cursed it, kept trying, and eventually had a workable installation of OpenLinux and Star Office, but never did get the sound card in that old HP desktop to work, after hours of recompiling. That would have been around 1998, if memory serves. Linux has steadily improved since then, and now I don't struggle much at all with Xubuntu on a well aged but much loved Thinkpad.
I've been using linux is some form or other since 2002, it started when I saw my brother running Gentoo (I think)with fluxbox, it was incredibly bare, and for some reason I loved that :)
over the years I've seen linux grow into a stable and completely usable desktop.
I'm still waiting for a complete and stable KDE 4 though :D
A total pain, as it was SuSE 6.0 (or maybe 5.0) and it took me about 4 days to get my NIC working. I actually BOUGHT the 6 CDs that came with it. I could hardly partition my drive and so I was afraid I'd loose my windows ... oh boo hoo!
It's funny, I don't remember my first girlfriend's name...
i still remember 2 important days.. 1 - the first time i saw linux, at a friend house, he showed me Red Hat (dont remember the version) back in 1999, he told me this is going to be the future.. i was like (what the he.. is that) 2 - a couple of months later i was installing slackware linux, i still remember entering X using startx (those where memorable moments) ;-)
i could do the startx thing for hours.. i was amaze how a black screen could turn into a graphical environment...
Saludos, Anibal Ojeda http://anibalnet.nl
I reinstalled FreeBSD over it.
My very first Linux install was a RedHat circa 5.2 install. I still
remember the great libc upgrade from libc5 to libc6. I think the first
really useful thing I achieved was a dial on demand router that would
connect to the internet whenever anyone in the house accessed the 'net
via the ethernet cables we had. IIRC getting the PPP dial daemon
working caused a fair amount of frustration up until I discovered
wvdial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wvdial).
I had to download my first copy of Slackware in 1993 over my $per/hour Compuserve connection on a 9600bps modem. My account maxed-out at $300 and I wasn't even at floppy #40, so I had to wait til I could pay-down the bill and get the rest of what I wanted.
I only grabbed about 41 or 42 floppy images, I think there were about 50 available. I couldn't figure out how to install it on my brand-new PC that I built, it was all manual back then... It was kernel .99. Getting IDE to work, getting past the bugs in the adaptec 1542 driver, figuring what the hell an inode was, formatting and mounting volumes, figuring out the swap partition, figuring out LILO, installing one package at a time... Easy now, super tough coming from the world of DOS/Novell/OS/2. However, I took a trip down the Weird Stuff electronics to see if they had a cheap copy of OS/2 2.1, and by chance the had a Slackware book that covered installation and configuration... It was a crappy book, but it was pricelesss. I still wish I had it for posterity.
Once I got it up and running, I figured X all on my own and after two days I was up and running. But after a few months I finally bought an Ethernet card and couldn't figure out how to setup the driver, so I just used Linux once in a while, but mostly sticking to my treasured OS/2.
Finally, I fully jumped into Linux full force with RedHat 4.0. Though I still preferred my OS/2 box, my goal was to do on the Linux everything I could do on my OS/2 box. It didn't workout that well, Linux could only do about 80% of what I needed at the time, but I learned a damn lot.
Now I'm mostly a Windows user, but I keep a Linux box around for research and just for keeping up with it. I got out of IT a long time ago, so I have not worked with proper servers in a long time, so no need for Linux in any serious capacity.
Ay, I miss the old days... I much prefer the old crude Linux days, except for the dearth of hardware support, lol.
My first Linux experience was back in school about 1995, when one of my friends wanted to show me how awesome it was.
We somehow freed up about 10MB of space of the 40 MB disk on mum & dad's computer, and repartitioned it to install whatever version of Slackware was current at the time.
So what was so awesome about a 10 MB installation? I asked, and I was shown how cool it was to be able to switch between several different text consoles. (That multitasking sure beats DOS or Windows 3.1!) Another supposedly impressive feature was how you could change the font of the text consoles to be something more italicised and comicey! The Slackware installer of the day let you do this.
The other awesome thing I could apparently do, which my friend mentioned as he was leaving, was recompile the kernel. Wow! Of course on a 10 MB installation, I didn't actually have a compiler, or any kernel source, or a working modem to get any kernel source, and to be honest I didn't know what a kernel was or why I'd care about compiling it. But if I'd been able to, I'm sure that recompiling the kernel over and over again would have kept me completely satisfied. I bet it would have been better than staring at a command prompt all day with barely any storage space and no applications to run.
I couldn't figure out how to switch the text back to a normal font after my friend had gone, when it was hurting my eyes. Not that it really mattered, because I didn't spend a lot of time booting into Linux, except for when I wanted to feel cool. :P
So my Slackware installation of 1995 didn't last terribly long. In later years I tried to move to Linux several times with a dual partition, but always had problems due to some Microsoft application lock-ins with certain jobs I was doing for other people, as well as problems getting an X server to run reliably. Since about 2001, though, I've been persistently running Debian on my desktop and laptop computers. I did away with Windows at about that time, and I love it.
Back then I couldn't even move vim. It took me quite some time to get the :wq
But I did it - sharing 64 kB/s with two other guys through an old Pentium with a Fritz Card.
Those were the days...
Distro: Redhat 5.2 Apollo
Hardware: p2 300 128mb ram 100mhz bus on asus p2b. used pin b21 cut hack to get 100mhz bus on 66mhz klamath.
What I did? : Web browse and just poke around. I played chess, learned shell scripting and file sharing. This experience showed me that this was Where It's At. I switched completely with 6.2 Zoot.
I tried to log in, but could'nt. Some days later I found out, that the administrator was called root ...
I used Linux and term to multiplex my modem connection to the university so that I could run multiple terminal gopher, vi and shell sessions.
seriously
I stared in awe as I middle clicked my display and swished it around it is virtual-3D-cube glory! I swear I needed a mop to clean up my drool.....
Just started with Ubuntu 7.10 when 8.04 was a few months into beta and loved the whole build you're own operating system thing. But it was hell getting everything to work with nothing but google and some outdated blogging websites to help. In the end I've been using Ubuntu since then even managed to make an ubuntu server that worked inside the college WIndows XP servers, with the help the techs their. Everyone was booting either DSL or ubuntu off USB for the hell of it for a while; mainly to play quake lol. Well that was a while ago and now I'm back to using XP because of the current build of my comp won't work with any linux. Mobile Broadband ain't the hell I'd thought it would be and looking to get back to linux whenever possible and update this thing.
My first time using Linux was to host a MySQL database for an application I was developing for a previous employer.
Before then, I've never used Linux before, but I did have a Unix account in college. I really just used that to log in and run 'pine' to check my email. I learned a few little commands like 'cd' and 'ls'.
The original app from that job was just an MS Access database, but I ended up writing a front end in Visual Basic 6.0 and then migrating the DB from Access to MySQL. Instead of hosting MySQL on Windows, I thought I'd try out this new Linux thing, Mandrake 9.0 at the time.
So I was the lead developer for the project, DB admin, and server admin for the box. :)
Having a smoking section in a public restaurant is like having a peeing section in a public swimming pool.
... when the installer wasn't in english yet. At my first prompt I typed "help". Wasn't of much help relly.