What Was Your First Linux Distribution?

[caindie]

Caldera Network Desktop

The user interface on X was called Looking Glass and it was from Visix.

Caldera did the promotion and marketing and a little bitty unknown firm called red hat put the distribution together.

That, along with the rest of Linux, changed pretty quickly.

[Fenrin]

my first linux distro was Suse 9.1. I was not aware that it was possible to download linux for free, so I bought it cheap with a short handbook at ebay And at this time Suse 9.3 was released already.

[HyperDrive]

Red Hat 5.2 on a 486DX2/66 with 8 MiB of RAM. And I still remember the "fun" I had getting the double speed Matsushita CD-ROM drive to work...

[philcostin]

Mandrake 8.0

... but once I went Slack, I never went back.

[cyring]

At first, in the 80'
UNIX : Conversant -> SCO -> DEC Ultrix -> Minix -> BSD386

Then in the 90'
Linux : Slackware

[Paul Frederick]

Mandrake?

I just thought I would ask what your first Linux distribution was that you ever tried.

My first distribution that I used way back when was Mandrake.

From my perspective Mandrake is a Johnny come lately. I started running Linux in 1995 and it was so long ago now I can't remember if it was Redhat or Slackware I ran first. Either way I doubt it lasted more than a few days before I managed to trash the system. It was a hectic time in my Linux life. I was trying so many back then. Distro hopping was a big thing in those days.

[Paul Frederick]

DOS?

That quirky offshoot of Slackware that was designed to be operated entirely from a 100MB Zip disk. At the time, 1997, we were still using the 2.0 kernel. You could boot the kernel from DOS using LOADLIN. Good times...

I gave up all forms of Microsoft software early in 1996. OK I use their web fonts now, does that count?

[Paul Frederick]

Little bitty?

The user interface on X was called Looking Glass and it was from Visix.

Caldera did the promotion and marketing and a little bitty unknown firm called red hat put the distribution together.

That, along with the rest of Linux, changed pretty quickly.

When Caldera came out RedHat wasn't little bitty in the Linux community. They were the biggest distro players at the time.

[frantaylor]

wow

first computer: 1802 cosmac elf hand wired in high school

first mainframe: IBM 370 Cobol on brand new green screens, just missed out on punch cards

first unix: BSD 4.2 on a VAX 785, hacking a DRV-11 driver

first pc: 128K mac, 68K assembler. I still have 3-ring binder edition of "inside mac"

first linux: 486/66, 32 Mb, SLS, 0.99 kernel, I still have the CD roms. I have original slackware and caldera and a whole bunch of old stuff like that.

gotta admit I liked the sun 3 a lot better than the linux box, at least at first. X was just so painful on linux and it just worked on the sun

[Paul Frederick]

The question was first Linux

first computer: 1802 cosmac elf hand wired in high school

first unix: BSD 4.2 on a VAX 785, hacking a DRV-11 driver

first pc: 128K mac, 68K assembler

first linux: 486/66, 32 Mb, SLS, 0.99 kernel

gotta admit I liked the sun 3 a lot better than the linux box, at least at first. X was just so painful on linux and it just worked on the sun

If you want to go all the way back to first computer then that would be my Z-80 breadboard. It wasn't capable of running Linux though. Before the IBM PC really exploded I didn't mess around with other junk. Being pedantic I don't consider any Apple products PCs. PC was an IBM specification. One that didn't have any room in it for $220 floppy disk drives either.