I guess this will help people remember/compare versions http://www.kde-files.org/CONTENT/con...218-gldt76.png

I started using Linux back in 1998. Hate to say it but my first disto was (insert evil music) Caldera. It took me two weeks to get dial-up networking to work on my very expensive 486 (with built-in math co-processor hehehe), but after that baptism of fire I was well on my way. Next, I went out and bought Mandrake 6 for some ridiculously low price, compared to Windows at the time. After that Mandrake 8.1. I also shelled out $150 for Corel Office 2000 for Linux, because at the time there was no really well developed office alternative. Next I went on this performance binge and installed Slackware 6.1. I especially enjoyed building the kernel, which to me was almost a necessity considering the speed of my computer - a Pentium 75 Mhz. Over the years I have grown lax and do not now seek to squeeze every little last bit of speed out of my rig. I've changed from cutting edge distros to the more stolid, stable ones. I used Cent OS 4.3 for a year or so, then Debian Sarge 4.0, and now Debian Lenny. That's my story. Truth is stranger than fiction hehehe...

My first distro was Mandrake 8.2 which I bought off the shelf at CompUSA. I believe that was around 2001 or 2002. I had just put together a new build and was angry about the WinXP activation scheme. Microsoft's direction was pretty clear and I wanted none of it. I put Win2K and Mandrake 8.2 on that box. Within 6 months, I rarely booted into windows anymore and never looked back. Taking the time to learn linux was probably one of my better moves.

"I used Linux back before it had a GUI."

There was never really a time before Linux had a GUI. X=GUI. XFree86 was ported immediately for Linux, so this poll element is a bit strange. I was in on the ground floor of Linux, circa 1991/2, and I just do not recall not having X.

Back in 1995 installed a Slackware 95 on a 486 DX4 16 MB RAM HD 1.2 GB IDE. I had to edit Space.c in order to enable 3 ethernet cards and type 'make config' to compile Kernel 1.2 ...

Free Redhat?
 

My first Linux OS was a copy of Redhat - Free Redhat

I find it incredible that ejackson was registered for over 5 years before posting ...

Welcome to LQ!

I thought I read that XFree86 was ported to linux in 1994, which was about four years into Linux history. But I didn't do any hardcore research.

The first kernel I had running was 1.09 on a 386SX40 with 4 meg of RAM (the RAM was second hand and cost me £80 IRC). From checking Kernel.org patchlevel 9 appeared in April 1994, so I suppose it was somewhere between then (and IRC it was 1.09 and not 1.0.9 in those days) and Mar 95 when 1.2.0 came out.

4 meg of RAM on a 386 was not enough for X to do anything much more ambitious than load, it was not possible for me to use the GUI. In fact that turned out to be a bonus - I learned to love the command line and the power of pipes and scripting.

From p75 of "Linux, Unleashing the Workstation in Your PC" 2nd Ed., Strobel and Uhl...
Later on the same page they note:
The book is marked (C)1986, it's the earliest Linux book I can find on my bookshelf.

Yep, it was Slackware, downloaded in an Edinburgh University computer lab onto numerous floppies. I still use Slackware today.

I started when leaving MS land - ehm, university in 1998. Was most impressed by some guys running a cluster of DEC thin clients and not allowing anything more than MS Office on a Citrix Terminal there. There was a single PC running SUSE Linux hosting the one and only floppy drive in the building. This was my initial mount/unmount training. Virtually no MS support but a lot of MS bashing all day.

Debian had a reputation for being hard to learn/setup, but I felt like taking the hardest way. Never went back. My first system was configured by hand-crafted config files step by step, weekend by weekend. Got a mouse within days, a desktop within weeks, functional NFS file server within months, e-mail with local IMAP server within ~ 2 years.

I never had to reinstall that system, just update and upgrade. Running on the 3rd or 4th mainboard, 3rd set of hard-disks I experienced reliability beyond anything I knew before and while running Win95b,c, Win98 and finally Win2k on workstations (dual boot with Debian) in parallel.

Since OOo 2.0 booting into Win2k is a rare thing, mostly for some old fashioned adventure games like Indiana Jones & Co. Now I do some server administration and web service customization improving programming skills. Still wait to by my 1st real 3D Linux game. But Debian definitely made my days and it even became part of my business some years ago too.

Perhaps that should be 1996, since Linus announced his new operating system on comp.os.minix on 25 Aug 1991.

Of course, you are correct. (C) 1996 Springer-Verlag New York, Inc

ISBN 0-387-94601-2

Somebody could send the authors an email I guess -

stefan.strobel@linux.org
thomas.uhl@linux.org

...I'd guess they might just have some "early adopter" stories, if the emails are still good after all these years.

Digging into my install CD collection I found Redhat 5.1 (May 1998) but I recall downloading 1.44Mb disk images at dialup speeds prior to that.

SCO signed their death warrant when they introduced user licensing & my first Linux production server went live in 2003 on Redhat 8.0 - haven't looked back since.

I tried Corel Linux and Redhat 6.0 back in 1996 but wasn't able to do much. Then after spending a year with WinXP on my laptop I got fed up with Microsoft to the point I was ready to switch and learn Linux. I chose Slackware 9.1 and have been a happy Slacker since July 2001.

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