After year of having a good time with Linux and KDE, I found and purchased a copy of the exact same book/cd of Mandrake linux 7.0
I might make a live usb from it and put it away sealed in a box as a memento. lol

Back in 2001 is when I came across of this version of linux.
At the time I was working at an airline back home in El Salvador.
I did risk it all installing it on my office computer, but it advertised dual boot.
The install process was SO EASY! and the graphics as I said it before, were OFF THE HOOK, I was in love with Linux from that point on.
Previous experiences came from college, we did use some type of unix/linux but I have no idea what it was. it was all terminal usage.

My first Linux install was Mandrake in 2001 (can't remember what version it was). I liked it very much but the documentation was lacking in professionalism (there were a lot of colloquialism's and just plain bad English). I loved the KDE2 desktop environment back then too. But too many things didn't work for me in Linux so I continued using Windows for a few years after this until I tried Ubuntu (8.04 I think) and was very impressed how far Linux had come since 2001. I've been using Linux exclusively ever since 2010 or so (currently using Manjaro KDE).

They were French so I think their translations would not be the best, though English is mostly French pronounced differently. The translation likely suffered from them not being proficient in the English way of writing it.

Edit: for example "a red coat" in English literally translated from French would be "a coat red", the adjective is always after the noun not before like English.

I think you are right!

With almost a year of experience in the Linux world, I'm considered a newbie relative to other users. But I definitely remember that day, Sept 23, 2020, which left sort of mixed feelings in me. On the one side, I had a system, which ran well out-of-the-box with almost all the tools I needed, without the bloatware of the Windows era, low memory usage, high speed, pleasant desktop interface, etc. But on the other hand - I was completely disconnected from the web without a chance to get the latest updates, to communicate with the outer world, you know... After hours and even days of research on Reddit, these forums, and my own system (dmesg was the name of the tool!), I could finally identify my wi-fi dongle as the culprit; actually the kernel didn't recognise its driver as it was from an unknown (suspicious?) manufacturer. Strangely, I'd been using the same dongle for a couple of years on Windows and it used to work well. Anyway, I had to replace the piece. But thanks God this didn't make me hate Linux from the very start. I'm a happy user and will hopefully stay the same in the years to come...

I remember that day too only because it is my birthday. Hardware has always been the sticking point with Linux, though Windows and its treatment of the hardware was my way to Linux. It was Windows 98SE that made my Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold the top of the line sound card at the time only play a midi file and nothing else, downgrade to the 98 only version sorry about your luck still only midi. Well I had heard of this Linux thing in the computer magazines I read and while at the local computer store seen this Redhat 5.2 for sale and bought it. Got home installed on spare hard drive ran the sndconfig utility to put in my irq and dma settings and presto I had sound again, that was the last time I used windows for my daily driver.

An early CD
 

This disc was my first introduction to Debian, obtained from an open LUG meeting at BCIT in Burnaby BC in 1999. Though I was impressed by the apt program for its amazing dependency resolution ability, I could not get my Xwindows to configure properly (on a 486 PC) so ultimately kept trying other distros (early Caldera, Redhat, Turbolinux) and finally settled on Mandrake 7.0. Since others on this forum have named Mandrake as their first successful distro, my conclusion is they offered one of the earliest reliable automated Xwindows configurations during the install process. However, subsequent upgrades proved problematic so eventually I made the transition to later versions of Debian and finally Slackware.

The installation took three months. Dual boot SuSE Linux 5.0 (June 1997) with Windows 3.11.

I remember that I had a helluva time finding a driver for my proprietary Mitsumi CD Rom. And that rawrite refused to run on DRdos. Other than those glitches, installation went pretty smoothly. I think I was loading Slackware 3.

S.u.S.E 5.0 (in this thread), was rather quickly installed, impossible to configure and I did not hold out a single week.

As far as I remember, Windows 3.x was just an add-on to msdos (sold separately), not a real operating system. From the msdos command prompt one had to run "WIN" to enter the windows frontend. Linux o.s. is older than mswindows o.s.

Ah now you mention that my SCSI CD burner needed new controller card for it to be compatible with Linux, almost forgot that one...

And there was no network stack for the TCP/IP only their MS network garbage until they adapted the BSD stuff they eventually used. And if you were smart you did not use the windows until the 3.11 arrived as the rest of it was total junk.

Edit: Plus the fun of the autoexec.bat and the lines to maximize the memory so you could load the every more bloated pieces of junk programs that were eating up the lower regions of the memory, your if lucky 512kb or so of it and those massive hard drives that had a good 10mb of space if you were lucky and were four or five inches high and took a good day or so to format by the cryptic commands you entered to maximize the interleaving of the drive so it would have better performance. I am not sure if I still have that full height 10mb upstairs with the old 286 it was in or if I have thrown it away, still have the Redhat 5.2 I bought though, dug it out last night but the picture I took to post on my phone had errors in it for some reason and was not viewable. Never installed the Linux on the 286 though it was the Celeron 300a that replaced it that got that privilege. Lovely chip it ran at the overclock of 450 mhz just by upping the crippled bus the greedy SOBs at Intel did to it along with the other parts of the chip they crippled, scumbags then scumbags now nothing changes in the computer industry it is full of them.

Edit2: Though now it hits me it was the config.sys where the memory settings and stuff were done if my memory serves me.

My first Linux distro was Red Hat 5.0 I got from a CD in the back of a paperback book titled "Learn Linux in 24 Hours", by Bill Brush, on May 1, 1998. I was looking for a copy of OS/2 at Barns & Nobel, which was where OS's were sold back in the day. I had been running Win3.11FWG in an OS/2 DOS box on a PC I was using before I bought a new Sony VAIO desktop for Xmas in 1997. It came with Win95 preinstalled. Between Win95 and the hardware was a layer of software Sony called "Sony-MediKit", IIRC. A fact which I found out about after I bought the desktop. Believing that MS could write a good OS, or as least as good as Win3.11FWG was (for me) I came to believe that the medi-kit was to prevent Sony hardware problems from crashing Win95, using a sort of "phantom reboot". Win95 would crash about every 5 minutes and I had to save every minute or so to avoid losing lots of code and having to re-write it.

Between Jan 1, 1998 and May 1, 1998 I had to re-install Win95 FIVE times, and finally got fed up with it, which was why I went to buy a new copy of OS/2, which cost $250 at the time. The paperback with RH5 cost $25 and the license said I could install it on as many machines I wanted. After I installed RH5.0 that Sony was rock solid stable and RH never crashed. I replaced it with SuSE 5.3 in Sept of 1998 because that distro featured KDE 1.0 beta, which had the look and feel of Windows. That was important because my client machines were Windows and working back and forth between Win and Linux created mental dissonance.

I used SuSE until Novell's CEO confessed that Linux was guilty of stealing MS IP and started paying royalties to MS. Novell's job after that was primarily replacing RH servers with SuSE servers, even though the SuSE servers were never allowed to be Master Browser Controllers of the networks. After SuSE I tried several distros that included KDE. Some based on the RPM and some based on DPKG. I decided that I liked the dpkg package manager more than RPM and in Feb of 2009 I installed Kubuntu 9.04. I have stayed with it every since. With Kubuntu 16.04 I began using BTRFS and now I will never use an OS that doesn't give me the option of making BTRFS the root file system.

I think most of the business users had to buy the Novel network software.
I remember a BNC-coaxial cable network in a job, early to mid 1990s: one of the network cards failed and the entire network was down.

I worked around 1990 in a company where people used Acer XTs and 80286 ATs with msdos 3. The PCs were about 5 year old and the 20MB hard drives of the 286's began to fail. The word "backup" was totally unknown in the company, although they owned a big VAX system too for engineering calculations with quite regular backups by the admin. Hopefully the XTs of the secretaries never had any problem.

Yes, config.sys and the high memory nightmare!

Yes that is what we did at the time networking installs and a video rental program we had for video stores plus local sales and service of machines. The old Netware 2.11 I think it was running the coax and making your own cables fun times trying to figure out the connection problems when it did not go right. Then fighting with the damn suppliers to not pay for a MS-DOS license for the computers as we were just installing the Netware which did not need it. Ended up it was cheaper to build from the parts so we did that later getting tired of it.

Edit: And the lovely monitors of the time, the amber or green until finally in heaven with a paper white, black and white one with a massive 640x480 pixel display. It only costed an arm and leg plus the rights to your first born child...

Edit2: Or now it pops into my mind trying to actually use all the memory slots on the motherboard without dancing naked in the moonlight sacrificing a few chickens to the computer gods, to ensure compatibility of the two let alone four sticks you had..

I've only replaced Windows for about a year, but my first Linux distro was release in 2013. I booted it first at least three years ago and at most five (from 2021).

I remember being excited it loaded, but I couldn't make much sense of it. I didn't know how to get online (which has been made much easier), install apps, customize the desktop, etc.

So I put it on the shelf until my Windows netbook crashed and both Redmond and oem restricted access to recovery media.

Booting Linux again, a newer version, was borne out of both animosity and necessity.

I worked on terminals from windows for 3-4 years and I loved the fact that I could do everything from a terminal, not needing to use the mouse to go from window to window. In ~2003 a friend, more knowledgeable than me, brought a CD and installed it, Mandrake I think. I was amazed by how smoothly the installation went. For about 2 years I had Linux in dual boot with Windows, but only for security really, in case I needed to run some software that I could not install in Windows. I soon realized that there was nothing such.
Since then I wipe out Windows whenever I have a new computer I work on, and I usually install multiple distros in the same PC. For about a decade I have settled with Linux Mint, but I still try new distro flavours. One thing I completely disliked was Ubuntu, which after some point I think ~10 years ago reminded me of Windows, in the ads and the graphical environment.
I have proselytized my surrounding to Linux, and although scared in the beginning, they are happy with the outcome. I have no intention to ever go back Windows, and I get annoyed when some software is needed for certain bureaucratic works that assume we ought to have Windows on (like virtual meetings with Microsoft Teams). I agree with an LQ friend above: I wish I could get rid of Google as easily.

In Retrospect
 

I'm glad that someone on LQ mentioned that they had been bothered by a Linux "distro." install, not setting up various things automatically, of the type that an MS-Windows install, did set up. As someone who has done a lot of software development, I suppose it can sometimes be too easy for me to get stuck thinking from the perspective of software development.

Somewhat separately, I've often wondered, if the cost of some other types of hardware, beyond that of the x86 variety, had been much less expensive years ago, could "desktop PC's" have evolved a good deal faster?

Years ago I worked on some Unix Kernels on National Semiconductor brand CPU chips. Those CPU's tended to have a so called symmetric instruction set; if an instruction addressed data, generally it could address data directly, anywhere in the CPU or memory. I feel the various addressing limitations of the x86 stuff, slowly over time, effectively spawned a variety of kludges, that somewhat worked around the limitations. I feel they were inspired kludges, but kludges nonetheless. Over quite a bit of time, the addressing limitations were worked around.

Unfortunately, I believe the higher cost of the National Semiconductor brand CPU chips, and the other hardware that tended to be used with them, resulted in the machines built with them, being less popular.

Catastrophe
 

It was Mandrake 6 PPC on an Amiga 1200 built into a tower. The Amiga loaded a special Kernel into RAM, rebooted and started linux. I didn't know what all those Files and folders in linux were for. And so I deleted some very necessary Files. You can imagine what then happend :)

Yeah, I mean who needs all those files in /dev, /etc and /lib anyway?
The more practice installing from scratch, the better.

My first installation was on a desktop with XP: I installed Ubuntu Hardy with Wubi. And I was stunned. I loved the aesthetics and ease of use.

And with the arrogance that comes from ignorance, I started installing it on every device I could find. It's now when I sweat when installing any distro. I've never had any problems though, except for the usual hardware compatibility issues.

1993 for me. Linus was active on various newsgroups at the time. Since I was living in the Netherlands, saw him live quite a few times. I remember thinking to myself, "I wish that this would really take off, it makes so much sense!" At work I was using AIX, so Linux wasn't a completely new thing.

It took forever! And crashed repeatedly until I could patch and recompile the kernel. Thank Stallman for make.

Exactly - windows 3.11 ran "on top" of MSDOS. In my case, (first PC), Packard Bell had their "Navigator" software on top of 3.11. I knew squat about Linux then but as soon as I found out about OS2 Warp, I dumped Windows in a heartbeat. That was 1993 but can't remember when I discovered OS2 Warp.

I recall back in 2005 I picked up a cheap Anthon from Fry's Electronics. It came with Linspire 5.

Other than being able to connect to the internet and simple things like that, it was not meeting my software needs, so I wiped the drive and installed Win XP.

The machine really isn't usable these days, because it lacks support for SSE2. Too bad. I was hoping it was at least up to Pentium 4 standards.

My first brush with Linux was around 1997-1998, when I was working IT at local high school. Our university set up a new listserve server for our department. I knew the root login, but got lost when it didn't understand the 'dir' command. I wasn't terribly interested in learning about it at the time.

I don't know what the reason was, but I got interested in Linux around 2001-2002. I learned enough to make my way around the filesystem, install software, set up DNS and email servers, and edit config files. Later, I downloaded Knoppix and used it for file recovery and system testing when troubleshooting the school's computers (they were DOS/Windows).

Within a couple years, I went dual-boot on my office machine, mostly using Linux. Then eventually native Linux with a Windows VM. I also set up an iptables firewall at the gateway to our network, and managed it from my office. "Sweet!"

I've been running exclusively Linux on my machines at home since about 2009. Used mostly for personal data management, internet browsing, and coding. I'm weak on server services, e.g. LAMP, etc., because I don't have much need for them in my home environment.

Too bad you didn't replace the Linspire with a more productive distro like Debian, Slackware or Mint.

Mint hadn't been invented yet. I did try Ubuntu late 2006 but had the same problem with software. Anyway, I'm using Mint since 2015 and Win XP was good back then so no complaints. I also like Bodhi Linux.

I didn't get to experience this, but if windows was still like this my opinion of it may be different. I've used msdos a little bit and it's not too bad.

Although I've used versions of MS-Windows that ran on top of MS-DOS, AFAIK, Unix dates from around 1973(GA), MS-Windows from about 1985, and Linux from around 1991.

OK, I was thinking of when Unix was announced, not actually made Generally Available.

Unix

I find it very interesting to read about the history of operating systems, and other things like BBS's and the early internet. A friend of mine told me about the time in the early 90's when he was no longer able to access the internet for free. I wish that someone had pointed my interests to computers back then so that I could have experienced these things.

I'm not arguing for who was first, Windows or Linux, because it seems unimportant to me. But there are 2 distinct iterations of Windows, those that have a kernel that relies on MSDOS, and those that don't. Windows NT was first released in 1993 as the first version of Windows that used a kernel that didn't require MSDOS, hence the NT (New Technology) badging, and in my opinion this makes it a distinctly different operating system from the versions of Windows which have a kernel that relies upon MSDOS. All of the MSDOS based versions of Windows were retired in the early 2000's, and as far as I know, some version of the Windows NT hybrid kernel has been used ever since. This would make it appear that the operating system that we know as Windows was first released in 1993.

That being said, Windows NT was based upon OS/2 which dates back to 1987, so we could probably say that the operating system that we know as Windows dates back to 1987.

Something else that I found interesting was "On December 31, 2001, Microsoft dropped support for Windows 3.0, along with previous versions of Windows and Windows 95, Windows for Workgroups, and MS-DOS versions up to 6.22" This seems like an indicator of some kind of major internal shift in Microsoft's engineering and/or marketing strategy.

My first attempted Linux install was Mandrake or Mandriva or something named like that. I purchased a box of 5.25-in floppy discs (yeah, I'm dating myself) from a CompUSA store across the street from where I worked. I took the boxed set home eagerly awaiting what I might experience. When I began the installation routine, I thought to myself...you've got to be kidding me. I didn't take a look at Linux again until a few years later.

I remember when 3.5" floppies first came out, and I remember thinking that first, they're not floppy at all, and second that it was strange that a smaller disc could hold more data.

Thanks for the links in your sig. :hattip:

Perhaps the Linux was something like SLS because it seems out of place for 5.25" floppies for Mandrake which came out in 1998. I have heard like in 1993 or 1994 there were some floppies of that size for Linux.

I was battling with SCO unix at university, with short file names and no symbolic links. I'd used minix a little, and then I downloaded the 2 floppies of the MCC distro, which had just come out. Disc 1 being boot, Disk 2 being root. Never looked back!

It came on 64 3.5 inch floppies and it took all night!

I remember installing software from 3 floppies and sweating that one was bad. I can't imagine the amount of moisture loss I'd feel at 64!

Interesting. Was MCC strictly command-line?

Ha! I bought one of those Linspire machines from Fry's. It was the first commercial Linux OS offering that actually worked for me, not that I've tried very many pre-installed systems. Linspire was just very limited in aps, repo-wise, and it had its own funky package manager, which was part pay-to-play, IIRC.

I did nuke and repave it with some other Linux OS--probably Fedora, but it could have been one of many that I used at that time.

My top 3 software programs wouldn't work with Linspire or any other Linux back in 2005.

Linspire at least worked since it came preinstalled. My previous attempt to install Red Hat I couldn't get the modem to work.

Fortunately things are much different now and I haven't needed Micr$sof$ for several years.

my first install of linux
 

I had bought a Tome 'Linux' or some such. It had a Redhat 5.1 CD in it. This was 93 or 94. The part I most remember was having to compile most of the software that you wanted to run. You really couldn't just download a binary and have it work.

Had to be earlier version, I bought Redhat 5.0 in 98 or 99 which was the current version at the time. I got it after the Win 98SE made my SB AWE64 Gold only capable of playing a MIDI file. It makes me think it was 99 I got it with the second edition of the 98, the Redhat worked perfectly for playing sounds, it was the last time I used Windows on a daily basis. Did a quick search as well it was not even released until 95 you must be thing of something else or the time is wrong..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Linux

I started using Linux in 2009, but my first experience with compiling my own software was with Slackware a few years ago. Compiling from source took more work and time, but it turned out to be more satisfying than simply installing a pre-compiled binary. And I imagine that the process of compiling software on Slackware must be easier than compiling software on other distros many years ago since Slackware has all the dependencies are listed and there's straightforward instructions about what needs to be done.

I remember it being Redhat 9 "Shrike" which came in an instructional book on Linux that I picked up at Barnes and Noble. The installation process worked, but the lack of kernel modules which would support my display left me with a hopelessly garbled mess.

Ah... the video cards, drivers and settings are still not 100% easy to deal with. But we know the hardware makers make it difficult for GNU/Linux, cause they don't give clues, let alone open the drivers, so that this amazing OS could run flawlessly. And so other hardware makers are still seduced by the m$0ft mermaid and don't help at all the Linux ecosystem (hello printers' makers and others!!). :mad:

My first installation was Slackware in about the year 2000 (when I've finished high school). There was no driver for my graphic card (1024x768) and I think I've had only 800x600 or 640x320 resolution with some default drivers, it was not usable. But later get RedHat and was able to actually use it.

my first install was SLS on a few 3.5 inch floppies (i was going high-tech instead of 5.25 inch floppies). there was something like 13 floppies. i can't remember how i downloaded them. i managed to have dual-boot on a 170 MB (yes, MB) hard drive. MS-DOS had 40 MB of it. later, i switched to Slackware.