Dude I remember when live booting knoppix was impressive. Hell my intro to Linux was mandrake. We have so many great distros and documentation available now it’s crazy.
Ahh Knoppix :’) I think live boots were my introduction to Linux.
I ended up learning by memory the US keyboard layout because i got tired of having to change it whenever i booted knoppix up.
Now i have all my keyboards set to US international. Best layout for programing.
I remember back then it was easier installing the OS than installing third party software 🫣
Both are hella easy now, flathub my beloved.
Hm. I started using Linux (Ubuntu) somewhat around 2007. And I was quite fascinated how flashy it was with all those desktop effects compared to the rather boring XP. Only problem I had back in the day was wifi, but I didn’t play a lot of games at that time.
But yeah, once I solved that wifi problem I had internet, so there was a difference.
thats me installing windows in the 90s, waiting for hours, not sure if it just froze
SUSE on 6 CDs
My first Linux distro was Puppy Linux, on a computer with no internet. I downloaded it on an internet cafe to replace Windows XP Fenix Edition.
My PC was too weak to run any flavor of the major distros, and I wanted to give it a go.
Best computer-related decision of my life to ditch Windows and use Linux as my daily driver.
I used xp for 15 years and i miss it. Fuck this ribbon nonsense too. Where is the desktop cloud? My precious is lost… i’m lost…i have no fucking idea where that file i just saved went… i built a pc in 2002 and progranned a vcr as well. Now i’m toast.
Definitely describes my switch back in 2008 when canonical still sent out Ubuntu CDs for free in the mail. We had dial up so it was faster for them to mail me a CD than to try and download the image myself.
If the ping rate is irrelevant, then the good old sneakernet is a great way to transfer large amounts of data.
I remember finding an early ubuntu CD just lying in the street. Took it home, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t turn my ailing laptop right around. Got 5 more years out of that thing.
Wow an Ubuntu CD just casually laying on the streets
Just laying there.
In the street?
In the street. Like the gutter.
It had like a cardboard case covering it, though.
It’s more likely than you think
lying
No, it’s true!
Dad?
The zines from the nerds of the 00’s.
Friend of mine once found a frozen-over cd of “Shaggy - Wasn’t Me” in his backyard, and after cleaned and thawed, it worked no problem. I guess someone really hated that single?
Wasn’t me
Still have my physical Ubuntu Hardy Heron DVD somewhere
Lmao I did this exact thing. Installed Ubuntu on the home desktop. Immediately occurred to me that I couldn’t connnect to the internet to look up how to do anything else. Scrambled so hard to find that XP disc and atone for my reckless folly.
It forced me to learn. It took me weeks to get X configured and working correctly. I had an internet subscription and a modem but it also took weeks to get it to work on Linux. My distribution came on a CD from a magazine but some dependencies were not included, so I had to reboot under Windows to download a missing package, reboot on Linux and try again, then need to get the next dependency. We came a long long way from having to specify the vertical refresh rate of the monitor in xf86config.
Starting with a French version of Slackware was brutal but I had nothing else.
Be 12 in 1998
Literally just ecstatic that I could wiggle around a little X on a blank screen after giving up trying to load a window manager.
Pop in a BeOS live CD to feel like I did something cool
Exact same experience. What district did you install for the cursor wiggle? Mine was slackware
Later mandrake was noob friendly enough for me to get a real start
Started on Slackware too. I remember building my own kernel and having to make sure it fit on a 1.44MB floppy.
make menuconfigah i had forgotten about xf86config. /silenthillvoice
I remember first learning about linux OS and how to create a Linux USB installer using rufus to bypass the password my parents had put on the windows side. In those days there was no eifi boot loader lock you could access the files just by trying out the new OS you had in your USB. LOL.
I remember getting a copy of linux from my friends at a local LAN party (though it was tokenring party for us) around ‘96. 2 floppy disks. I’m 99% sure it was slackware.
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You guys only got alcoholism??!?
Crack is whack, or at least that’s what I keep telling myself
Huh
I told you it’s not a LAN party, it’s a TokenRing party!
Hah, yeah I got a Debian floppy and then tried to install packages over DSL. Somehow it didn’t immediately kill my interest in Linux, eventually ran OpenBSD as my server for a while.
I started with floppies too, when I bought my copy of Conectiva Linux 3.0. It came with a hefty manual that was instrumental for a newbie like me.
Shit, what games could be played on token ring?
Token Ring is a network protocol where a token—a small data packet—circulates around a ring topology, allowing only the device holding the token to transmit data, thus avoiding collisions. We played Doom and Quake.
I know what it is, and I played both those on lan, but my older bro set it up so I guess I just don’t remember. Fucking crazy that shit could work fast enough.
I don’t remember, what was the lag like for token ring? Lan just feels like it should be 100 ping or less
Not really. It was a local network, and sure the latency increased linearly with the number of nodes, but for a small LAN party it would be quite serviceable.
Yeah, sorry. Nerded out there for a sec on description. I don’t remember the lag that much, doom was ok. I think we all upgraded to 10Base-T ethernet (you remember the bnc stuff) after playing quake and host tended to have the gaming advantage. A few of us worked at a pc repair shop, so we could source (aka borrow) the parts if we couldn’t afford to buy them.
A few laters Quake world came out, someone finally popped for a hub and we all had 100mbit cards installed. But around then, we got @HOME in my neighborhood and gamespy was my new friend. I hated hauling my whole setup once a month after a year or so.
doom’s netcode is weird as well, all the clients run in perfect lock-step. seems like it would be weird on non-duplex networks.
Knoppix was the shit back then.
I tried out knoppix. I probably used the shell in knoppix more than any other distro than Irix.
