What Was Your First Linux Distribution?

[joshuapurcell]

My first distribution that I used for my personal desktop was Gentoo. That lasted around a month or two until I went with a Red Hat version that I paid something like $80 bucks for at CompUSA. At the time I thought I would get something out of paid support, but I never once used the support that was included with that purchase. I don't remember which version of Red Hat that was, but it was around 1998-1999 time frame

[wirechief]

ROFLMAO! I think I was referring to the relative age of when they got into Linux... You've got me beat a little bit on the being in the industry by a few years- I started my futzing with computers about around 1976 or so and got to professionally doing things on computers about around 1987. An IBM 360/35 under DOS? You know that kind of dates you, don't you? >:-)

I started with suse 7.1 then Fedora 2 and stopped for a long time then I tried Suse 10.2 and decided that was the end for me with rpm crap. My first debian distro was Freespire and at first it was fun till i realized that it was frozen in time and going absolutely nowhere, I moved on trying Ubuntu 6.06, Ubuntu 7.04 fiesty and trying a hd install of Knoppix 5.l.1 and when I had trouble finding the "keys" for a sidux.com I landed there and use it on all my machines, it is defintely hot and spicy, like riding a wild bronco!
I think if someone wanted a easy ride and didn't like to experiement then Ubuntu fiesty is ok but if you want to have fun run Sidux. I might add that none of the distros liked my ati 1300pro card, I plan on replacing it with a Nvidia card but am not in a hurry my on board Nvidia
graphics card works fine even playing doom3

[deanjo]

Heh... All of you are young'uns... >:-)

Yggdrasil Plug-and-Play Linux 1.0, followed up by Slackware when Yggdrasil bailed out of the distribution business.

Some of us just never used a "distro", but built it from scratch in the early years.

[Vakilik]

I started off in 2003 on Mandrake 9.1, it was okay but I was disappointed with bugs and such, so then I bumped into Fedora Core 1, it was a improvement but again, bugs and problems. So I used Slackware, this was different, I learned alot more from the command line because it was a do it yourself distro.

I hung with that for a while then I kept hearing about something called Ubuntu, it was in development of its 4.10 warty release, so I grab it, check it out, and it was pretty cool, very stable and worked. The thing that amazed me about that distribution so much, was its community, so I stuck with that for about a year in a half, and by that time I knew that Ubuntu was based off the linux distribution Debian.

So I go and try it, and fell in love with it, it had the perfect balance for me and its been a rock solid distro for me thus far. We all have done the distro hop, trying to find that one that is just for you, its like, a journey haha. Eventually you find the one, we usually don't get it on the first try though, but we eventually find it. Almost sounds like marriage.

[Svartalf]

Some of us just never used a "distro", but built it from scratch in the early years.

Heh... Prove it.

[deanjo]

There wasn't too many options for running linux on a DEC VX40's. You had to build it from scratch in the early years.

[glussier]

There wasn't too many options for running linux on a DEC VX40's. You had to build it from scratch in the early years.

Earlier you wrote that you started on Corel linux.

[Svartalf]

Earlier you wrote that you started on Corel linux.

That he did. Now, letsee...

The DEC VX40 would be a Multia/UDB mobo...

deanjo, what timeframe would this doing Linux on an Alpha machine be in?

[niniendowarrior]

The first distribution I really put some time in is Redhat 7.3.

My first one was Knoppix ver. 3.3 or something. Don't remember anymore. That said, I started Linux around 2003 or so.

My first *nix system was fiddling DEC Alpha Unix systems.

[random2]

My first distro was Redhat 4.x (don't remember the exact version) in mid 97. I helped my friend install this one for his project and was soo drawn by it that I installed it on a partition of my 2gb disk.