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Iphigenie
Iphigenie
When did you use Linux for the first time? and which one :D
April 27, 2009 - Comment - Share
1993 or 4, DLD - Iphigenie
slackware was the first linux i experimented with somewhere around 2000 or so. didn't do much with it. Redhat was the first one i played around seriously with, around 2002 or so. i've been around *nix variants though since about 1993. - Imabug
1991 - playing with (probably the very) first Linux ever published - A. T.
@silpol and that was ...? - Michael Bravo
RHL 6.1 (Cartman). Somewhere around 2000. - Takins can bump
I have tinkered with 0.96pl8 or so, maybe earlier builds but I do not remember to be exact. It was around time Eugene Crosser introduced first Cyrillic support into the kernel, I remember having to hack it in manually before that. Later, I worked in a company (with @yan here) which sold SLS on 5" disks (and later on 3") here in St.Petersburg, company was called Urbansoft. I am totally unable to map any of that to a timeline, though. - Michael Bravo
1999 or 2000 I think. Red Hat 5? (If this can't be I probably have totally wrong memory on this) I installed it one time, hoping to see something very special. Went back to Win98 quickly. I did play quite a lot of Sokoban (one of the many pre-installed games) on it though. - Meryn Stol
@mbravo: Hey, I think I remember Urbansoft ads in Russian translation of Knuth's "The TeXBook". They were distributing Cyrillic TeX as well weren't they? - Takins can bump
1991 you could get SLS via walnut creek and some company in germany, iirc - that would have been a bit before slackware. I tried SLS but remember DLD was slicker - although in my head the distro I used was bought by Suse - considering SLS was the base of suse but DLD was bought by redhat (according to wikipedia) I am now unsure which I would have used. I used slackware for a while too - but then BSD was more unixey so i used that (the goal was to have access to an unix-ey set of tools at home). My main OS was then OS/2 from 1995 to nearly 2000 - Iphigenie
@aivanov yes, and @yan was the TeX (and PostScript) resident guru :) - Michael Bravo
it definitively was DLD, 1993 - and redhat bought them but by then I was mostly on OS/2 and R switched to SuSe (he's still on suse today) - Iphigenie
1992. Slackware. - Joey Gibson
if it's 1992 it was probably SLS, you remember slackware cause that's what you used next, it was modified from SLS and was, well, waaay easier? - Iphigenie
I did have a Linux CD in 1996, but did not use it till 1997; it was Debian potato or such. before that, I've had enough of Digital Unix and FreeBSD by that time to want also a Linux box, but by 1997 Linux became a viable enough desktop for a workplace, and nobody wanted to give me an Alpha box for a desktop %) - 9000
Jeez, you guys are *old*. ;) - Meryn Stol
Don't remember, but it was the last time, too ;) - Jemm
My grandmother is a linux user. Don't think much people can say that! :D (Admittedly, it's a dumbed-down "grannies" PC with big buttons for the few features it has, but it is based on Linux!) - Meryn Stol
1992 - sco linux by the way. Sad to see what has happened to them. - Dan owns Comicsforge.com
Never - used QNX 1.x in the early 80's though -- but that doesn't count I am guessing? - Brian Sullivan
1994. I don't recall which one, but I think it was slackware. Till that time I was pretty much all UNIX and till 2000 remained primarily a Unix person - Deepak Singh
circa version 0.9x - I started with slackware, and morphed it from there. - Kevin Johnson
I don't remember, but know I'd been using Red Hat for a while when I got Red Hat Linux 2.1.ORA, from the O'Reilly "Running Linux" Companion CD-ROM, 1996 - Ken Sheppardson
Wow uh...It could've been Caldera OpenLinux, and I bought it from PC World (here in the UK that's a shop, not a magazine/website) and that was quite a while ago... Not my first memorable experience with Linux though, that came with Slackware, and Mandrake. - Jalada
Mandrake around 2000, I think I tried using NetBSD before that and failed miserably, so I bought a book and it came with a Mandrake disc - Ryan
2000. Solaris. - Pierre Lindenbaum
@techwag there weren't any such thing as SCO Linux, ever. So it was either SCO UNIX, or you might be referring to Caldera OpenLinux, but the company was started in 1994 and wasn't subverted towards SCO until early 2000's - Michael Bravo
mid 1990s, slackware. - DGentry
Mid 90s, slackware was the first on a machine I owned. I did some fortran 77 coding on a UNIX mainframe much earler. Played with RedHat some a few years later. Now use Windows almost exclusively. How times have changed. - Mr. Gunn
Early 90s. I installed it from a Slackware distribution. - Morton Fox
2003, knoppix. for recovering teacher's computer :) - Ahmet Ercan
'94, Slackware installed off floppies on a 386DX40. - Nick Lothian
The first one I "installed" and ran on my PC was zipslack back in either fall 97 or spring 98. I also ran into Redhat in my high school's computer lab in 97. - Daniel J. Pritchett
You guys should revisit slackware, or some of the desktop distros built on top of it. It's still good :D - Iphigenie
Most of the OSes I actually chose don't exist anymore. Am I cursed? - Iphigenie
OS killer! :) - Imabug
Red Hat or Mandrake, I think it was RT, late 90s - Micah
2002, debian potato - orie from fftogo
the first linux i used professionally was redhat (server), before that i was always on proper Unix. Used redhat 1999-2004 (the rackspace UK edition, very not stable). We also used Debian (when installing at clients, since redhat licensing was iffy), later fedora - and switched all servers to BSD in 2005. - Iphigenie
2001. The IT boys taught me at Oracle. - Mona Nomura
2007. Ubuntu. never looked back. - Alejandro
Started messing around with Slackware in the late '90s, then really didn't do much until I started working with Gentoo and Red Hat around 2005 and Ubuntu a little later. - Tom Harrison
remember how hard it was to install? felt like 99 steps - Iphigenie
Last week, ubuntu 9.0.4 & open solaris - DanDan
Summer of '07. Switched from XP to Ubuntu. - Steven Perez
2005: Debian - now on Ubuntu. - Sarah Peterman
'97 with Red Hat. Also Mandrake. My god, those installs were /fun/. - Arlan K.
I might have tried Linux first time via Telnet connection in 1998 but started to use it on my own computers in 2001. - Daniel Schildt
Hmmm, first ever was Slack c.1996 but really started to actually use it with Redhat 4 and 5. - Kenton
Opps, just noticed the question is for Linux, not UNIX ... Hmmm .... I believe Slackware in Mid 90's. - Rui Pereira
Not sure about those old days of Telnet fun, but later on I started to use Debian. After that, I have tried Mandrake (didn't like), RedHat (pain to administrate), SUSE (almost usable), Ubuntu (nice!) and probably few other distributions. These days, it's more likely Ubuntu or some another derivative of Debian. (While I have grown to like Mac OS X more than Linux recently.) - Daniel Schildt
2007 - Pardus (a Turkish distribution) - Alp
experimented some Redhat on 1999/2000, re-started with Debian on 2002, now using Debian/Ubuntu - Matteo
wow Greg - still have an OS/2 box and a solaris box, but neither are quite that old. You packrat! - Iphigenie
Sometime in the mid 90s, started with Slackware... - Holger Eilhard
1996-ish, Slackware - mikepk
when I was 13, i believe it was redhat! - hormoz
1993 or 1994... Watchtower PPC on an Amiga 1200. - Brome
Around 2000. RedHat 5.something. - Jan Aerts
Hmmm. I don't think I did much Linux until after OS X came out (dual-boot), but UNIX in early '90s... AIX-RS/6000 & SunOS/Solaris-SPARC. - Tinfoil 2.0
Sometime around 1996, it was one of three distro that came with a book I got. I was running OS/2 Warp as my OS at the time and when IBM later shutdown OS/2 support, I switched on over to Debian. - Grant Bierman
1996, Red Hat. Took me until 1999 to become a regular Linux user. - Jack&Cleo
a knoppix live cd was my into to linux - Phil Maxwell
1994, Slackware, installed from 24 or so floppies on a 486. But then Win 95 came out. I switched back to Linux in 1998, with Red Hat 6.0. I haven't used Windows as my primary OS since then, although I did end up switching to OS X in 2002. - Victor Ganata
Sometime in the early 90's. Probably slackware. - Rodfather
It was Slackware (or maybe Debian) and I installed it on a Packard Bell that had previously been running Win 3.1. Not sure what year that was :) - Rah-PM 2012
first slackware out ;) - guruvan (Rob Nelson)
Around 1996, Slackware. - Eric
I'm in the "never" camp. Anyone else? - Rochelle
Linux on the server or desktop? - Rishabh Mishra (p248)
2003ish Red Hat 6.0. First when I switched was SuSE 9.3 Pro. @Rochelle: Never... not even on embedded devices? that is unusual. - Jake (aka Jawee)
2007 ubuntu - Ryan Dadey
It would have been Redhat in 99-00 - Will Higgins™
2001 Knoppix - Keith - @tsudo
1997. I think I tried Slackware first, then quickly moved to RedHat. I was cleaning up all my old distro CDs on the weekend and had a little trip down memory lane .. the oldest burnt disc was probably RedHat 6.2, but I think there were some older versions on the pressed CDs I bought with RedHat, SUSE, Slackware and Debian and a commercial MetroX X11 server. - Andrew Perry
I'm impressed how many people have kept CDs and floppies from the early 90s - I think I have a few games and might have windows 98 somewhere, but I cleared most of the older stuff when I moved - Iphigenie
Was trying to remember what some of these linux distributions desktops *looked* like, and for most I cannot. I should have kept screenshot, my desktop(s) are as much part of my history as the flats we lived in... - Iphigenie
2005 installed it on my working station when I had a lazy working day, I believe it was Ubuntu... the boss didn't like that - Dobromir Hadzhiev
This one's easy, never and none. - Christian (Simply X)
1999, RH 5.2. - Pawel Szczesny
1999 RH - ethem
1995 Slackware, but I had SLS kicking around on CD-ROM from Walnut Creek a while before that but coudln't work out what to do with it :) - Daniel Swan
1993 or 1994, Slackware - Lars Juhl Jensen
in 1995, Slackware GNU/Linux v1.2.3 on an i386 SX-20 ;) This machine became as 'fast' as the i486 DX2-66 running windows: it impressed me, I continued to use Linux. - Thierry R. Andriamirado
Years ago and I don't remember. Seriously started about 98-99. Really liked using it. - Richard A.
1994 : needed a cheap unix like system, the distro does not exist anymore (I remember the CD to be red with white grid on it), we still used it 10 years after that - Olivier
June 2001, Red Hat Linux 7.1 Norton Antivirus had crashed my pc, and I was bored. - Ahsan Ali
@mbravo that was ftp-downloaded from garbo.uwasa.fi if my memory serves me correct... and it was NOT classical linux as we know it nowadays -- rather kernel with BSD-stuff glued on top of it *with chewing gum and what not* ;) - A. T.
@silpol, that is as dedicated hard-core as it gets, i certainly could never bother with the download and build approach :D PS: it is still linux nowadays - linux kernel, a thick layer of old school BSD and/or gnu apps and services (apart from the filesystems, many of the components still today pre-existed linux), then you get onto the X and windows managers and apps where nobody can't tell anymore which are "linux" inspired and which are not. - Iphigenie
@Nick Lothian - we are almost the same, 1994, slackware, but mine was on a 386SX33 ; that sx part really bit me in the ass because, as many of you probably know, it had no math coprocessor and thus couldn't handle floats. No matter how much I tried I never could get that damn thing to dial up and connect to my ISP. - Bill Rawlinson
@silpol yeah, mine was something like that as well, see version numbers I mentioned :) - Michael Bravo
Last year on my Eee PC - Shey
1996 or 1997 and I think the first one might have been mandrake. I can't remember. I'm a ubuntu junkie now though. - Beau Liening