• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Your first Linux experience.

What was your first Linux Experience

  • Total voters
    96
S

Stugots

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Feb 25, 2004
Messages
7,301
We're going to do this according to kernel version. No subversions, just major version. You can use www.distrowatch.com to find out what version of the kernel a specific version of most distro's used.

Redhat Linux 4.2
Kernel 2.0.30
 
Probably the mid-to-higher 2.0.x branch, mostly with Redhat and Slackware. That was strictly in a server environment (and usually remotely) with a number of web servers. Back in my 'I am going to be a web developer as my career' days ;)

I don't think I personally installed and used a Linux server locally until the mid 2.2 version, and did not attempt desktop use until the early 2.4 days. As of the later 2.4 days and until current, I have always had a Linux desktop at home and work, generally Gentoo at home and Redhat (and just recently Ubuntu with LTS) at work.
 
Whoops. I voted 2.2 but meant to vote 2.0. RH 5.2 was still using 2.0.36!
 
DAmb I dunno...

It was a Redhat 5 series I think..., ha distroWatch doesn't go back to 1998
 
No poll entry for pre-1.0? I started with 0.99. I voted for 1.0 since it I moved to it a couple of months later.
 
my introduction into linux was with Smoothwall Express 2.0 with there 2.4 flavour


 
Debian off the Boot Magazine CD, on a 486 with 8MB of RAM, 1MB ISA video card, maybe 200MB HD, 4x CDROM and 33.6K modem for my dedicated machine, and occasionally on my Pentium 75 (OC'ed to 100) 32MB, integrated video 4GB HD, until I ran out of space for Windows games and programs.

I can't remember which kernel version, either 2.0, 2.2 or (not likely) 2.4, as I upgraded later on to the last version of Debian that fit on a single CD for binaries.
 
A little over 3 years ago (wow, doesn't really seem that long at all), Mandrake 8 with a 2.4.something kernel.

I didn't like it at all.
 
1993, Yggdrasil...Some version I can't remember.

I got it right in 1999, though. That's when I started exploring FreeBSD (3.4-RELEASE).
 
Mandrake 7 beta up until I got sick of RPM-hell....

debian 2.2.18 from then out.
 
I started with mandrake 9 with the 2.4 kernel. I remember thinking that the 2.6 kernel was going to make Linux mainstream, boy was I wrong. I believe that was around 2003~
 
I still have my first InfoMagic "Linux Developer's Resource CD-ROM" with Slackware 2.0.1 (1.1 kernel), SLS 1.0.5 (1.0 kernel) and Debian 0.91 beta back from 1994.

I voted 1.0 since there was no 1.1 option. I remember installing that Slackware way back when.
 
sc3252 said:
I started with mandrake 9 with the 2.4 kernel. I remember thinking that the 2.6 kernel was going to make Linux mainstream, boy was I wrong. I believe that was around 2003~
Click to expand...

I know people who still insist on running 2.4.
(I can see why, the whole 2.6 process seemed a bit messy. How many different ways to get a working /dev did you pass through?)
 
HHunt said:
I know people who still insist on running 2.4.
(I can see why, the whole 2.6 process seemed a bit messy. How many different ways to get a working /dev did you pass through?)
Click to expand...
Like the 2.4 process was any better...2.4's major suck, constantly uprooting large portions of it, constantly re-working the PCMCIA stuff, replacing VMs, etc. were the things that motivated me to try FreeBSD. I guess I should say "thank you" to the 2.4 maintainers and their piss-poor job with the first several releases of 2.4 for pushing me to FreeBSD. :) I figured 2.6 would be better, but...Nope!
 
Haha, right. I guess 2.4 is looking stable now for much the same reasons that 5-STABLE finally does. :)

(It's pining for the fjords.)
 
HHunt said:
Haha, right. I guess 2.4 is looking stable now for much the same reasons that 5-STABLE finally does. :)

(It's pining for the fjords.)
Click to expand...
Okay, that's the funniest thing I've seen all morning. Thanks. :) There's a good joke in there somewhere...

"How do you stabilize a Linux kernel branch?"

"Dump it and move on to the next 'stable' one!"
 
I don't remember which kernel was being use the first time I used Linux, and I honestly wasn't paying attention to the version at the time. It was the late 90's, and I had a bunch of different distros that came on CDs in the back of a book I had bought about Linux. Slackware was the one that I picked, because it had instructions for installing it into a folder on my existing fat16 partition. As i recall, I managed to get the gui and everything running how i wanted, but I decided that it just didn't have any apps for me that I was interested in, so I spent all my time back in Windows and abandoned Linux. In the last couple of years I have been looking at Linux again, and I was surprised to find that the situation had reversed, and now Linux has huge amounts of useful apps.
 
Like I said earlier, I started with Redhat 4.2. I stayed with Redhat till about 8.0, then started messing around with Mandrake, Slackware, Gentoo a little. A long time went by that I for the most part dropped Linux until Ubuntu came out. I had never used a Debian distro before but it caught my interest. I kept an eye on 4.10, then I started using the then development release 5.04. Now I use primarily Ubuntu and RHEL.
 
Mandrake and SuSE 7.0

Bought both boxed versions of them. That was when we had to fight with winmodems so I bought an external modem to get it working.

Now my fight with Linux is SATA2 controllers and a USB hub of mine that will prevent linux from booting. Always something.
 
Various distro's of Linux in mid '90's, so it would have been the 2.0.x branch.
 
I tried various distros throughout the years. I never used Linux fulltime until March 2006 when I initially went Gentoo on my Linux Fileserver. Switched to FC4 x64 a month later, then FC5 x64 a month after it was released. (Drivers and Web GUI for my RR2320 are in RPM for FC4/FC5, the Web GUI source was made for IA32. I never got it to compile properly on Gentoo x64). Been running it ever since.

I still don't run Linux on my desktop, but that is because it is my game machine.

Building a second fileserver next week, it too will run FC5. I also run IPCop(soon to be SmoothWall) on my router. I would give BSD a whirl for the new fileserver, but XFS support is still immature.

I don't use GUI's on my Linux machines. I use CLI and Web interfaces(RocketRAID CP and IPCop).
 
Redhat 5.2, then 6.2, then I pretty much segwayed a few years later into Gentoo, now any system I touch is probably going to run ubuntu or gentoo if its a desktop, and gentoo-hardened if its a server.
 
redhat 2.0 i believe. no idea which kernel. ran it on my pentium pro 200, and could never figure out what to do after installing it.10 years later, i'm using suse.
 
Started off with Mandrake 6.5 or some where around there. Wasn't long before I really got started with Slackware.
 
The first Linux distro I used extensively was Corel Linux in 1999-2000. I had the 2.2 kernel I believe. I seem to remember using an kernel back in 1995-1997 timeframe, but I don't recall what it was, and I didn't use it for very long.
 
I started off with Redhat 5.2 but couldn't get it working so I switched to Slackware. After that I switched to Debian for a while and now I use NetBSD or CentOS.
 
I started off using gentoo back when the 2.6 kernel had just come out. I know that I briefly used a couple 2.4 kernel's, but I generally used the early 2.6's for everything. So I voted 2.6. It makes me look like a noob but I promise I'm not. :cool:
 
i'm pretty sure the first distro i used was caldera 1.3 but it might have been and older version (5.2 or 4.something) of red hat. either way im pretty sure what ever it was it had a 2.0 kernel.
 
Gentoo and used the 2.4 kernel, but I think the 2.6 kernel was just breaking into the scene about that time.
 
I got started by taking a couple college classes that utilized Red Hat 7.X (can't remember which one).
 
[H]EMI_426;1030221381 said:
1993, Yggdrasil...Some version I can't remember.

I got it right in 1999, though. That's when I started exploring FreeBSD (3.4-RELEASE).
Click to expand...
You unwashed heathen.

2.0 here. Started with RH, but over the years I've loaded just about every flavor out there. I've even loaded freebsd, but felt unclean afterwards and had to spend a week in the shower on the account of the smell.

:p
 
[H]EMI_426;1030221381 said:
1993, Yggdrasil...Some version I can't remember.

I got it right in 1999, though. That's when I started exploring FreeBSD (3.4-RELEASE).
Click to expand...

That should have been around .95.x or so. That was my first Linux distro too, sort of. I couldn't get it to work so I switched to Ameritech Linux out of the South Pacific.
 
ianshot said:
That should have been around .95.x or so. That was my first Linux distro too, sort of. I couldn't get it to work so I switched to Ameritech Linux out of the South Pacific.
Click to expand...
Yeah...I fought with Yggdrasil for a while, then jumped ship to SuSE...Which worked much better, albeit half the HOWTOs were in German.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top