The CD set is dated March 1995 (images attached), but I don't remember if I bought it in 1995 or 1996. Used Slackware, various other Linux distributions and windoze-whatever, off and on for a while, but somewhere along the line decided to stick with Slackware.
Still have a 1st edition of "Running Linux". It was a great help during those early days.

Attached Thumbnails

       

7 members found this post helpful.

Relative newbie here, I installed Slackware 14.1 on the 21st July 2014 according to my own private changelog.

I did use ZipSlack back in the day to play with this thing called bash and another thing called emacs.

1 members found this post helpful.

Probably somewhere around version 2-something. I remember the brouhaha around jumping from version 4 to version 7. (Too many people confusing Slackware and other distributions version numbers with kernel version numbers.)

I still have a couple of archaic sets of CDs from InfoMagic - Linux Developer's Resource - that include Slackware 2.3 and 3.0.

Somewhere along the line I stopped dual-booting the same hardware between Windows and Linux. For a while I used my old Windows computer for Linux after each new Windows machine, but eventually I decided that Linux deserved its own new hardware and now my Linux hardware is usually the one that receives the benefits of new purchases.

It was 1999 for me. I gravitated to Linux, actually for a few months Mandrake Linux from OS/2 based on my experience using an Enlightenment WM thanks to emx runtimes and the advice of a few guys in the local User OS2UG. From there I spent a lot of time learning Linux on IRC channels. In the most 1337 channel, after a completer bork job after a --dist-upgrade in Mandrake I asked what everyone else was using and a handful of the top dogs (shout outs to uf0dZiner, alphageek and Amrit) said Slackware, because "stuff just builds right". They were spot on.

1 members found this post helpful.

I wish I'd got interested in messing about on computers sooner. Only "discovered" them in 2002 at the age of 57.
Slackware was the first distro I installed, dual-booting with XP Pro until its last EOL.

3 members found this post helpful.

Happily using Slackware (stable) Linux since fairly recently, 2012.

1 members found this post helpful.

yes

dual booted coherent/windows, dumped all those diskettes long ago, windows too

top lines in attached disc ChangeLog.txt

Attached Thumbnails

 

2 members found this post helpful.

Slackware 8.1 so pretty long time ago

Slackware 8.x it might have been? I seem to remember alot of floppy disks. The oldest media I have right now is a CD I made that says "Slackware 10" on it, with the little circle "S" Slackware logo drawn on in pencil. I have the date "11/21/03" still in my /etc/issue file so it was ending 2003. I got tired of Windows ME, with all its crashing, and phone-homing, and the feeling that Microsoft was in control of my machine and not me so I decided on Linux, Slackware, by chance. I wiped Windows, installed Slackware, then found out I didn't have the complete install. Setting up a PPP connection was beyond me at the time, as a brand-new Linux user, so I had to re-install Windows, get what I missed, then go back and try again. Of all the networking connections I've done since, PPP was probably the worst to set up. I never did get all those supposedly "easy to use" GUIs working and had to edit pppd's config files by hand. Talk about learning to swim in the deep end.

Briefly I left and went to LFS and did the whole "build your own" thing, but after getting a new machine I didn't want to rebuild everything from scratch again and so I remembered Slackware.

Another fun question would be, do you remember the first big problem you had to over come when you first used Slackware/Linux? I remember mine clearly even though it was over 20 years ago. It was relatively easy getting X going but once I booted into the windows manager all the fonts were like 1pt size. Being that small the WM was completely unusable, I vaguely remember what the program was to fix this. I want to say it was something like "ttmkdfdir" or something like that. I remember it taking me days to figure that out.

1 members found this post helpful.

1997 - Slackware 3.0, kernel 1.3.18. From a CD included in a Simon & Schuster Macmillan Linux book.

I mostly remember XFree86 being quite slow and unstable on my 486-based home PC...

Since 2003, I think – around the time Slackware 8.1 was out. First as dual-boot with Windows XP, and then as my only system since mid-2006 (by then it must have been Slackware 10.1 or 10.2)

I started with Slackware 3.0 1995. Back then it was deliverd on a CDROM, but machines were not capable of booting from CDROM so you had to create a boot floppy with the kernel and a root floppy with the initrd to install the system.

If I remember right I used loadlin as a bootloader then and ended up not only with a dual boot system with my Windows 3.11 installation but a triple boot system when I also installed Windows 95. To my surprise Slackware played along better with the existing Windows 3.11 installation and could share partitions with Windows without any problem. Windows 95 messed things up for the Windows 3.11 installation with its new vfat features and caused applications like Norton disk defragmenter to no longer work.

I soon found out that triple or even dual booting was not the way to go, having to reboot your machine to run another application was not very nice. I decided on one OS and it was an easy decision to choose Slackware and ditch the Windows versions.

If I do remember my first big problem? Yes, that was at work with Slackware 3.0 or maybe 3.1. For some reason I thought that it would be a good idea to update glibc on those installations. Things seemed to work fine until people complained that they were unable to login. Somehow the new glibc had broken NIS... Fortunately I was able to rather quickly install the old glibc version again.

My first small problem was the fact that I took the time to choose among all packages during my first installation. One of the packages I didn't think I would need was some kind of text formatting application called groff. It then turned out that it was not possible to read man-pages. Since then I have allways done full installs of Slackware.

regards Henrik

I should add, not only did I have to learn Linux itself, and set up a PPP connection, but it was a winmodem on top of that. If you don't know what that is consider yourself lucky. Setting up X11 was not fun either. Mode lines, depth, X, Y hold something...something...card chipset...be careful not to blow up your monitor. Good old XFree86.

Relative Slackware newbie here, been using it since 2017. When I first joined LQ, I detailed my experience here: How I came to Slackware.

5 members found this post helpful.