OStatic

My first experience with Linux was *WAY* back in the early '90s with a distribution called Yggdrasil. I got it from a book called the The Linux Bible and it was an interesting experience at that time, though there was no immediate value for me since the work I was doing was Windows based. It was nice to tinker with though.

In my case, it was when I was back fro a 4-month assignment to a regional office of my employer. This was back in September 97. High-speed internet was starting in my area, and I wanted something that could let me share my internet connection, without any more costs. There were some shareware solutions, under Windows, but I did not like them. I started using RedHat Linux 6.02, with the kernel 2.0.36. How the heck do I remember this ? I could not say. That was back on a Pentium I, 75 MHz and a small hard disk. I was still doing beta testing of Windows 98, and that was the last beta from Microsoft I ever spent time on.

I got hooked by the open aspect of Linux, and its easy network connection. Back then, I was not even thinking about using a graphical user interface. Graphic stuff was under Windows. Real things happen at the console. Real nerds don't need menus.

Three years later, I met my first girlfriend. Since I was completely nerd, and had absolutely no experience with women, she was the one who went ahead with this relationship. I was 35.

I'm still married with her, we have a beautiful 7-year old boy. I'm trying to teach him nerdy stuff. He enjoys any TV program about machines, technology, computers, etc. My wife hopes that he will have a first girlfriend more in the early 20's, than the mid 30's as I did. She uses Windows Vista, I'm hooked on Ubuntu. She uses one PC, I have three Linux machines. If I'm lucky, I will get my father-in-law on Linux by the end of the year. One of my nephew is already interested in Linux.

Debian. Was supposed to be Red Hat, but we went with Debian at the lab. Fall 1997. All the machines were named after hats too, but then we ended up going with Debian!

Thanks for sharing, everyone! It is sort of odd what sticks in your brain and what doesn't... All the little details of "important" life events tend to get fuzzy, and the ones you'd think were minor -- not so much. I can't remember the first time I used Windows. I know it was 3.1 and involved getting the GUI going at the command line. I remember my Commodore Vic 20, and my utter fascination with my elementary school's Commodore PET (and of rushing through my math work to get the chance to die gleefully of dysentery on the Oregon Trail...) I think my start with Linux stayed with me because, quickly, I realized I was able to think about and work through things in a way I never thought I could. It's not so crucial to have the desire to roll up your sleeves and delve into the system's entrails anymore, but that's great, too: If you don't want to, you don't need to, but you still CAN if it floats your boat.

I stuck with the second operating system I got involved with, and I'm pushing my 13th wedding anniversary with my husband -- the second guy I dated (the last guy I dated, too, incidentally). I've never owned a Mac -- I am finding in my life, second time is definitely the charm.

Thanks for sharing!

My first Linux experience was when in undergrad me and a bunch of my friends did an internship in a Robotics company in India where we learnt that almost all robots run Linux. We were all Windows users till then and were so clumsy at the terminal that our supervisor used to laugh at us in sheer disgust. But he taught us all the nitty gritties of becoming a true Linux nerd and 5 years later I can even modify kernel source code if I need to for my robots.

This article really made me nostalgic and reminiscent of a great time in my life.

Linux 0.99pl14 with a slackware install on floppies back in 1994. I installed it on 4 Gateway Pentium-90s and started my ISP. I now have 100+ linux servers running RHEL, Fedora, CentOS. 2 Windows servers in my network and those are gonna die soon.

OS X on my desktop though!

In the fall of 1995, a bunch of friends from school were passing 30 or so floppy disks that comprised the Slackware 0.84a distribution. I installed it in a dual boot mode on my new 66MHz Pentium. I was amazed that it was free given that it came with a full version of the GNU development environment including gcc, make, and ld as well as X Windows. What was even more amazing was that I could do all of this from the comfort of my apartment without having to connect to the campus DEC Stations.

My thesis partners and I ended up using it to successfully develop about 20,000 lines of code for a crypto protocol stack. It's been almost 14 years since my first install but ever since then I couldn't imagine life without Linux.

Easy to remember the install, less so the exact date!

Being a NT guy then, around 1997 I needed SMB filesharing with more than 10 clients and some tricky routing for a branch office project. MS Licenses would have cost a fortune, Cisco routers were by far out of our financial reach (I mean it: by very far).

I was a command line freak anywway - when a Redhat tryout-CD popped out of some magazine, I booted some 90MHz Pentium with it. 48 sleepless hours later I had my SMB server and my routing - early 2.2 Kernel days, I still remember searching for the ipfwadm tool on Alta Vista.

I had been using unix at work for several years when I encountered my first linux installation disk in 1996. It was slackware on a CD, bought at a computer show. I installed it on an 8-MB machine with a long series of text-based questions.

When I had finished, the machine ground the CD drive for a while, then displayed a short message endinng with "Have fun." and a root hash ("#") prompt. Up 'til that time, when I was sitting at the root prompt, I was always nervous, since a single mistake on my part could send 10 or more users screaming to my desk and my boss about the loss of their applications. I realized then that I could do *anything* to this machine, and the worst that could happen was that I'd have to re-install -- and I'd already done one installation. It was extraordinarily liberating.

I did a bunch of C development on that machine, which was so small that I couldn't actually run gcc and emacs on it at the same time. What also struck me was that when I ran out of resources, the OS would politely put its hand up and say "You need to kill something..." The stuff I was using elsewhere at the time would simply fall over and die without warning. I was really impressed.

Nowdays I don't know anything about winders or OS/X; I'm pretty much all linux all the time.

My first experience was in 2002 with Ubuntu. I had started getting a little more interested in computers at the time and I had read something about Linux and how it was getting easier to use for 'average' users. I took a chance and installed it on my second drive that wasn't being used. In the end though, the second drive still wasn't being used because I accidentally overwrote my Windows partition. I give myself some slack though because it was my first OS install. At least Windows ran faster after I reinstalled it. :-)

It took a while to figure out how to get my graphics working (I too had the Radeon driver issues) but then it worked great afterward. Now I use Linux just as much as Windows.

Compiled a small C app. Back in 96, or was it 97.

My very first Linux experience was in 2002-ish, on a university-brew red-hat distro, where in my very first Computer Science class my first assignment was to send an email to the professor using Pine....

Just the first of many joyful command line afternoons. And evenings. And not-so-joyful-freakin-in-the-middle-of-the-nights. Now I spend most of my time working in various Linux-based environments.

If I recall correctly, my very first Linux installation was... RedHat 5.2 with FVWM (the Windows95-like one), in the early days of my teens. But, and I'll be honest, it was only to use something that was branded as "not windows", though it gave way to passion, configuration, MUCHO geekness and overkill configuration - Hey, I had a gentoo that was so "optimised" that I had circular dependancies at the "emerge -Nuv system" level, that is NOT good for the brain, I assure you.

I started with redhat 5.2 in mid 1999. My parents had just purchased a new computer and gave me the old 486 to play with. I had seen a display of linux books at a local book store and my mom bought one for me. I went home, installed it on the machine (a cd was included with the book). Most people complain about the install process, but it went fairly smoothly for me. The graphics card was the hardest part to get working, but after some tinkering I got a working X server. Then I got online with the 14.4 modem. I never used windows again after that. I was 12 years old.

I'm still on fedora. It is really amazing to see the progress of desktop linux from that far back.

1994, 30 floppies of slackware, Gateway P90, and a race/bet with a friend to see who could get X installed and correctly configured and loaded. I won :-) Have never looked back and have been running some flavor of linux as my only OS since.

My first experience with linux was OpenLinux 1.1. I actually bought a copy too. I ran it on my old cyrix 90MHZ. I soon moved to Redhat after that.

I started a job at an ISP doing tech support and was given a login on a shared redhat machine and a copy of putty for the purpose of performing diagnostics using the terminal. I think the first thing I ever did was a whois lookup.. I didn't even know it was linux until I'd used it for a few days. Now I use it exclusively.

SoftLands Linux, downloaded over a 2400 baud modem. Written onto three 1.44mb floppies from DOS, and installed on a 386 /w 100MB HDD. It wasnt long before i had a Cyclades 8 port serial card and some old wyse terminals hanging off it. This was mid 90's

High school -- I started with Corel Linux on my first computer in 1999. I asked my neighbour about this Linux thing, he lent me the Corel disk and said he didn't want to hear any questions about it. I credit him with forcing me to do my own research and learning how to RTFM.

I broke things pretty quickly, but as a tinkerer and someone who tries new distributions when they come out, I think that's a good thing. Still a Debian fan to this day though (and Corel was a Debian derivative).

I do remember my first linux... I had Mandrake 6.5, and I couldnt get it to work no matter how hard I tried.. so I dropped that quick.... Corell Linux was really my first love.. it got me hooked. Easy to install, quick.. KDE 2 was flexible as it always was... Not only that it came w/ wordperfect which was a great program. Later I moved on to SuSE for years (at least 4). SuSE lost it's appeal, especially when I found out it was sleeping with microsoft. I wasn't going to be promiscous no matter how much fun SuSE was. I moved on to Ubuntu... The simplicity... It was easy, it worked well, didn't let you change much because you didn't have to! It was simple and it worked! My job created this double life of Ubuntu and Red Hat, I didn't want the two to know about one another so I began to live a dual life, I wasn't proud of it. Red Hat brought the money in, and I kept Ubuntu around for fun. I look back though at the high maintence distros in my past and still miss those days..

my first was ubuntu...

I remember at that time I was using CP/M & Unix at work, and running CP/M on a Commodore 128 at home. I knew at that time that CP/M was on it's death bed and I could not use Unix for my personal use because of the price.

I built a 386 with 8 megs of ram and no OS, so I went looking for a free version of Unix and found Linux.

I downloaded the Linux kernel in ver. 0.11 in 1991, and went to work on building myself a operating system based the linux kernel.

I have been a Linux fan ever since.

For those people who don't remember the 386, When I would compile the kernel, I would go 3 wheeler riding for 2 or 3 hours.

Later

I had some experience with SunOS at the University as a student (it was even before Solaris :-)) ). I was very intrigued when I heard that I could run Unix at home using something called Linux.

My first experience was also with Yggdrasil, a distro called "Plug and Play Linux". Those were the days where "Plug and Play" was all the rage :-)

Needless to say, the installation was anything but "plug and play". I ended up losing my entire DOS/Win3.1 partition and reformatting everything. Anyway, it was so cool when I got my first bash prompt! I clearly remember the first command I issued and it was "man ls" :-)))))

Since then (1993 I guess), every machine I've owned has had a Linux-dedicated hard drive

Tks for the trip down memory lane!

Carlos

Slackware 1.1.1 with Kernel 0.99pl14 on a 486DX with 16MB RAM back in 1994! Wanted to see how this compared to DEC Ultrix and VAX/VMS. Ended up using Linux as a cheap X-terminal for running Motif applications from Ultrix and VMS hosts.- we hired some temp staff for data entry and didn't have enough RISC workstations which cost a fortune back in those days.

I remember being really happy when the first Walnut Creek CD ROM kits were released which gave me an opportunity to compare Slackware with RedHat and Debian. Was a big RedHat fan until they did the Enterprise Linux thing and then switched to Debian.

cheers

In my case I wanted to create a home media centre. I was allready aquinted with X, linux and Unix from School and work and thought that MythTv on Debian was the way to go for me. I did not really do that much with that media centre and I also found that it took to a lot of work to do even basic things. I had done a very lean Debian installation so I needed to install even basic things like dhcp on my own and at several occasions I needed to rebuild the kernel to add support for new services. Probably not the most beginner friendly introduction to Linux. Anyhow, at some point my laptop just got to slow to run Windows comfortably. I did some research and found out that there was a new distribution of Linux out there that was gaining a lot of momentum. It was supposed to be clean, very feature rich and user friendly. I throw an eye at my media centre, hooked it up to a monitor and installed Ubuntu 4.10, Warty Warthog. I was in love from the first moment. I have used Ubuntu now for four years and I have not build my own kernel even once in this time.

I think my experience with Linux was in 1995 when I was just 15 with Slackware. It was hard to install. I had to download all these disks (overnight) I think I used mget on FTP and it would take quite a few nights. At the time each package was separated into disks. Then I installed from my hard drive. I don't remember a lot except it was a pain. But eventually it worked and while I liked the shell I couldn't get the internet to work because I had an IBM Thinkpad 755 CD which had a win modem. Then I got an external modem. I remember some of them would not work with linux so I had to return 2 or 3. Then that thinkpad had a winmodem (the mwave) that was also the sound card. That required a fight to get the sound to work. Finally everything worked.

After that I had an on again off again relationship with Linux. Every once in a while I would try to switch to it, then I'd go back to windows. In particular the sound card though it worked sounded nowhere near as good as it did with the windows drivers. Also most of the games worked better on windows than dosemu. I did like the compilers though, but I can't remember if Cygwin came out around that time. Once I had Cygwin installed on windows the compiler argument was mostly gone.

Then through the years I would go back and forth. Often software on Linux ran much slower than the windows versions. Microsoft Office considering how bloated it was ran pretty fast, even on a 486 dx4 100. Also games/multimedia were often better on windows. The linux video players were often choppy and difficult to use. Now I mostly use windows but my laptop dual boots to Linux. The new distributions are much easier than Slackware. I would always have to fight with Slackware to get it to work. Changing all sorts of configuration files, custom building the kernel to get this or that hardware to work, etc... Lately with Ubuntu and even Fedora the installation just works and finds all my Hardware. So Linux has definitely made some great strides....it still has more work to go though. I still prefer Microsoft Office to Open Office (it runs slow for me even on my Core 2 Duo). And now there are some good video players, but you still have to go codec hunting and they still are harder to use than windows media player. But Linux is coming along. One day I may try to switch again. However Mac OS/X is also tempting....But it's not Free and you have to keep going to Steve Jobs for a lot of stuff.

SLS then Slackware using a 0.9 kernel off floppies

My first was Mini-Linux (kernel 1.09), I think it was 1996 or so. On a 20 MHz 386 with 2 MB of RAM. Think I had a 80 MB hard disk. It installed from 4 floppies that had a couple of giant (at the time) spaned zip files. You called up loadlin from a batch file in DOS to get it started.

I spent some time getting it networked to my DOS machine (NE1000 cards) so that I could use my ham radio packet program (various NOS) from Linux. Ham radio NOS programs were(and still are) modeled after UNIX, so it was not all that hard to get used to the most basic functions. I did however, take a "Introduction to UNIX" class at the local tech school to get myself used to the new world (having come from the world of Commodore 64s and MS-DOS).

I was amazed at the speed, and remember editing files with vi. No X at that time. I had the ability to use Windows 3.11 when I needed a GUI, which I used for free Juno E-Mail, but not much else (3.x was not very stable). Mini-Linux came set up for a specific graphics card, which I did not have, and therefore did not have X going on it. One of my friends had complete internet access, and used to drop me various Linux software on reformatted AOL floppies!

Only when I moved on to Caldera Open Linux Lite did I have a working X desktop (with FVWM). Then it was Red Hat 5.2, 5.3, 6.0, 7.3, 8 and finally 9. I went on to various Slackware versions. Have installed Ubuntu on friends' computers and have messed with other distros. Slackware seems to be the one that gives me the most flexibility and ability to customize things to my liking.

I still have some floppies with files from my first dive into the world of the 2.0 kernel. I do have one floppy marked "Mini-Linux", but apparently it got overwritten with something else.

Those were the days!

Well, my first experience was with turbolinux 3. I was trying to come up with a solution to replace my NT machine at my own ISP. I remember being exited about getting it set up when a friend who knew linux called me with my root password. Seems I didn't know I had to encrypt the passwd file. I then switched over to FreeBSD 2.2.2. Seemed easier for me to bungle through. Funny thing is that FreeBSD 7 is almost the same install while Linux has grown leaps and bounds. I love being able to apt-get this and that!

It was either 98 or 99. I got a copy of redhat 4 on CD from some dude at the tech college I was at. I installed it on my Pentium 166. I remember it installing, the color palette was all jacked up, half the hardware didn't work right. I had no idea how to make the hardware work. I tried a few applications. was unimpressed and installed windows 98.

I've mostly used windows since, but about every year or so I installed a distro just to see how it progressed. I'd say Ubuntu is the best distro for me so far. I used it exclusively for 6 months last year until I got tired of crappy performance for my games in wine. My desktop now has XP-64 on it, and my laptop has Ubuntu, but I don't use the laptop much.

I think I started around Redhat 4 and a 2.0.X kernel. I had an ISDN connection at the time (mid '90s) and I thought I was hot stuff with my blazing 128k speed, but I wanted to share it on my LAN. At the time there was Windows NT 4.0 with Microsoft Proxy Server floating around which was just BAD.

But I read about a neat tool called ipfwadm (you know, that utility before iptables and before ipchains?) and something called Linux. This sounded like it was going to be my answer. Once I found I could also play games like Doom and Quake from linux, I've never looked back since.

My first experience with Linux was in 1999. Not a very pleasant one, since I was living in a third world country with a very limited internet connection at 28k. I bought a book (in Spanish) about Linux and it came with a CD with a Slackware distro. The first thing I did was try to configure my graphic card and my monitor.... It was not pleasant but when I finally got linux to work I felt ... FREE.

My first experience with Linux was Mandrake (Mandriva). I installed it alongside Windows 95 and soon after decided to build a dedicated box. I had a few hiccups at first Midnight Commander made my life alot easier but I soon ironed out most of my problems and if asked today what i prefer I have become an Ubuntu fan simply because of popularity and ease of use. I have two computers running Ubuntu Jaunty and an Intel Mac and a Windows XP and a Windows 7 computer. I feel to be a good technician and well rounded you really need to experience all the different flavors.

My first Linux was Suse 5.something from a Personal Computer World cover CD. However, the real thing for me was Suse 6.2 I bought next year, because of the printed 400 page manual included.

Don't tell anyone, but I still have a leaf from that manual in my wallet. Pages 381-382. Why? They are the vi manual pages :-)

I did a lot of 3D modeling and related raytracing back in 1994 using a DOS port of a UNIX command line raytracer called "Rayshade" (look this up from Google to know more). It worked fine on DOS but locked the non-multitasking machine for 3 days for exclusive computation when rendering hi-resolution final images (even drafts could take hours on the the 486DX I was running).

My roommate had already been pushing me to Linux for a while, so I gave up and let him advocate his thing and welcomed Slackware on my machine (don't remember version, but kernel was 0.98XX those days). I luckily had some good UNIX background from univ. studies, so learning to compile static modules into kernel for new devices (network cards ...) was a breeze and the later introduction of "menuconfig" was a usability heaven for us kernel tinkerers.

Been running Linux exclusively for my own purposes since 1994 with Slackware followed by Debian, RedHat and finally Ubuntu (which seems to stick with me).

I sometimes kept Windows variants (XP, Vista) shipped with laptop (multi-booting to linux), but never had a machine without Linux.

Now that shockwave and flash works okay on Linux even my wife and kids are using Ubuntu full time.

Thanks for putting out such an interesting quest out !

My first encounter with Linux was probably about 1993.

I had using the Internet though a Unix-machine (by modem through a BBS) and was fascinated by Unix and multitasking. So of course I wanted to have it running on my own machine. My father worked as a professor in a university here in Finland and I asked him if he could get a hold a Linux, since I heard it was free. Within a week I had a 2 disk (1.44M 3.5") booting Linux system, which run on my 386.

I didn't use it that much then, because it didn't include that much utilities and I couldn't connect anywhere. Later I installed the Slackware distro, which I started using as my main OS.

Slackware 2 or 3 back around 96 or 97.

On a screaming fast AMD 233Mhz IBM Aptiva.

Never did get past the command line....

That began a long term story of me improving my skills and linux getting easier, up to the point where I ran diskless linux computers for a distributed computing project.

And Windows XP came out and thoroughly disgusted me, who had a long history of LIKING Windows versions- 3.11, NT4, Win2K, they were all pretty good. (Note I do not mention 95, 98 or ME...)

I quit playing around and removed Windows from my desktops, servers and everything else over the next few months.

I still don't "code", but I do install some form of *nix on everything I can get my hands on:

PDAs

iPods

HP Mini netbook

Laptops

Even my car has a linux computer built into it now.

I still remember my early frustrations with Linux though- trying to puzzle my way through learning how in HELL to run cli text editors to get xorg running and not burn out my monitor...

We've come a long way since then.

My first distro was AT&T SVR2 on a 386DX-40 with 4 megs (no, not gigs) of ram and a 40mb (no, not gigs) hard drive. I bought this system in 1989 if I recall correctly. The thing I did most was play hack, and later nethack.

I think my first actual Linux distro was Redhat, I also used SuSE, and am now on Ubuntu.

I've always maintained a Windows installation because I had to for work, first dual boot and now as a VM, but I've fortunately had to resort to it less and less as time goes on. Pretty much all I do now is run IE for website testing.

1994, Slackware 1.2 maybe

I can't say whether I have regretted ever trying it or not. I used to switch back and forth from windows to linux quite a bit. I wasted time I could have been studying. Making A's. I could have had a 4.0 gpa. Graduated with a 2.6. Bulked up more. Played more sports.

Those were tough times. There was no internet, just Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). $400 phone bills. I regret that. I wasn't the best son to my parents.

When I loaded my parents' machine this time I put XP on it.

Why make them suffer? My kids enjoy old games. The installers work just fine in WinXP.

Linux hasn't changed much since 1994. I commend Shuttleworth for taking the lead and trying to changed things. But there are several areas where improvement is needed. Windows 2000, 98, 95 could detect hardware years before linux had any solution. Simply because the guys that new how to do it didn't like it. The unix way. The slack way.

I sacrificed alot to live the dream. But its really just a lie. There is no glory to the torture you endure just to say you use linux. I'm no better of a person for it. How man people can do regex search replaces in Vi? When control H in notepad is just as good :)

The true war was making Microsoft see the error of their ways. In some way or form this has happend. They give away alot of stuff. Do enough evil for a long enough time and even you will become sick of it. Want to write a game, XNA? Free.

Slackware, Sasteroids.. fond memories. But the flood of pain comes back.

Can I say I've learned alot from Linux? Sure. Maybe. But I let my Children choose their own path. A tool is a tool.

T'was Fall of 1997. I'd tried FreeBSD the year before in my 1st year of college, but downloading the floppies over a 14.4k modem for my 486 wasn't cutting it - I never got X working ;)

My 2nd year a kind soul gave me a Redhat 5.x CD, and that was ok, but GCC wouldn't compile properly on my new Cyrix system.

Finally, my 3rd year, I had a K6-300, and Redhat 6, and it was fun. Then I started taking C programming, and it was either screw up my code, freeze Windows '95, and reboot, or do it in Linux and get "Segmentation fault" in the terminal window. That was part 1. Part II was when Windows started freezing constantly (except when running Winamp) and I was forced to do everything in Linux. Even the Windows installer froze.

Turns out my CPU fan had died. But I ran that box for at least 2 weeks before I found out :D

Over a decade later, and I'm still using Linux as my main OS... Just upgraded from Hardy Heron to Jaunty Jackalope this morning :D

Geez I'm old.

SLS, in the fall of 1992, while in college. Downloaded to 5.25" floppies from sunsite in the computer lab with a fast connection.

It was such a huge improvement over DOS + Telix connected to a shared XENIX machine that I never looked back. I think that I slept 6 hours over the course of three days as I got X working (on a Trident card, connected to an interlaced monitor), the kernel rebuilt (no modules yet, so running on limited resources meant removing any driver that wasn't useful), and pine, tin and Mosaic compiled.

I've had at least one machine running Linux ever since.

My first distro was SLS (Soft Landing Systems) Linux. This was before my modem could download at 9600 baud, so it turned out to be easier to buy a copy from the company.

It was a nice in that you can load different sets of floppies depending on what you wanted to do. So - if you didn't have the bandwidth to download all the X stuff (which I didn't) you could skip that series of disks altogether but still have a fairly useful os (text mode only).

Unfortunately, while the core kernel was fairly decent - X was rather buggy. I ended up skipping Slackware and came back to Linux once RedHat started to become prevalent and X11 matured.

My first experience was with either Mandrake or Red Hat in the fall of 1998 (I don't remember which was first because I then immediately switched to the other and then moved to a CLI Debian build), running KDE as the X-Windows interface. I was almost 16, and my boyfriend at the time was a total super-genius who convinced me to help him subvert one of the computer programming lab IBM desktops. Shockingly, our only punishment was to reinstall Windows 95 and reset the Netware settings after school. Jonathan had Debian running on a POS Cyrix (remember Cyrix, the company that tried to be like AMD, but with absolutely no quality control?) 333 in his basement and we used to hack around on it after school.

I put Red Hat on the family computer (after backing up everything to a Jazz drive first), but got screamed at and had to put Windows 95 back almost immediately. The computer I got for Christmas 1998 was heavily built-around multimedia and video editing (I had Premiere 5 and an expensive analog to digital converter card that cost almost as much as the computer system), so my Linux exploits were mostly limited to friends computers, old machines or random hacking projects. From the beginning, I found myself drawn to using it to manage networks of computers or as a web server, not as my primary desktop OS.

I've continued to use Linux off and on since 1998, but almost all of my use has been on the server and not on the desktop. I had the first public Ubuntu release on my laptop for a few months back in early 2005, but ended up having to go back to XP after Open Office fubarred my Excel files and made it impossible for me to do group work in my accounting classes. I switched to Mac in 2007 and am fully committed to using that as my desktop OS. I do have FreeNAS (FreeBSD based) on our home media server and all my web-dev boxes run some form of Linux (CentOS or Debian), with the exception of my XServe slice which naturally runs Mac OS X Leopard Server.

My first Linux attempt was not very memorable; it was some small floppy disk set in late 1993, pre-SLS (was there something out of one of Texas universities?), and I was able to download it (very slowly - my internet connection was via a VM/CMS system and I had to first FTP disks to my VM/CMS account and then download them via kermit (or zmodem?) to my then laptop or desktop. I recall downloading it, figuring out how to boot up off the disk and then go "now what?" and was absolutely baffled by the instructions on how to install it. Ditto on 386BSD which I tried downloading sometime around then.

Shortly thereafter someone on USENET turned me on to SLS, which I got installed on one of the machines at my high school computer lab much more easily, and I've been a Linux user ever since.

In March of 1989, i bought a 286 PC, 2MB of RAM and 60 MB harddisc

to install microport unix 8-) I was doing Ultrix sysadmining at the university

at that time. The first free unix was some early 386bsd around 1990 or so.

Linux was always used in parallel, some very early 0.1x version. One guy

at the university was even doing his own unix: nilix 8-)

My first linux install must have been when I was 13 or 14 and wanting to learn to code MUDs... I think it was some version of Linux Mandrake orginally, followed shortly by Redhat & Slackware (my favorite till I tried Ubuntu 2.5 years ago and never looked back). It was more of a hobby and an interesting thing to play with for a long time... then a couple years ago I once again accidentally deleted my windows install while messing with Ubuntu 6.10 and decided I might as well give it a good go... and have been happy as a clam with it ever since (I just upgraded to 9.04 last night;)

My first installs were back in the early 90's. I recall something like 0.93 patch level alpha and I had it on 5.25" floppies. I was working at Bell Labs at the time and my first system that I built was a 386/20. Linux ran beautifully on it! I used Slackware as well and even printed labels for the 3.5" floppies. Waiting for the next kernel patch was awesome!!!

Many years later on some version of Wine, I had a slip connection from home to work and I played a game of solitare over that 9.6k modem just because :)

Slackware, '95 or '96. The first thing to do, after initially exploring the filesystem (color ls! Wow!) was to get a 'net connection going, of course.

Slackware 2.20. I couldn't do a full install because my hd was broken, but booted from the floppy and was amazed with the boot log. I decided that someday I would use Linux.

My first distribution was Slackware 3.2, a four CD offering at that time. I wanted to link my computer to the local ham radio tcp/ip network on 2 meters. I did just that, and learned quite a bit.

Then I took a C++ programming class and would not pay big dollars for a Borland C++ compiler just to do my home work. Linux had a GUI C++ compiler that was just as good. I got an A+ in the class.

After a long spell away from Linux, I’m back to Slackware now 12.2. Xubuntu is pretty cool too, but I still prefer the versatility of my Slack machine. And I'm willing to spend the time making it right.

My freshman year of high school; I had a brand new Compaq with a 160GB hard drive, a 3GHz Pentium 4 with hyperthreading, 512MB of RAM, and Windows XP. I had been looking at Linux for a little while already, but now that I had my own computer I decided to give it a try. So I downloaded Fedora Core 1, which was brand new at the time, and installed it on a 10GB chunk of my hard drive. I genuinely enjoyed it, it looked and felt cool; but then when I went to reboot back into Windows to play a game, I realized I had managed to nuke the entirety of Windows from the hard drive. At the time I had no knowledge of partitions (the same can't be said now; I've repartitioned some of my hard drives so many times I'm amazed I haven't worn them out yet), and the Compaq only came with a "recovery partition" that I burned onto "recovery discs" but that somehow refused to work, so my mom and I ended up paying a tech support guy to install a clean copy of XP on it.

Of course, I wanted to get right back into Linux, so I took the old 10GB hard drive from my mom's computer that had been replaced by a 40GB drive, put it in my machine and installed it, and have always had an available Linux installation since. My mom's been a little anxious of Linux since then though, but I think she's used to it now that that same computer is my 13-year-old brother's and is running Ubuntu.

My first linux install was RedHat 6.0 - I saw it in Fry's and wanted to try it out because I had some sort of vague notion that in order to be a 1337 h4x0r I needed to use Linux.

Of course, I also needed a system that I could compile exploits on - I sat around on that machine as root and would throw exploits from rootshell at it. Fortunately, Redhat 6.0 had no shortage of remotely exploitable root vulnerabilities. If I hadn't already been running the exploits as root, I might have succeeded, or more accurately, noticed succeeding at compromising my own machine.

My first experience with Linux was in 1994. A guy at work (a consulting company in NYC) thought it was extremely important to get Linux on one of our machines because he believed we would be able to use it to run high-end analytical applications. It never occurred to him that the machine might just not be up to the task.

He took one try at it and gave up. He then asked me to do it and handed me some 3.5 inch diskettes. I think it was only two or possibly three diskettes. It took me awhile and several visits to various online forums to figure it out, but I had it running by the end of the week.

I thought it was pretty cool that Torvalds had accomplished so much, but I wasn't particularly impressed with the capability of Linux 1.whatever. I was big into OS/2 at the time. Needless to say, we never did get any high-end analytical applications running on that machine.

About three years later I was tasked with installing and evaluating SolarisX86. That experience kind of sold me on *nix even though I wasn't all that impressed with SolarisX86. A while later someone gave me some RedHat CDs and suggested I give it a try. This time I was impressed. I was still big into OS/2 (I just never got past my frustration with Windows95),

By the end of 1999 I was 100% Linux on every machine I owned. RedHat for a while, but I was disappointed with the performance. I also tried SUSE and Mandrake (now Mandriva) and liked them, but wanted more access to the innards, so I settled on Gentoo in 2002 (rhyme unintended) and have stayed there ever since, despite some issues. I seduced my wife into using Kubuntu by building her a new machine (in that respect, at least, I am a stud) and she now wants nothing to do with Windows.

The first thing I did was to dig out the manual for the monitor and carefully edit the X11 config file to get X working. There was a line in the instructions at the time explaining that an error in the configuration file could destroy my $700 17inch CRT monitor. It took a few days to get X working, and then I tackle the printcap files. And then finally after configuring the modem, ppp and slip I finally got to work....

First downloaded SLS (before Slackware!) in '91-'92 (kernel 0.99 something or other). I saw Linus' famous first post before that - and followed it with interest (was considering buying SCO Unix for 386 at the time, after using HPUX on a University system for a year and a bit). Installed it on a 386 first. Didn't take very many floppies, and was in the enviable situation of downloading it at a University (fast - yay!)

I tried at the time to write a SCSI driver for a tape drive, but gave up eventually, as everyone else was moving too fast and I was still wet behind the ears. I remember even getting personal email from Linus at the time.

Started playing with it more seriously during '93 while working at IBM (but in my spare time - for work used VM/CMS and AIX). After a brief fling with Windows '95 and NT 3.51/4.0 (shock, horror) , I haven't looked back, and am quite monogamous - hmm... though Opensolaris and ZFS in particular is quite the temptress... come on BTRFS.

My memory's a bit vague of the first time with Linux - I do remember meeting both my first girlfriend and my current long term partner better than that... shucks, can't be a real geek, despite the odd spot of (successful but unused in the end) kernel module development since my first attempts! :-(

Slakckware, early 90,s. Tried to figure out how to recompile the kernel to add CD support. I did it too!! I have used Linux on and off since then. My main machine at home is Ubuntu and I have an OpenSuse file server. My netbook is using Easy Peasy (which is very good). I have also been acting as a "virus" making sure that every where I work at least tries Linux. Interestingly the biggest enemy to Linux in my experience is "IT Support" people. They are not interested in anything different even if it solves lots of problems. NS is the "way". The best thing to happen in the Linux world. The fading away of the snobs who would flame you if you asked a reasonable newbie question. Thanks Linus and the unsung thousands who have made Linux so good. I have some reason to be happy when I turn on a PC - even if it was dfficult in the ealry days.

My first Linux installation was going to be Mandrake 7.2, but the computer's cd-rom didn't work. So I settled on Slackware 7 which I could install because of a long process of downloading the many zip files off an AOL connection and installing off a DOS partition without repartitioning and booting to it via a floppy based LILO bootloader. I was in 7th or 8th grade at the time and got hooked on UNIX due to a Solaris 7 install I played with at my neighbor's house and that line from Jurassic Park...

Initially I had no X and figuring out how to move about the commandline was interesting. I got stuck in vi and remember having to hard reboot since I couldn't exit it and didn't really know about virtual terminals. But I stuck with it using it to learn C and play around with the system.

Then I moved to FreeBSD for 2-3 years in 9th grade...

So it's been a journey the last 10 years... for someone that's only 22 wow that's a long time... I cannot see myself using a non-*nix environment anymore and need some form of it to get my fix. Currently, I use debian lenny and Mac OS X, but really want to install Arch Linux one of these days.

4 fiirsts, actually.

1st Red Hat in 1999. Could not get it to work. Nothing but a black screen.

2nd in 2004. Debian. got a $. but I had NO idea what that meant then, so gave up.

3rd On an acquaintances computer, l installed -something-I don;t know what, which worked to insatll koha, the opensource library software.

THAT was when I really sw Linux's potential. a fantastic cataloging program, freely ditributable and free not just for libraries, but anyone! And that freedom could not legally be taken away. That last part really excited me as I had just discovered the fantastic Creative Comons licensing schemes.

4th, iinstalled ubntu Dapper Drake. and really really like it. I was dissapointed that my ATI AIW card didnt' work, so I couldn't do the tv in and out like I could with XP. I soon switched to nvida fx5200 and have been rocking ubuntu debian gnu/linux ever since!

My first experience was with a Red Hat distro packaged and sold by MacMillan, that I bought at a local Future Shop (Downloading with a 56k modem in the end of the 90's was not an option for me) and tried to load it on a 486 SX with 4Gig RAM, an old computer I still had since I didn't want to ditch Windows just yet and I had no knowledge of what "dual-booting" was.

The MacMillan CD had a defect right smack into the TCP package which blocked any further installation. Email inquiries to the MacMillan tech support went nowhere. I then crossed a French magazine boasting the new Mandrake 5.3 (when Red Hat was at 5.2, I believe) which worked right the first time.

I had a Unix account in my university days and I was surprised that all the documentation I received from the university's tech department team was still relevant for Linux. I could experience again with lynx, vi and perl and stayed pretty much in command-line - with such low amount of memory, it took hours before getting X to run.

Sometime back in 1998. Some distro for my G3 desktop. It fried the motherboard, which was under warranty. Redhat 6.2 was a better experience in 1998.

Back in 1991 or early 1992, so before there was even a "Yggdrasil" or any other distribution, we used linux as a replacement for our students living comunity news and mail server. Today i still have my own linux server for voip, http and mail placed in a colo.

I bought my first copy of Linux. It was a gray box with a Red Hat on it at Fry's Electronics. It came with a book and a CD. I'd gone to Fry's to pick up a copy of NT 3.51 for one of my clients to use for file and print. A week later he was running that copy of Red Hat and pretty happy about it. I was running it too but was so deep in Microsoft's world that it took me until 1999 before I did anything serious with it and Apache. The first thing I did with Linux was learn about Bash, then about networking, then about X windows configuration. To this day the first thing I do with any Linux installation is learn something new - even though now its voluntary. :)

1999 was the first year I used a Linux desktop for doing real work. It was the Corel Desktop. I ran it on a laptop (Sony Vaio) my boss had discarded after using it hard for two years. The install took a really long time but once it was installed it worked great. It ran Wordperfect! I still have that laptop and the Corel disks.

Somewhere in 1999, there was an article published in a local newspaper in my area, where in there was a picture of the KDE interface on Linux. That got me thinking about it and I bought my first book on Linux along with came a CD of Red Hat Linux 6.2. It has been an awesome experience of learning, tinkering and fiddling with Linux, which even meant that I accidentally erased my partition with something as simple as cat /etc/passwd > /dev/hda and latter learned how to write a partition table using a hexeditor, all thank to Linux.

I owe big time to Linux. Thanks Linus.

Slackware. 1995.

And, yes, I toasted a video card under X. After much RTFMing and a new video card, I was _even_ running a GUI. :)

I know exactly what I did with my first Linux installation.

On completely new hardware purchased specifically for Linux compatibility, and after 8 hours of the worst installation experience I had ever had, I tried using the interface for 10 minutes before taking the whole new computer outside, finding my hammer, and smashing everything inside the case.

I thought that after the Amiga, that switching to Windows was an exercise in hell... boy was that assumption wrong! The Linux creators obviously spent many thousands of hours perfecting the most crap OS ever.

Yes, I did feel better after killing the new computer. No, I have never smashed a Windows, Amiga, OSX machine... only Linux is bad enough to drive me to OSticide.

Frankly, I was trying to find something to run my BBS (modem based) on that was better than Minix, which was driving me nuts with it's small memory model.

I saw this post in the Minux Newsgroup from some guy from Finland called "Linus" talking about this "Kernel" he had that sounded better than Minix. It even used the Minux filesystem.

So I thought, what the hell.. after the (god knows how long) of downloading my Boot and Root Floppies via 9600 baud modem (look it up for people who dont know) I had it running on my PC, and was attempting to port my BBS code to it.. When I found out that there was no CDC (Carrier detect line) support, so users would hangup, and the kernel would not detect it and pass it down to the application.

After emailing Linus about it, got a response something like "You have the Source, how about your try..."

I've been using Linux ever since.

Somewhere around here I met Richard Stallman at an AUUG (Australian Unix Users Group) conference, and have been evangelising Linux and GNU ever since,.

I still even have a set of 5.25" 0.11 Boot/Root floppies that I found while cleaning out my shed!

People complain about it being rough to Install Linux now...

Bwahahahahahahah

My first experience with Linux was Red Hat 8.0. Why? Some of my friends had already tried it and assured me that Linux was THE shit. It came with one of Sweden's biggest proffesional computer magazines, Datormagazin. With Red Hat I never really got anywhere. I managed to create a LVM software raid ouf of my two very small(4.3 and 3.73 GB) on my dedicated Linux machine(I wasn't ready to through that other OS out quite yet at that time, since I actually couldn't do anything useful with my Red Hat installation, but that's because I didn't know of all the possibilities) so I could install ALL the software packages(5.6 GB or so iirc). After a few months with Red Hat I got a tip about Slackware, I repartioned my drive with Fdisk(and I had to redo it at least five time, since I had no idea of what I were doing) and finally managed to get a working setup. After that I actually learned Linux quite well. Since with Slackware there's no one to hold your hand :). I had to do everything the hard way and thanks to Slackware I am no studying to become a UNIX/Linux Systems Administrator. ATM I'm using Arch Linux, a distribution that is similiar to Slackware but isn't stuck in the early 90's with using Lilo instead of grub and what not.

My first was Slackware 96, installed during Christmas that year.

I can still remember having to answer yes/no to what packages to install for over 300 separate packages that meant very close to nothing to me.

One specific I still remember was the Klingon fonts for LaTex.......

I remember thinking "What on earth do I need that for?" and pressing the "Y" key....

Redhat 4.1, installed it as a "dialup gateway" at the company I worked for.

At home I tried several Redhat versions, but, moved to Linux full time when the conversion from Win98 to WinXP caused too much expense and instability.

My first Linux installation was Slackware (can't recall version) but it was back in May of 1995. I had a 9600 baud modem and took me quite a while to download all the Y series (documentation I think...or games heh) all in all, I think I had to use eighteen 3.5" floppies. I hadn't even tried to mess with X windows but for some reason, being able to setup SLIRP and using lynx to browse the web just made me addicted... go figure.

July 2006, Ubuntu 6.6 Dapper Drake was brand new and it was about the time when Microsoft started to implement WGA on windows xp.

Long story short... Didn't have a legit copy of windows and Ubuntu was all the buzz on tech sites and podcast so I decided to give it a try, feel in love with it right away.

My first attempt at running Linux was back in the nineties, with some version of SuSE that came on a magazine. But at the time, I did not have an internet connection, nor did I have a basic book, nor the actual magazine on which the CD came, so, as I got my first bash prompt, I was only able to do 'dir' and cd .. ' :).

Then, in 2001, or maybe late 2000, I installed WinLinux. That started triggering all these beautiful thoughts and emotions in me... at which point I decided to try an actual distro. I think the first one I set up was Corel. Then it was Mandrake, then Red Hat. By then, my win partition was getting smaller and smaller, until it just disappeared about a year later.

Through the years I've used many distros, including Debian, SuSE, Gentoo, Slackware, DSL (Damn Small Linux), Yellowdog (on a powerbook G4). For the last couple of years I've been using Ubuntu, which I run on my Desktop/Server at home and on my MacBook. At work I use Fedora Core and most of our servers run some flavor of Red Hat (RHEL, CentOS or even Fedora Core in the smaller ones). I couldn't be happier :)

Thanks for the trip down memory lane!!!

I think my first experience was 0.12 where you had to change a couple bytes in the boot sector to get it to boot on a hard drive. By the time I got out of College, slackware was the distro of choice. I've always been using it, but really came back a few years ago when at work (a MS shop) went into IVR/VOIP and Asterisk came out. That really boosted the usage where I work!

I think my first experience was 0.12 where you had to change a couple bytes in the boot sector to get it to boot on a hard drive. By the time I got out of College, slackware was the distro of choice. I've always been using it, but really came back a few years ago when at work (a MS shop) went into IVR/VOIP and Asterisk came out. That really boosted the usage where I work!

I think I was the youngest here when I started, I grew up in a house that religiously deionized proprietary software. My father was a die-hard Linux user, and when I was 8 years old I was allowed onto his home built Red Hat 5 machine where I was kindly greeted by gray Gnome footprints, Netscape, and Frank the Fish. 11 years later I'm a die hard user and Linux is second nature.

I recall in 2000, some friends of mine at school started messing with Linux. One guy paid $100 for a version called 'Slackware'; at the time we were too new to understand the concept of different distributions, and the rest of us figured that sounded a bit expensive for something that we didn't need. Plus, Internet access was pretty slow and there was no way I was downloading an ISO over dialup; not to mention, I didn't have a CD burner, or know what an ISO was. So, I went on, happily using Windows.

Summer of 2001 my friend got a 'Linux for Dummies' book, which came with Red Hat 6.1 on a CD. I installed it and was amazed that it worked; after all, I'd never installed Windows before. I worked through the book to get familiar with the command line, but without Internet access, there wasn't a lot to do.

My friend and I did discover the Gnome Fish application, which I know now was basically just a wrapper around 'fortune'; however, I didn't even know of fortune at the time. I named my Gnome Fish 'Ng', and proceeded to read fortunes for hours on end, because that was about all I could do with Linux.

I've learned a lot since then, and have gone from later Red Hat versions to Slackware to Linux From Scratch to Ubuntu; but I'll always remember my days with Ng the Gnome Fish.

1998 - Linux PPC

I ran it on my PowerMac 7500. I used it to log into my schools sun sparc 20 work stations and run programs on my screen. I remember how slow it was to run Pro/Engineer V19 on my screen. Not only was the sun sparc 20 antiquated, but there where a bunch of other students logged into it and the internet connection was not that quick! This convinced me of the stability and power of Linux (and Unix)... Boy was that cool at the time.

I bought a Caldera Open Linux boxed set at Business Depot. It was very limited, but got me interested. I was tired of Windows blowing up, and while a full migration took several years, I no longer run Windows.

Favorites are Ubuntu, Moon OS, and Fedora.

The first Linux I installed was some Slackware version that came on several 5.25" floppies. At the university I had used SunOS and HP/UX because those were installed on the lab computers that we could use for web and mail access. Didn't have mail access at home at that time, even though I had a modem that I could use to log into BBS systems.

This first Slackware installation was rather painful (and it only worked because a friend did it for me). The base system came on smoothly but the X11 configuration took until next morning. Then I sat there with a graphical UI but didn't know much about where to go from there.

My main reason for installing Linux was running LaTeX, the text processor. I had been using TeX on MS-DOS (anyone remember TEXSHELL for DOS? Its editor looked like Turbo Pascal's one, and Ctrl-F1 gave you context help for TeX commands), but, being a DOS app, you could either see the TeX source code or the output (using a dvi viewer which switched into graphics mode). I knew from the Unix machines at the university that it was possible to have one editor window and one xdvi (viewer) window on the same desktop, side by side, and I wanted that at home, too.

Well, to shorten the rest: The LaTeX stuff worked well for me, but I still needed my other stuff (on DOS), so for a while I kept on using DOS, later Windows and some OS/2, but finally in the late 90s I completely switched to Linux. For several years nothing but Red Hat ran on my computers (and I wrote books about Red Hat at that time). Then S.u.S.E. (later written: SuSE, now OpenSUSE) replaced Red Hat, and that's what I still use today.

BTW: I liked the post from further up where the poster said, he had some terminals attached to his Linux machine. I tried that too, with some old VT100 clone, and it worked, though the characters kept coming one by one rather slowly ;) It was no good for any productive work, but it was fun just to see it was possible, after all I knew dumb terminals from university, too: The maths department used them for computer algebra courses (with a text mode version of Maple).

Ubuntu Virtual machine on VMware was how I first tried out Ubuntu. Immediately downloaded Fedora too! Great way to check out a bunch of Linuxes!

My first Linux experience came from some version of Red hat (Can't recall the version exactly) about 6 years ago.I installed it in my home PC and I was stuck form the word go...,in the installation. It worked after I called one of my Linux-familiar-friends and followed his instructions.

Installation went well and I've been able to log in to a Desktop Environment (It was Gnome)

and found it hard to believe the amount of software that came with it.I think that because I used windows XP too long to realize what I was missing. (with expensive proprietary software that i can't afford)

But the happy mood quickly changed after I realized it doesn't detect my sound card. or I was being deaf all the while. :-)

I was so disheartened and because of my knowledge of Linux was so low at that time I couldn't figure out a way I can fix it. and I went to the easiest choice available.installed XP again.

Then after few years I was following a Course in University about System and Network admin. Under Linux. I got the chance to encounter Linux again. this time it was fedora 9. I went home with a DVD of fedora and installed it, (Now im learning Linux..so no hassle in installation) and started working.

By the time that course was completed I had considerable amount of Knowledge in Linux and had played with about dozen of various distributions from Ubuntu to Free BSD. Now im playing with my current OS fedora 10 and also created an OS from scratch. im so happy the fact that I crossed over to Linux. it allowed me to learn various concepts of Linux,Programming,Networking and Computer science in general, Because with Linux you can watch under the hood and learn how the system's core looks like. and you can learn how various parts of the OS is configured to do the tasks that are requested and also how the Software that is installed in the system communicate and share machine resources with each other.I consider Linux as a Great OS and also a Great learning tool.

My first Linux experience came from some version of Red hat (Can't recall the version exactly) about 6 years ago.I installed it in my home PC and I was stuck form the word go...,in the installation. It worked after I called one of my Linux-familiar-friends and followed his instructions.

Installation went well and I've been able to log in to a Desktop Environment (It was Gnome)

and found it hard to believe the amount of software that came with it.I think that because I used windows XP too long to realize what I was missing. (with expensive proprietary software that i can't afford)

But the happy mood quickly changed after I realized it doesn't detect my sound card. or I was being deaf all the while. :-)

I was so disheartened and because of my knowledge of Linux was so low at that time I couldn't figure out a way I can fix it. and I went to the easiest choice available.installed XP again.

Then after few years I was following a Course in University about System and Network admin. Under Linux. I got the chance to encounter Linux again. this time it was fedora 9. I went home with a DVD of fedora and installed it, (Now im learning Linux..so no hassle in installation) and started working.

By the time that course was completed I had considerable amount of Knowledge in Linux and had played with about dozen of various distributions from Ubuntu to Free BSD. Now im playing with my current OS fedora 10 and also created an OS from scratch. im so happy the fact that I crossed over to Linux. it allowed me to learn various concepts of Linux,Programming,Networking and Computer science in general, Because with Linux you can watch under the hood and learn how the system's core looks like. and you can learn how various parts of the OS is configured to do the tasks that are requested and also how the Software that is installed in the system communicate and share machine resources with each other.I consider Linux as a Great OS and also a Great learning tool.

My first Linux experience came in (don't remember exactly) later 80's or early 90's. After I met a SysAdmin from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), at a Borland's developers meeting and we eventually became friends.

He took me to the lab on the UBA campus where I saw for the first me Sun and SGI machines !!! There was a machine that was not booting and it had no diskette or CDROM bay. My friend downloaded Linux from the Internet (at the time it was not spoiled by commercial activity and there were only two Internet connections in the entire country: one at the Chancellery and one at the UBA IT labs). If I remember correctly that Linux distro came in something like 13 diskettes.

My friend configured some of the files on the first diskettes onto a Sun machine, configured the broken machine to do a network boot and Voila. It booted and we got a wonderful, shiny login prompt.

After that I've stuck with Linux as much as I could, Today I have 9 machines running Linux at home from PDA's to the router, from the laptops to the media server and even the PS3 is running Linux.

I can't remember the actual install, but I do remember all the cool eye candy it had. I split my 4GB hard drive for win95 and mandrake. If I remember correctly it was a early pentium mmx on a FX chipset, with a fair amount of memory at that time. Along with a ATI 4MB video card - all was great, it did make me ask a lot of questions. win95 didn't do much for me in that area, nor was it as intuitive as Linux felt. Even in Bash, Linux just seemed to make sense.

Linux was the first OS on a PC that made me think PC's aren't as crappy as I thought. My Amiga which was way old already, out performed my first PC with win95, thinking back I was pretty depressed about my first PC up until Linux. 95 just BSOD all to often and I didn't think it was nice of M$ to sell some thing that wasn't ready for the market. Funny how they still do exactly that...

I would have to say my entire Linux experience has been very moving, I like computers again and probably would not be in the computer field if it wasn't for Linux. Thanks to everyone that has helped make Linux possible, that includes R.M.S. whom has enough foresight to make freedom work in the long run.

;)

I first downloaded slackware 3-something on floppies and found it completely baffling - this was in 1997. I persisted and aside from finding out about my hardware problems on this machine I eventually found a copy of redhat 5.1 ... not long after I met my linux guru Waldo who had been using linux since 1993 and he warped my mind by introducing me to Debian. I've been a Debian user ever since as I can't abide RPM based distros ... oh yes, Waldo still uses Debian too!

I remember downloading Debian Bo after I proved L.O.A.F. would boot on my machine and give me a prompt. After figuring out how I was going to dual boot my Packard Bell P133, I partitioned the machine, and after about 2 days of trying, I finally got the thing installed.

That was when the learning started. After about 2 weeks of trying to get the WinModem to work, and reading success and fail stories of ndiswrapper, I decided to buy my first peice of upgrade hardware, just to get Linux to work. v.90 technology, here I came! Swapped in the modem, compiled and patched my 2.0.29 (i think that was right, maybe it was .27) kernel driver, and I was on my way. After about 3 more weeks, I finally got sound working.

From there it was an uphill battle with proprietary Packard Bell hardware that forced me to scrap the PC and move to a Pentium I machine that didn't need a turbo button to be happy. I was all in, buying hardware to suit my OS. Every since that day, I have been a Debian supporter and contributer. Oh Debian, how I love thee.

This is a fun article.

My first Linux experience was with SuSE Linux 9.3. I think it was in the 2004 or early 2005. I decided to free myself from the Windows slavery.

I installed linux and decided to setup a web server with Apache and PHP. I can say that a whole world opened in front of me. I couldn't believe (as many Windows users can't) that all this beauty was free. It is like suddenly removing the headband off my eyes, and seeing there is a world out there.

Windows users are endogamic, they don't want to know anything out of its world. And Microsoft encourages this attitude.

Now I have tested and used many distributions since. I continue attached to my SuSE roots, but I am really attracted by the Ubuntu and Linux Mint in the desktop side.

My first experience with ubuntu was opensuse. Not sure which version. Tinkered a bit. Learned my way around a bash prompt and got a few simple servers running (ventrilo and an IRC)

I couldn't get my spare wifi card to work though and it was leeching the feed from my windows box.

Then tried to duel boot ubuntu and windows in 2007, but ubuntu was not compatible with my monitor and I couldn't even get to the install setup. Too lazy to find a work around, I gave up on linux until I left for my first year of undergrad in 08. Obviously I got a laptop, pretty standard these days. An HP pavilion dv2000. A friend of mine used gentoo exclusively and got me back into linux. I duel booted windows and ubuntu for a while and found that my windows partition was more or less a waste of space, so I completely erased the harddrive of the whole box (like a cleansing fire) using darik's boot and nuke. I know run ubuntu 8.10 exclusively and other than for hardcore gaming, will never need windows again. (I'm even finding with a little work and alot of fun most games run better on my linux box)

^^^ i meant linux in that first sentence, Freudian slip

My first experience with Linux was 2000ish inspired by my interaction with Mozilla Firefox which introduced me to the GNU GPL dream of the developer's stuff :-D I think the first I tried was Mandrake Linux. Liked it, but back then couldn't get to use my Windows partitions so had to kick it off the drive. I also screwed the master boot record many times because I didn't know to how to configure grub or lilo. Oh, what a nightmare :-o Now I show around the Ubuntu OS around like its a crown that I totally 0wn:-D Windows is exclusively for gaming. I wonder why there aren't any games released exclusively for Linux :-P

I'd love to see this is in the system requirements of some totally awesome game.

OS : Linux/UNIX Kernel XXXX or higher. Windows not supported, suckers :-P Please use ENIW to get this totally cool game running. Hehe.

Ahh, reading that brought back some memories! First the playing around with the Kubuntu LiveCD and wanting so badly to install it because it was a gorgeous (and deliciously geeky) operating system... then taking the plunge and installing it on my laptop... being convinced I had screwed up and actually sitting there crying at my computer only to figure out hey... I can fix this problem!

Going on to install it on my desktop and eventually making it my sole operating system. I really can't code much, I wish I could. I have so much respect for those that do. But I know my way around my operating system, and most importantly, I know that if something messes up, it's because I did something wrong, not because the operating system sucks and randomly decides to freeze programs on me =P

I'm the only one in my little group of friends that uses Linux, which is funny, because so many of my friends and my boyfriend know sooo much more about computers than I do. But I'm the Linux geek in our group. Wouldn't have it any other way!

Seeing all these people commenting about using it in the 90s, I'm reminded that I'm a "new" user--only been using Linux for just shy of 3 years now. I don't think I actually qualify as new anymore though, since I've got patches strewn about now... My very first experience was Damn Small Linux in a VM on Windows to see if those Linux people had figured out GUIs yet. Turns out the answer was yes. So I went and bought a laptop with Linux-compatible hardware and tried to dual-boot it with Ubuntu/Windows. Ubuntu 6.06's partitioner had a tendency to eat (instead of resize) NTFS partitions back then, so I ended up with just Ubuntu. Oh well, sink or swim! A couple weeks later I recompiled the kernel for SMP because I didn't know they had more kernel builds available.

My first time using linux was back in 2004 when I was finishing my final year thesis in the university when my Windoze box crashed. I was devastated cos all my work was in the harddisk and I couldn't boot up the OS anymore. So after all the effort, to try to fix Windoze failed. I found myself a livecd linux distro, retrieve my important files and continued to finish my thesis using the livecd. From then on, I had a lot of respect for linux and became regular user for it. Now I use only linux and Mac OS, the only time I touch Windoze is at work. Windoze gave up on me when I needed it the most. But I'm glad it did. =)

My first time using linux was back in 2004 when I was finishing my final year thesis in the university when my Windoze box crashed. I was devastated cos all my work was in the harddisk and I couldn't boot up the OS anymore. So after all the effort, to try to fix Windoze failed. I found myself a livecd linux distro, retrieve my important files and continued to finish my thesis using the livecd. From then on, I had a lot of respect for linux and became regular user for it. Now I use only linux and Mac OS, the only time I touch Windoze is at work. Windoze gave up on me when I needed it the most. But I'm glad it did. =)

My very first distro was Red Hat 6.1 in 1999, it has been quite an experience installing that distro on a Windows 98 machine, but at that time I was more into gaming so to install this on my computer was quite alien to me. But after that was:

Mandrake 6.5

Slackware 7.1

Mandrake 8

Red Hat 9

Slackware 9

Mandrake 9.1

Suse 9

Ubuntu 7.04

Mandrake 10.1

Slackware 10

Suse 9.3

Slackware 11

openSuse 10.1

Slackware 11.1

Ubuntu 8.04

Slackware 12.1

Now

Slackware 12.2

So my Linux distros for the last 10 years, but I guess I keep gravitating back to Slackware. I guess it still holds it charm for the oldest distro and keeping things straight thinking. Thanks Patrick Volkerding! Keep up the great work!

Probably sometime around 1993, I'm terrible with dates!

I was a microsoft lover, but when I bought my first 32-bit computer, a 486DX 33mhz, I knew I needed a 32 bit OS, had windows95 been out then, things would have been much different.

I had been using unix-ish dial up providers, LOTS of unix flavors, solaris, RS-6000 hosts, irix and generic unix from vendors I can't even remember. (these were the days of shell accounts, usenet, gopher, archie, etc..) OS/2 had no future.

So I killed OS/2 and installed Linux. Learned perl (I had been into REXX, Basic and Assembler), web design and a whole lot of things and almost immediately began selling e-commerce solutions for people, during which time, I had to work with many flavors of unix. (irix, BSD's of all sorts, solaris, on and on..) it was great and it taught me to value platform freedom.

These days, it seems all the hosts are linux & freebsd, I consider this to be a terrible thing. (but at least linux gives you hundreds of distributions)

The windows crowd are kind of contaminating linux, it's wonderful for introducing people to unix, but I what good is it if linux becomes just like windows with cygwin installed?

All these "desktop frameworks" and huge monolithic programs are replacing the original ideas, small, simple, beautiful programs that do only one thing, do it well and work with other programs.

Linux is loosing something important (and all binary only programs flash, realplayer, etc.. aren't helping) we're on track to being as awful as windows is now. I guess we've succeeded.

I'm planning on switching to FreeBSD, in large part because it has better performance and has something called "BSD jails" (wish linux did) but also, freebsd captures much of the flavor linux originally had.

I still like linux, I like the GPL, I've run gentoo, slackware, redhat, debian, archlinux (briefly), suse, fedora and I've even built a couple of my own linux distributions. Try building your own "custom windows distribution" sometime... heh!

I also run OS X once in awhile, it's cool to see the same software running on a completely different processor, even though apple itself leaves much to be desired. (I got suckered back in 2000, when I thought apple saw the light and was going to be more open, turns out, they were lying)

If you miss the original "magic" linux used to have, you should try DragonflyBSD, OpenBSD or FreeBSD, it'll take you back (DragonflyBSD is cool because it's still fairly new, has a real culture behind it, and has some really cool ideas. FreeBSD will make your hardware go Zooom!) I haven't used NetBSD in years.

When advocating linux, try to squeeze in a little about "UNIX" and how linux is great because, unlike windows, it gives you the freedom to switch platforms without loosing all your software. (provided the source code is available).

I love all open source unix's (yes, linux too!) - It's about simplicity, beauty and freedom, lets keep it that way :-)