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?'"

Comments

I tried to access the floppy drive

[iYk6]

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.

Re:I tried to access the floppy drive

[plasmidmap]

Windows is like a drug addiction. Sometimes it takes several tries to kick it.

More like Windows is a bad stain-- it might take several washes to get it out!

Re:I tried to access the floppy drive

[N3Roaster]

My first Linux experience was when a friend was trying to install it and for whatever reason just couldn't get it to work. At the time I was a Mac person who had played around with a lot of different things, but my friend figured that since I was writing software (never mind that writing software and using software are pretty different skill sets) maybe I might be able to help. So, knowing nothing about how to install Linux, I asked him to show me what he had done. He put in the first Slackware disk, started the computer, went through the installation, and... it just worked. At the end, he had a working computer running Linux. A few days later he told me what he did differently. He accidentally deleted the partition with Windows. Oops, but he learned that he didn't need that after all.

Re:I tried to access the floppy drive

[dov_0]

Windows is like a drug addiction. Sometimes it takes several tries to kick it.

More like Windows is a bad stain-- it might take several washes to get it out!

so, a bad stain is worse than a drug addiction?? if not, which OS would u describe as a drug addiction??

Linux, but more like Soma in Brave New World. Not harmful, just gives u a bit of a rush every now and then.

Re:I tried to access the floppy drive

[Frankie70]

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.

So basically you just waited for floppy drives to get obsolete?

Re:I tried to access the floppy drive

[Jurily]

I tried to access the floppy drive. Eventually gave up, and re-installed Windows.

I hear ya. I was looking for drive C:, and when I found it, it wasn't working like I expected.

Oh, and kernel modules came in a single .c file and a README that said "just type gcc [...]". I was yelling "WHERE, YOU PIECE OF SHIT?!" for a week. What did keep me there was the fact that the installer was able to set my screen up for 1024x768@43i, and win98 couldn't do that.

Oh, ever seen KDE 3.0 on 16 Mb RAM? It was quite... educational.

Re:I tried to access the floppy drive

[Jurily]

so, a bad stain is worse than a drug addiction?? if not, which OS would u describe as a drug addiction??

Linux, but more like Soma in Brave New World. Not harmful, just gives u a bit of a rush every now and then.

Gentoo install. "Just one more package before I go to sleep". Then you wake up three days later with your keyboard imprinted on your forehead.

Re:I tried to access the floppy drive

[Arceliar]

You jest, but... have I got a story for you...

July, 2005, day 3 of the gentoo install. A friend asked me to put it on his iBook, and I have severely underestimated the time it takes for this machine to compile code. I have not slept since the ordeal started. But, at last, I am sitting at a functioning xterm, and am watching as the last few bits of gnome compile. I victoriously initialize one last emerge, after seeing that everything finally appears to be in working order, deciding that it can compile a few bits of additional software while I sleep.

I enter my room just after 1:00 PM and pull back the blankets on my bed, intending to fall asleep before I even hit the pillow. From above, I hear my older brother shout "OH MY GOD, THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE!!". The general area around the power meter, also where the power to the house comes in, had ignited, for what I immediately expect to be an electrical fire.

I don't know what else to say, so I'll just say it: I escaped the blaze, on roughly my 51st hour awake, with a cat in one arm and a fresh gentoo install, still compiling, in the other.

A RedHat 2 Distro back in 95? 96?

[wiredog]

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.

Re:A RedHat 2 Distro back in 95? 96?

[Anonymous Coward]

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".

Re:First time?

[u38cg]

Unusual. In this thread, /.ers compete with each other to try and be the earliest to use Linux. Where's Linus when you need him?

Re:Both feet, you say?

[Jurily]

Long live The Penguin!!

You mean the devil.

Bad news :(

[u38cg]

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:\>

Re:Knoppix

[apoc.famine]

My first time wasn't even an install either.....I think the install came during try #6 or something.
 
What was the first thing I did with Linux? Fail. Fail and give up.
 
Of course, I always got pissed at Windows a month later, and tried another flavor. On and off for two years, until I did the unthinkable....
 
I did a Gentoo minimal install.
 
So I guess the first thing I did with linux was watch Gentoo compile. (Guess that's the last thing I'll also do with linux, eh?)

Re:Linux helps you grow?

[garcia]

Linux has caused me to become a drunk. I hate going through manpages, scouring through Linux support forums, and trying what seems to be an endless train of the same thing until I get so drunk that I do something I didn't plan on and the setup works.

That said I've been running Linux on one machine or another since 1996 (beginning w/Slackware, moving to RH (for Alpha), and then finally moving to Debian where I've been since 2002). It still pisses me off that I have a couple of outstanding issues that have been around for the last 6.5 years but I'm just too fucking lazy to fix them. While I used to run Linux solely (between 1997 and 2002) I have moved to a server side Linux setup and a desktop Windows (and OS X, ugh) environment.

I still get drunk and I have Linux to blame. Don't drink the penguin!

I never installed X

[interstellar_donkey]

But the first thing I typed into the shell was:

man woman

Then I giggled.

Re:First time?

[bingbong]

I too used the floopies back in 1995. I learned a lot of interesting thing... like you had to manually configure some addressing issues in 'shadow memory' in order to get my token ring card to work.

I used latex to write my thesis in vi (sorry emacs peoples).

yep, we had to type uphill both ways in those days. We fought each other with sticks to obtain extra carriage returns.

Sadly, I installed BitchX

[Sun.Jedi]

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.

Re:Sadly, I installed BitchX

[DNS-and-BIND]

Oh, man, so much fun. I forgot about that - I had a dialup to a campus server running Solaris at the time, and writing a script to run through channels and send winnukes to everyone on the list. Ah, going to #mirc and watching most of the channel drop off the net. h0h0h0. Nothing like a fresh Windows bug to exploit.

Re:First time?

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting... usually the "handshake o' love" only involves one person...

Re:Near riot on the airplane

[ciderVisor]

"Hey! This guy's got UNIX on a laptop!"

Did a 12yo girl come up and say "It's a UNIX system! I know this!" ?

Re:First time?

[metacell]

Bah, that's nothing!

I overheard a conversation Linus had at the campus cafeteria back in 1990, when the Linux kernel was just an idea in his head. During the conversation, I wrote down the machine code on a napkin and executed it by hand, using a couple of salt shakers to keep track of the status registers.

You youngsters think you need a lot of expensive hardware to run software, but let me tell you, back in those days, we learnt to use our heads!

Re:First time?

[SEE]

Yeah, yeah.

Re:Knoppix

[flappinbooger]

So I guess the first thing I did with linux was watch Gentoo compile. (Guess that's the last thing I'll also do with linux, eh?)

Is that because it's still compiling??

Re:Knoppix

[flappinbooger]

I used to work with a guy who, on a monday, said he installed gentoo over the weekend. Not too long after he said he was getting divorced. I wonder if it was related?