What was your first Linux distribution and version of that distribution?

[Vrai]

My first was Red Hat, based on a friends recommendation. At that time it was available by downloading six or so floppy discs. I was not tech savvy enough to get it sorted.
A while later I discovered Ubuntu. Dapper Drake 6.06 I think it was. That was the first Linux I was able to get installed and up and running.
It was beautiful !

 

[rppp01a]

I'd been told if I wanted to work with Unix I should try Linux. It was free and ran on PCs. This was in 1998. I was in a bookstore about a week later and found a book with Redhat linux 4.2 on a CD in a sleeve in the back. I bought it (and still have the book). I built my first PC so I could run it. I then went to town trying to learn to use it. The first time I used vi I couldn't figure it out (I didn't have the internet at home at the time) so I rebooted. lol

 

[KGIII]

The first time I used vi I couldn't figure it out (I didn't have the internet at home at the time) so I rebooted.

You are not even remotely alone with that one. It's sometimes said that the only way to exit vi(m) is to power cycle the computer. My Vi skills are very rusty, but I can still remember how to exit. These days, I prefer Nano.

 

[dangarbri]

I had to google the name. I remember it was ubuntu back around 2012 or 2013. It was Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzl. I was a freshman CS major, I don't even remember what got me to install it but I remember wanting to use more CLI tools since I learned they were way more useful than all the normal GUI tools I'd always used before. I remember having so many driver issues and editing lots of config files, but I enjoyed it. Used ubuntu for a long time and learned a lot about general linux usage. Which was great for when I started my career and we used fedora as our dev systems. I actually started to dislike linux then because it would break every now and then I didn't like spending time dealing with linux issues when I wanted to code. But I've found trying to code on windows to be a much bigger PITA. Eventually I evolved to arch, but the laptop died a couple days ago and now I've upgraded(?) to gentoo.

 

[gvisoc]

Oh, I love the threads that allow me to tell the world how old we are haha!

My first Linux version was a Red Hat 5.1, not sure if late 1997, or early 1998. I was 17 and my elder brother, already at the uni, had to do some labs on it.

We squeezed it in a 400MB ext2 partition + 64MB Swap, as our disk was only 2GB on a Pentium 166MMX with 32MB of RAM.

We had to keep Windows 95 for the rest of the family and for the games, but our BIOS wasn’t somehow friendly to LILO on the hard drive, we had to have a boot floppy disk to boot on Linux.

 

[gvisoc]

My first Linux version was a Red Hat 5.1, not sure if late 1997, or early 1998.

Although this screenshot is from a 5.2, it’s essentially the same idea, as we were using Afterstep as our WM.

 

[rppp01a]

Although this screenshot is from a 5.2, it’s essentially the same idea, as we were using Afterstep as our WM.
View attachment 15844

My first WM was fvwm95. I couldn't figure out how to get the configurations to save. When I found AfterStep, I was curious. Then I found WindowMaker. That was the UI of choice for me for years. It just seemed elegant to me.

 

[gvisoc]

Yeah, Window Maker was top notch. Fast forward to 2001 when I was doing my own labs that was the WM I felt most productive on.