Bit of fun: Your first Linux distro
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?!). For me, I was about to head off to university and became very interested in UNIX (and in particular, Linux) since it was beginning to make a bit of a splash in various computer magazines at that time. I got hold of a copy of Yggrdrasil Linux which boasted that it had 0.93 (or was it 0.98, I can't remember) of the Linux kernel. I had a relatively new 486DX-33 computer at the time with 8Mb RAM and attempting to run XFree86 on it was incredibly slow. I managed to persuade the folks that I needed more RAM, and eventually ended up with 16Mb which made all the difference which meant that I had a working X-Windows box that did keep swapping it's memory to HD and slowing the thing down to a crawl. Ah - those were the days... (he says with a small tear in his eye..) Regards, Martyn -- http://www.drake.me.uk http://martyn.drake.me.uk http://www.alug.org.uk
Martyb wrote:
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 in December 1994, during my first year at University, that I installed my first distribution of Linux. It was a Slackware with a kernel 1.1.30 or something. I had never seen a Unix prompt before, and I remember it took me a few nights to configure X properly. My machine at the time was a 486 DX2-66 with a 40 Mb hard disk and 8 Mb RAM. I later upgraded with an additional 300 Mb hard disk and 16 Mb RAM. /proc/cpuinfo showed 32 or so bogomips, I seem to remember. Before I suscribed to an ISP in 1995, I was getting mail and news with UUCP from another Linux box that was connected to the net. Huge phone bills... Good old days... Cheers, Eric.
-----Original Message----- From: main-admin@lists.alug.org.uk [mailto:main-admin@lists.alug.org.uk]On Behalf Of Martyn Drake Sent: 15 February 2002 11:35 To: main@lists.alug.org.uk Subject: [Alug] Bit of fun: Your first Linux distro
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?!).
Slackware 3 I think it was kernel version 1.2.13 late 1995. I managed to get it to boot to a prompt but had no idea what to do with it so went back to the then fairly new Windows95 which was about as stable as a stick of dynamite oozing slimey stuff. I had tried Linux because I was so p***sed of with Win95's instability much prefering DOS for stability but craving a 32bit multitasking environment. I didn't get a useable Linux system until RedHat 5.0 which I had X working out of the box. I have tried out many many distros since and when I get around to it I'll retell "The Saga of BJ's Journey Around the Linux Distributions of the World" in the ALUG web site contrib area. :-) -- Cheers, BJ
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?!).
SLS, I think. A 2 disk *system* (And now SuSE's only on the 1. DVD, mind!) One of the 0.9x kernels. (That was a *looong* crawl to v1.0!) And an install pamphlet with a petrel on it that seems to have mutated into a penguin. I'd heard about this "linux" thing, but at the time I was running a 286. No go. But a friend on my course (hi Andy!) had "borrowed" a flatmate's 386 laptop... Never did get the number of columns quite right! That would have been between autumn '92 and spring '93. 10 years of linux coming up!
Ah - those were the days... (he says with a small tear in his eye..) Eh, by 'eck thay were! Nowt but a blunt holepunch if you were lucky, or teco if you wern't!
On Fri, 15 Feb 2002, 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?!).
Ermmm, it would have been shortly after getting my first x86 PC, I used to be an Amiga fan and kind of got out of the scene around 95' and after a few years wanted a computer again so got myself one of the new Pentium IIs which had just come out with 64Mb of RAM and a 3d gfx card etc. Anyhow after deciding that windows was a POS i needed a new OS, and I had heard of linux and always wanted to try unix so proceded and got a nice shiny copy from the linux emporium of Redhat 5.1. So I can't remember exactly when this was either late 97' or early 98' i guess, the kernel back then was 2.0.3* something or other. Anyhow i used to have a winmodem back then so i couldn't do anything really useful with the machine until i invested in a real modem, by then i think the ALug had started and i made it to the first meeting in suffolk and around this time got my external modem, after that first meeting i was persuaded to use linux as my main desktop... the rest is history i guess ;) -- Adam "a funny thing about regret is, that it's better to regret something you have done, than to regret something you haven't done"
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?!).
Like everyone else it seems, I started using Linux on my start in 1995 at Uni. When I brought the book "Linux Universe" after hearing all about it in the press. The book is still on my bookshelf to this day. It was based around Slackware and the 1.2.13 kernel, and I was trying to install this on a 486SX-25 with 8Mb RAM, a single 210Mb HDD and one of those Creative propreitary CD drives attached to the soundblaster card. I distinctly remember spending many days trying to install it using the "sbpcd" driver, aswell as configuring X to work with a 1Mb Cirrus VESA graphics card. Neither worked particularly well, until I came across Debian 1.3.1 and the 2.0 kernel and I was hooked. The bogomips I as I remember was only at 80 or so and I brought numerous upgrades just to increase this figure!! Sad old days. Hip hip... David. --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.323 / Virus Database: 180 - Release Date: 08/02/2002
On 15-Feb-02 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?!).
Well, since you ask, the story (for good reasons) goes back to 1980 or so when I was using CP/M -- brilliant OS considering what it packed into the top 8K of 64K RAM (Oh, not forgetting the 256 bytes it also needed at the bottom, but never mind). And the ZILOG Z80 processor it ran on was not a bad beast either, for the time. What was amazing (and still is, looking back) is the performance of the best CP/M software -- remember WordStar, dBaseII? VisiCalc? And I was compiling FORTRAN on it, and later C (Aztec C; excellent). Mind you, you had to know how to handle "overlays", but in the circumstances of the times that was forgiveable. Later, it was a plunge from CP/M into Unix: 1984 or so, and a few of us statisticians had become computer missionaries in the Dept of Pure Maths at Cambridge, not only using them for our number-crunching but also advocating the use of microcomputers (as they were called then) in teaching (and being accused of "throwing money at the problem"; what's new?). But then the PMs noticed that the Applied folk were printing their own articles, lecture notes and exam papers just like on a real printing press, using a Unix system running on a ZILOG ZX8000 machine and typesetting software called "troff". So it was "Us too, please"; and at the end of the day yours truly made the inspired mistake of volunteering to get the Pure counterpart installed and running, and to manage it. Not knowing anything much about Unix. Well, that was a Unix machine with a 68000 processor, and it had all of 1MB RAM and 10MB hard drive. "WOW!!" from your boy from the backwoods of CP/M. Also, on the back of the box was a bloody great serial board with 32 ports on it, from which cables fanned out to Wyse terminals across the Dept, to secreraries and Professors alike. (And remind me sometime to tell the story of "device full" due to trying to log-in the mains hum one night ... ). Well, up to say 6-7 users could be on at once, and you wouldn't notice that anyone else was using the machine. Above that and, well, it did slow down ... Nevertheless, your boy from CP/M was vastly impressed; and in the process learned a lot about Unix and what capabilities should be expected from a really good OS; and also why, and how, Unix was one such. And that's why that mistake, of "volunteering", turned out to be inspired. And so it goes ... after a few years, the early IBM PCs appeared; some people turned to these, but the Unix fans amongst us managed nicely without. What we couldn't (for some reason) achieve on our Unix machine we could still do on CP/M and/or BBC micros. By 1989 I was in Manchester, and before long grappling with the PC and with DOS. It rapidly became clear that DOS was CP/M-like with a few Unix "features" tacked on: mainly directory trees and a really nasty kludge for pipes. Oh, yes, there was a DOS program called "more". Big deal. I'd already written my own in C for CP/M ... The one major advance was in the area of graphics: PC hardware was much better at this than what we'd had on CP/M or the Wyse terminals. Apart from that, little could be done with DOS software that couldn't have been done before. But multi-tasking? WHAT???? [Aside: hats off to Quarterdeck and their "Desqview", which finally did manage to achieve fair multi-tasking on the PC with DOS.] Then it struck me: The PC I was using (386SX 25MHz processor) itself had 4 MB Ram, and a massive 40MB HD -- more hardware power on every front than the Unix machine I'd been running (except for that serial board). And the best that could be done with it was to run DOS! Blimey. [And the serial board would have been irrelevant anyway.] Actually about the same capability as I was getting on CP/M with 64K RAM. Well, you don't have to guess for hard the next thought that struck me. Where's Unix for the PC then? We're up to about 1990/1 now. Well, there were one or two knocking around. SCO Xenix comes to mind. But you paid the earth just for the Unix "base", and then some if you wanted to run anything useful on it. Also on the scene around then: The Next Box, with NextStep OS (basically Unix with a graphical front-end that used Display PostScript to relate to the user). A beautiful thing, I was told. But costing a good fraction of a year's pay. By 1992, I was hyped up into "mission status" on this issue. No way was I putting up with Unix-capable hardware that was only running DOS; hardly an advance on CP/M in 64K. Early MS Windows had come out, and I had a look at that; those of you who remember it don't need telling what I thought of it (and those of you who don't remember, but do remember more recent series of Windows versions, can extrapolate backwards with confidence. Had another look at NextStep. By now the Next Box was dead, but the OS was now available for the PC. Three snags. (1) The OS was 1,000 quid. (2) Appications were extra. (3) No way would my 386SX-25 box cope with running NextStep. Hardware of that strength would have set me back about 2,000 quid. 3,000 quid all told. Plus. Also had a look at IBM's OS/2, which seemed to be a good approximation to the real thing. And, believe it or not, at "Windows NT", already lurking back-stage by 1992; and this, according to its description, would turn Windows-on-DOS into Windows on something that might have the multi-user, multi-tasking capabilities that I declared to be the birthright of every user of sufficiently powerful hardware. Wasn't sure about it having good tools, though. But it was the wrong moment to be looking at either. IBM and Microsoft got into a tangle, which wrapped itself round OS/2's neck in the womb and strangled it. Windows NT retired into an extended development phase, and remained irrelevant for some years to come. And I began jumping up and down. * * * * * * * * * * At this moment, lateish 1992, in the Newsletter of the Manchester Computing Centre, appeared a small announcement: "Free Unixes for the PC" placed by Owen Leblanc (one of the most notable Linux pioneers in the UK, and contributor to the ext2 filesystem). It described FreeBSD, and Linux. FreeBSD was "more mature", but wanted the whole hard drive to itself. Linux, while "experimental", could share a drive with DOS. After some hesitation, this persuaded me to try Linux. So I jumped over to MCC, and sought out Owen. Armed with about 25 floppies, he took me to a PC where we downloaded SLS Linux (kernel 0.99 if I remember), and I took this lot back home. Repartitioned the 40MB drive into 10MB for DOS, 5MB swap, and 25MB for Linux and user workspace. [Don't ask what it was like doing this for the first time, in those days. But Owen had written excellent documentation of the details of what was going on, so I got there, making progress notes on paper on the way.] Then inserted floppy after floppy, picking and choosing, being very very careful ... After a long time of this, finally the thing booted into Linux, and sitting at the foot of the console was root # and a flashing cursor. The dream come true. Unix on the PC. And, to check I was really home, I entered "ls /usr/bin", and the familiar faces rolled past. Finally, to culminate the ceremony, shutdown -h now and it wrapped itself up and went to bed. I was home again. Well, after that no looking back. No X, of course; not with that capacity hardware. But SVGAlib was your friend for graphics, and the console terminal was really (as it still often is) all you really needed. But those 25MB for Linux and user workspace allowed a lot of useful real work to get done. So that's how I came to Linux, what my first distribution was, and what the kernel version was. After that, it was MCC-Interim 0.99, Slackware (which I stuck with for a good few years), Red Hat, briefly Linux Universe, a brush with Debian unfortunately at the bad moment when it tried to move from 0.99 to 1.0 and got it wrong, then SuSE. Currently running on different machines Debian, SuSE-5.1, SuSE-7.2, and Red Hat 7.1. And remembering that interesting time of transition from "a.out" to "ELF". I still feel that angry missionary urge which gripped me around 1990, still trying to show the cannibals what can really be done with a proper OS and proper tools. And yet, more and more marvelling at how it is that what used to be possible in 4MB RAM and 40MB HD, with room to spare, now wouldn't even install on that. Well, you did ask ... Two days ago, someone wrote to the groff mailing-list: "Of course, choosing an embedded language must be done in terms of the target audience which is *not* jaded old hackers who got in touch with computers in the early eighties at the least, that is in times so Paleolithic to have known *roff as the tool of choice to typeset their documents, and find that writing programs in VM/CMS pseudo-assembler is the closest to nirvana one can get while incarnated." The cap fits. Best wishes, therefore, from your Jaded Old Hacker, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972 Date: 15-Feb-02 Time: 21:57:47 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
Me - I started some three years ago with SuSE 6.1 (2.2.13 kernel) for two reasons. a) I found a program that did what I wanted, and would only run under linux. b) Getting really p****d of with a burke that thought himself as THE computer expert - Could turn a computer on, play a few games in Windows... Give him a command prompt and he'd be buggered. Even in the last couple of years, I have seen linux and GNU improve in leaps and bounds. I laugh in the face of the worms and virii that land in my mailbox, and remember fondly the lovebug (still have a copy somewhere). Linux now runs on all my computers at home, and I still haven't got round to running the killer app that started me off on this.... Regards, Paul. Feeling young again in the presence of so many old hands <g> On Friday 15 February 2002 9:57 pm, Ted Harding wrote:
Well, since you ask, the story (for good reasons) goes back to 1980 or so when I was using CP/M
Best wishes, therefore, from your Jaded Old Hacker,
I too started on micros way back in 1980, my first commercial project (as a contractor) being for a double glazing company in Ipswich on a floppy-based TRS-80 running TRSDOS. At the time, I was a programmer at the EADT on PDP-11s and moonlighting! At that time, I ran a few PCs running CP/M, we replaced the TRS80 with a Z80 CP/M machine with a hard disk, 5meg I think, and I bought myself, at *huge* expense, an Apricot Xi10 with 984K memory which ran DOS 2.11 I then went to Peachtree in Maidenhead, and worked, in secret, on the IBMPC, which was announced later that year (1981) in November at the Which Computer show. Did a contract for Marley Floors in Kent where they ran MP/M on Televideo kit which supported 16 users and had a *massive* 40meg of disk space! Leapfrogged to and from CP/M and DOS-based PCs to VMS on the Vax for a few years, and ran my first PC Unix in about 1990. surprised not to hear it mentioned here yet: Minix. It was hard work, IIRC... Finally started with Linux in oh, 1998(?) with SuSE 5.3 and haven't looked back. I still use 'Doze for some things, many of my customers do so I have to, but for servers, it's Linux all the way... Cheers, Laurie.
On Monday, February 18, 2002 10:18 AM, Laurie Brown wrote:
..... and ran my first PC Unix in about 1990. surprised not to hear it mentioned here yet: Minix. It was hard work, IIRC...
Yes Laurie, I too started playing with Andrew Tanenbaum's MINIX around 1987 after buying his excellent book "Operating Systems - Design And Implementation" (published by Prentice Hall). Even though MINIX was available to run on "old" PCs with only 256k RAM and I had a "powerful" PC with 512k RAM as standard I remember trembling as I eagerly upgraded my PC memory to "the full 640kB" and upgraded my floppy drive from the standard 360k five and a quarter disks to the "modern" 1.2M Double Sided Double Density five and a quarter so I could load and use the best version of MINIX available. Several years later I "upgraded" to Slackware (can't remember version). Then (1996?) "upgraded to Lasermoon's Linux-FT ver 1.1 which it's README file proudly proclaims was "the only Linux distribution to be developed against real UNIX and POSIX standards by X/Open members (ISV Council) demonstrating a commitment to UNIX standardisation and quality... The POSIX 1 certified release is the first Linux distribution to achieve POSIX.1 certification with the NIST... is the only 64bit clean Linux distribution to be ported to the Digital ALPHA range of processors... the forthcoming release will have full binary compatibility with Digital UNIX". Linux-FT ver 1.1 was based on kernel 1.2.13. Ian.
on Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 11:35:08AM +0000, Martyn Drake wrote:
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?!).
I am bad with dates. The first real linux distribution I ran was redhat 5.2 (I think, in 1998), although I had played with slack 3.4 or so before. It used linux 2.0.36, I think. I decided to switch to Linux after seeing some pretty screenshots in a magazine (pcw), and also having a lot of source code that only worked under a unixy os. And also getting fed up with win16api, win32api, mfc and so on. MS VC++ 1.0 was very unstable and confusing and Symantec C++ 7.2 wasn't much better. I found redhat a real pain, and so was more than happy to switch to slackware 7.0 (in 1999) when I upgraded my main machine from a p100 with 8 megs of ram to a pII 350 with 64megs of ram. Now I only have 1 Linux box (running a very patched and modified slack 7.0) out of around 12 boxes. Most machines run NetBSD.
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.
participants (12)
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Adam Bower -
David Fairey -
Eric Sellin -
Ian Douglas -
John Woodard -
Laurie Brown -
Martyn Drake -
Paul -
Steve Fosdick -
Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk -
wbh -
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