We usually don't recommend Kali to newbies. But then we don't recommend using Linux to crack other people's computers and steal their data either! I hope you have grown out of those childish pranks by now. Having said that, if you managed to use Kali without coming a cropper, you shouldn't have any problems with Slackware.

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I know it's not true everywhere, but the whole world seems full of thieves, nowadays. (A general moral decline?)

On topic: . . . that it was a helluva lot easier to install than W2k!

.....and you wonder why most folks, as soon as they read the fatal words 'Kali Linux', lose all interest & move on to find something else to interest them - sharp-ish, like.

This is not the image of Linux the community wishes to promote...


Mike.

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Kinda related to the Kali story above, I used (my roommate's computer) to participate in a scrolling chat environment in the mid-90s. It was the wild west, with us ne'er-do-wells firing off winnukes, port floods, javascript sploits and icq bombs. I thought it was some really neat stuff, and I found some cracking and phreaking manuals online so I could take it to the next level. I read stories about some big names in the phreaking and hacking circles, like Kevin Mitnick, Kevin Poulsen, the 414 Gang and others. Many of them mentioned UNIX, and how learning UNIX would make you m4d l337z0r. So I set out to learn UNIX and be a hax0r. I started reading old UNIX books and manuals. I built my first computer (300mhz K6-II, 128mb RAM, 6.44gb hard drive and other bits from EggHead Auctions), and acquired a free copy of Sun Solaris 7, which ran like cold garbage on it. I didn't have any concept of HCLs or the like at the time, and practically nothing was supported. No modem, no sound, just 16-color low-res CDE. Around 1999 I got a copy of Caldera OpenLinux 2.2. This worked a LOT better, and figured out a lot of the hardware on its own. Everything worked except sound. KDE 1.0 was amazing and I loved it. Terminals everywhere! Honest-to-goodness manpages! It also came with all the dev tools that I couldn't seem to find on Solaris. I started writing programs in C from a pretty bad book that I bought at a library book sale.

Somewhere along the way, I fell in love with the system and the people associated with it and just forgot to be a hax0r. I got my mom-n-pop ISP banned from EFNet for making jokes about an upcoming release of "Microsoft Linux", and soon found FreeNode. Eventually I learned my version of Caldera Linux was woefully out of date, and since all I had was dialup (single phone line shared with roommates) the idea of downloading an OS was out of the question. I eventually found a place called CheapBytes that had a whole catalogue of Linux and BSD CDs they'd mail you for a nominal fee. I chose a few to try out, mailed off a check and in 10-15 business days got a box with Debian 2.2r (Potato), Slackware 7.1, Mandrake Linux (7.2?), FreeBSD 4.2, a copy of Helix Gnome and something else I can't think of at the moment. I want to say RedHat or Suse.

Mandrake seemed bloated at the time (but my mom loved all the games that came with it). I liked Slackware the most but in the end Debian won me over with apt-get. The final straw on Slackware was trying to install The latest GIMP from source and getting down into something like 16 levels of dependencies. I mostly used Debian from around the turn of the century until the big systemd controversy. I then went to Salix for several months, then back to Slackware. In the meantime I always had multiple computers (usually old cast-offs that people didn't want) and have tried out a lot of different Linux systems, and all the BSDs. I used to particularly like NetBSD. I've built LFS twice, and I'm getting the itch to do it again.

I've currently got 2 main computers that I use- a 3rd-gen i5 that runs Windows 10 for schoolwork and games, and also an AMD FX-8350 that runs Slackware for everything else. I thought I'd get smart and get rid of the piles of computers and just get a couple of hot-swap hdd bays and just change out hard drives when I wanted to experiment with a new distro or OS. I installed those in 2 computers, got rid of everything else, and now 2 years later I have 9 computers again.

Oh well. They keep me off the streets I suppose. So there's the short story.

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I remember back in 1999/2000 having a 386 and some Mandrake CDs. It took my usual five or six tries to get it to install. Trial and error, mainly. After it was running it took me more days to get the modem to connect. Al lot of fussing with the port jumper settings, and then had to edit this script that managed the login process. I remember having difficulty with the resolv.conf file too, but after it worked, it was great!

Was feeling proud of myself until I ran into a Debian user. Could never install Debian before version 4 came out - too difficult. So would be interested to hear how anyone got Debian 2 or 3 installed hehehe

Later I switched to Slackware. It's strange but I found Slackware a lot easier, after trying Debian unsuccessfully. At least it had a little more hacker status than Mandrake.

Those were the days.

I ftp'ed version 0.11 on January 23rd 1992 on to a machine at Wellington City Council where I was working at the time. Wellington City Council (wcc.govt.nz) provided a pioneering public access site. I had to use a utility called rawrite to write a boot floppy and a root file system floppy. After this I booted it on one of WCC's 386 PC's. (Was this the the first Linux boot in New Zealand?). Linux booted and asked for the root floppy. A getty for Linux did not yet exist, so wasn't any login-password interaction: after booting you were dropped straight into a root shell (GNU bash). Commands such as ls, cd, and ps, worked like the real thing. I felt like I was witnessing a moon landing. Here was a multitasking system with the potential to support the mountain of freely available Unix software. It was really was multitasking and it was fast. By using the doshell command you could fire up a shell on multiple consoles and it really worked.

After the release of Linux 0.11 a snowball started to roll. During January (?) the interim news group alt.os.linux came into being. This group filled in the gap until comp.os.linux could be established. Archives of linux installation kits were starting to come into being. The forerunner of sunsite.unc.edu was pioneered by Alan B Clegg at banjo.concert.net:

The two main problems for new Linux users were:

1. How to get it onto their hard drives.
2. How to set the root and swap partition numbers in the boot binary.

A typical Linux setup booted from floppy. Two addresses in the kernel loaded from the boot floppy dictated the location of the root and swap partitions. You had to figure out the magic numbers for your hard drive and hard drive partitions and zap these numbers into the kernel with a program of your choice. This was usually a custom written piece of C, or a DOS binary file editor. Here's a typical posting:

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Wow! To be there at the very beginning - so impressive! Thanks for sharing.

Installed Slackware from two floppies that I’d downloaded over dial-up. Couldn’t do anything with it, but it did boot into a command line.

It was an Official redhat Linux 6.0 (3 CDs worth) !! I still have them...

Not knowing what to expect, I put the 1st CD in and .... nothing happened. After much consternation, I realized that I had to fiddle with the machine's BIOS to get it to run the CD.

But there were two more CDs to go! Wow! Looked rather daunting for a first attempt, so I put it off and went back to my faithful Win 98.

It took quite a bit of time (like over a year for another try) to try getting a look at the Linux GUI.

A week earlier I heard about Linux on NPR, so I had to try it out. I remember CompUSA had a sale on Redhat 5.1, which came on floppy disks. I remember that I was stuck on "mount point" for a whole day. And then many more days to get the modem to work.

Girlfriend (wife now) was all supportive of me learning, as long as I am not out at the bars.

Thanks, LQ, for the ask.

Edit: And swap space? Mind blowing when coming from WIN95.

I was getting more and more disillusioned with the windows xp "phone home" system, but I was not aware that there was any other option.
After an online search I downloaded Ubuntu (Dapper Drake)

I was astonished to find my system could dual boot, and after a bit of an easy learning curve the micro$oft thing ceased to be an option.

Never looked back since

My first successful Linux install followed probably 40 unsuccessful ones.
My first attempts were in 1998-2003 and were plagued by corrupted downloads and a failure to understand how the root user model worked. My success was with an early Mandrake disk that I ordered from a vendor. It arrived in a white-labeled slip cover and was a CD-R with the word “Mandrake” written on it.
When I booted it up, it was actually a RedHat disk with no other apparent modifications. I was ecstatic to finally get my first install that gave me a command prompt. There was no GUI and I didn’t know yet how to get a GUI. I played with bash for a few months before I had learned enough to start teaching others how to use it. By 2004, I discovered Ubuntu. By then I was hooked.

Professionally, I'd been developing diagnostic and system consoles for both business servers and supercomputers under UNIX SYS V so, when I installed an early version of Slackware on my home PC, I thought cool--it's like SYS V (close enough and I still greatly prefer Sys V init over systemd) and it's free! Various flavors of Linux have been my "daily driver" ever since and I had opportunities to do some development work under Linux operating systems too before I retired.

It was a now extinct release which I don't recall the name of - something Norse - Yggdrasil?. It occupied a notable number of 3.5 inch floppies. I had to first track down the GCC compiler, install it, learn about configuring the make file, and then run several attempts at compiling before I succeeded in getting all the pieces in place. Once compiled, installing it to boot was another learning experience of considerable complexity. But stubbornness pays. Ultimately I had a booting system. Of course there wasn't much to run on it. But that changed rapidly and I was able to download and install Slackware binaries shortly. Red Hat seemed to be kind of cranky at the time, and Debian never worked for me, and I never did find out why. Within another ten(!!!) years it was my default OS on my own computers, and I used to enjoy switching between Mandrake, SuSE, and Redhat (Debian was still pissy for some reason on my systems).

Even though people say something such as "Once you Slack, you never go back", the first Linux "distro." I tried was Slackware, long, long, long, ago; the very early days. It had all sorts of problems on the particular machine I was using. Instead, I bought from a store, in a box, the "Professional Version" of SUSE, and didn't have any problems on the same hardware.

As I learned more, I realized it might well just be a difference in what hardware was supported.