On Fri, 15 Feb 2002 11:35:08 Martyn Drake wrote:
Hi folks,
Just for a bit of fun (since it's Friday) - what was your very first exposure to Linux and what was your first distribution that you ever installed (and can you remember the kernel version?!).
It was probably about ten years ago and at the time I was working for BT with HP-UX and a contractor we hired suggested I might be interested in this neat thing he'd found called Linux - it was a proper Unix OS for the PC, he said.
The distribution names I remember from then are SLS and Slackware. I have a feeling we started with one and then tried the other though I don't remember which way round. I say "we" as I was installing based on this guys recommendation so when he changed track I did too. The kernel version I can't quite remember either but I think it was one of the 0.9 something variety.
I didn't spend all that log playing with Linux back then as we had bigger hardware running Unix which was gave better performance and you could still download and compile lots of GNU software on it.
My next exposure was when I installed Linux for my younger brother. He had heard of Linux and decided to try it and bought a CD from Yggdrasil. By this stage it was getting to the point where PC hardware was capable of running X at a sensible speed though you had to have about twice as much memory as was common at the time (I think that would be 16Mb rather than 8).
Take three was after a talk from Richard Stallman and on his recommendation I installed Debian. Of course I took it that his recommendation was based on software freedom rather than technical merit but found that Debian was techinically good too. I started with a spare machine at work just to try it out and IIRC I installed Debian slink on it. I borrowed a PC to take home and put slink on that too and then upgraded to potato when it was in it's frozen state. After that I built my own PC for home, without windows pre-installed or a license to run it, and installed Debian potato on that - I have now upgraded it to woody. I also have two machines at work now running Debian woody and one running RedHat 6.2
Steve.