What Did You Do First With Linux? 739
ruphus13 writes "OStatic has an interesting article on remembering the first time you used Linux. Quoting: 'I'm not sure if the admission that I remember my first Linux installation much more clearly than any date with my first boyfriend or my first date with my husband is a really wise thing to put in writing. I will freely admit it wasn't quite as anxiety-inducing as a date, and the long-term relationship that sprang from it taught me quite a bit about myself, how I learn, and how to passionately load kernel modules at boot. So, what was your first Linux experience?'"
Knoppix (Score:4, Interesting)
Slackware 3.0 at the back of Linux Unleashed (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd heard of Linux while at school, so during summer break I saw a book, "Linux Unleashed" with a copy of the latest Slackware (3.0) at the back. So, I bought the book, took it home, made the boot floppies, and proceeded to blow away the Windows 3.1 and installed Slackware 3.0 on the machine. Took a good 45 minutes (it was a 486SX2-50) but then, I was there. I configured my PPP dialer (took half the time than with Winsock dialer) and logged onto my ISP and proceeded to install ircII to then chat with my friends on IRC. I had an IRC star trek game to attend that weekend, so I logged into DALNet and then went to play my game, all the while enjoying the B&W plain jane interface. Then I flipped through the book and found the page talking about virtual terminals. ALT+F2 and BAM, I was then using Lynx to browse the web at the same time. I was in hog heaven. ALT+F3 and I was learning how to make an Xconfiguration script to try and turn on the GUI. then the magical moments, I typed startx.... and 5 minutes later fvwm came up! Rediculously slow compared to today, but compared to Win3.1 and OS/2 2.11, I was loving every moment of it.
I still have the hard drive from that old machine, still sporting Slackware 3.0 on it, with the 1.0.13 kernel in all of its glory residing as vmlinuz.orig.
Both feet, you say? (Score:5, Interesting)
First time was kind of mandated by moneyless employer. With my own Windows Compaq laptop in hand, I flew to Atlanta and was greeted by a bunch of old Unix hippies. I was to write PHP/miniSQL code for them but had only one computer to do it on, mine. Problem was that I had windows and they wanted me to run RH. So, I totally wiped my machine and installed RH. Even at that time (years ago), I had no problem getting Red Hat installed (5.2?) on my presario.
Ever since then my tolerance of Windows has been in nothing but decline.
Long live The Penguin!!
I started with version 0.97 for ONE reason (Score:2, Interesting)
I downloaded (via FTP - since the web was barely born) Linux v0.97 kernel, tools, C-compiler, etc. in 1992 for just one reason... to play the curses-text game "rogue"
And today... I'm going to be downloading Jaunty Jackalope (yes, sorry I'm late) Ubuntu and likely playing nethack (based on rogue) later this afternoon.
Things never change
Here's a Usenet post from me in 1992 bitching about "I DON'T WANT TO HACK THE KERNEL"
http://groups.google.ca/group/comp.os.linux/browse_thread/thread/46815c0980f82296/458335391bd59a18?hl=en&q=dzubin+linux+linus [google.ca]
Back in 1992 when I first started off with Linux, you downloaded two floppy images... you booted off one and halfway through the boot process you swapped disks...
Since I lived in Victoria, Canada at the time, I was able to get the first distribution of a "packaged" ready-to-run Linux called SLS
Later, I started using Slackware and kept using it until Ubuntu 6
Thomas Dzubin
Ubuntu 8.10 2008 on a PPC, well, a PS3... (Score:2, Interesting)
Who know what distro (Score:3, Interesting)
1993
386DX40
4 MB of very expensive RAM
345 MB Maxtor hard-drive
Stack of floppies that had been downloaded over BBS/FidoNet with a 14.4 kbps telephone modem
Linux kernel version was something like 0.97 or so.
I'm not sure if my first try was with Slackware, SLS, or who knows what.
It was at that time that I fell in love with the UNIX way of doing things. It was like an OS written just for programmers.
Kind of Ironic (Score:3, Interesting)
The whole point of the article is to tell what he did with linux when he first installed it. I read the whole article and he never did anything! I was waiting to hear that he actually did something with this linux install other than just getting it to run. No mention of any apps he checked out, how he felt about the desktop, nothing. I mean, what entirely is the point of this article? "I installed linux, got it to run, and never looked back." Whoopdeedoo. For the record, I first started out with debian and would always be stuck installing from floppies and then grabbing packages with a modem. Since I had older hardware (even then at the time) BASH was my desktop and then ZSH for a period of time. I always thought that textmode linux rocked (I still do) and is probably one of the strongest features of UNIX in general. I guess the first thing I ran was telnet, so I could get on a shell and irc for a while. See, this guy installed linux in 2001, and I've been using it off and on since, what 1997? Debian has always been my favorite distro by far and I've always liked Ubuntu by extension.
Re:First time? (Score:3, Interesting)
I dont remember the first distro i tried, but it was 1997 or 1998. I did the install over my windows install and...when i realized it was ugly, going to be a bitch to do anything, and i couldnt get a dial up connection working easily, i reinstalled windows.
I started using debian for toying around with 3 or 4 years ago or so, and I use ubuntu on the desktop for the last 2 years now. I way, way prefer linux over windows, primarily due to software management and interface options.
My First Install (Score:4, Interesting)
The year was 1996. I was young, dumb, and full of ... self-confidence.
I had been posting little Perl includes to a Slackware server at my ISP for a couple months. I was a pure hacker - everything I knew was from trying it. I was still getting emails from their admin saying things like, "Could you stop putting 'end(0);' at the end of your scripts - it's supposed to be 'exit(0);.' You're filling up our error logs."
I made a ten page static website for a little Mom & Pop computer company (Micro Trends). The owner of the company put the URL in an ad in Computer Shopper magazine and his phone and fax caught on fire. The ISP said we were generating too much traffic, and they'd have to start charging him for bandwidth.
So he decides to expand, pull in a T-1, split off... four channels IIRC for data and use the rest for voice. Meanwhile, he talks to me about working for him full time on the website. We reach an agreement and I show up. He hands me a Cisco router, a computer, and a CD with RedHat Rembrandt on it, then points me at a closet where the T-1 lands. "It should be easy," he says, "my cousin set up his own."
So I dive in. I sat in that closet (a coat closet, not a euphemism for a small server room) for the next week, my head spinning with thoughts like, "What does 'kernel panic' mean? It sounds bad." To that I added a few dozen phone calls to Cisco support, the ISP, and everyone I knew who had ever used the word 'Linux' in a sentence (all two of them -- Thanks, JY and Neil).
It is truly amazing what you can achieve when you are not aware of your limitations. I posted a test page early in the second week, and migrated traffic to the new server the week after that.
Then I started on the dynamic site. Filled with things like a a custom shopping basked that carried the order -- including the prices we would charge -- in a cookie. The customer's credit card was transmitted in the clear over HTTP, of course. But that is a story for another article.
It was a helluva lot of fun. I've never looked back, and have not regretted a day of it.
Re:First time? (Score:5, Interesting)
I first installed an early version of slackware, back in 95 or so. I don't quite remember how many floppies it was, but a couple friends and I were able to split the downloads up between us. One boot floppy, one root floppy and a significant number of installation floppies (that we soon learned to copy to the HD before installing). We got this through a hole in the state library system's gopher access number.
I spent a large number of sleepless nights chatting on the 50 person(!) BBSs, facinated by the ability to chat with so many people at once instead of the one or two that I could with the better set-up local dialup BBSs. A little later I learned about ytalk and got to have more "personal" (wink wink, nudge nudge) chats with 1 or 2 people at a time again. :-D
Eventually, I met my wife on the Illinois Institute of Technology computer club's BBS, shadow. Yep, that annoying sound a modem makes was "the handshake o' love" to me.
Now excuse me while I go see if there are any kids on my lawn.
first experience (Score:1, Interesting)
Downoading a TON of floppy disks to run Slackware... don't remember the version. Remember having SLURP because I could get a shell account for cheaper than a PPP account, and with SLURP I could run several emulated serial sessions across that one dial-up connection.
I also remember when X sucked so badly under Linux (without any real applications) that you didn't bother to install it... and if you did, it was SO slow, it still wasn't worth running.
This was also when WINE couldn't even run Solitaire.
Oh, and then there was the joy of downloading the latest Kernel every few days and re-compiling it because it hadn't hit the mystical v 1.0 kernel yet.
Had a 56K frame line at our little college at that point.
Linux as a whole has come a long way since then.
Near riot on the airplane (Score:5, Interesting)
Early 1992, Manchester Computer Center (MCC) distribution on a half-dozen floppies, on a laptop with a 20 MHz 386 with external floating point unit, 4M of RAM, 40M hard disk, 640x480 monochrome display. Added a port of (then) Bellcore's MGR light-weight windowing system.
On an evening flight from New Jersey to Denver, I had the machine out with an analog clock in one window, was compiling something in another, and editing a document in a third. A guy headed back to his seat from the restroom stopped and yelled up the length of the plane, "Hey! This guy's got UNIX on a laptop!" Next thing I knew there were half-a-dozen people hanging over me, elbowing each other and some of the other passengers, all trying to see and asking questions at the same time. The flight attendants were NOT happy.
IIRC, recompiling the kernel on that machine took about 45 minutes.
Redhat 5.2 (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah, I remember when I picked up my ordered box back in 1998 from the mail office, looked at the odd interface pictures from behind the cardboard box and fiddled with the cool manual and stickers that came with it.
The first steps were very odd, installing with the boot disk and several CD-ROMS. I remember being very excited about this totally new system. Beforehand I had only experience from the usual MS-DOS and Windows. The road to 100% Linux use was long and hard. So much new commands, new way of thinking about things and these strange source code packages you could download.
Lots of compiling the kernel trying to get my SB32 and ISDN cards working .. the ISDN setting up was a lot of manual work back then, I even wrote a document on how to get it done in Finnish as nobody else had done before.
Playing quakeworld, ircing and listening to mp3s at the same time, nice :) Also the quality of the developer tools and environment really surprised me, compared to the MS-DOS counterparts I was used to, like 64-kbit segments of memory.
After that I guess I tried every possible distro available. Slackware was my pick of choice after moving away from Redhat, and after that Gentoo, then Debian and now Ubuntu if I have to use Linux. Mac Os X is so much nicer on the desktop.
I remember all the years that were supposed to be the 'year of Linux on the desktop' .. I guess their approaching that now :)
ahh those were the days (Score:3, Interesting)
So what did I first do with Linux? I ran gcc, vi, started learning Perl, used minicom, spent many pleasant hours in
Eventually in my pursuit of a CSE degree, I had to install Windows 95 in a dual-boot configuration to run LogicWorks. But I did put VNC on the lab computers and just VNC'ed into the lab after they were closed from my SLIRP'ed dialup at home. And whenever I had to work from the Lab computers, I was VNC'ed into a terminal on my home machine. (This was before the ubiquitous putty)
We thought 1 GB HD was big back then and we liked it, now get off my lawn you whippersnappers!
over the rainbow (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wrote a C Program that allocated a 4MB array (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a similar story.
The fact that the system came with a compiler was the reason I knew this os was for me. That and the fact that I squashed a really annoying bug in a program I was using. Took me 30 minutes to isolate it and fix it with one line (python), I was speechless. Mind you the bug wasn't fixed in the upstream atm.
This opened my eyes to the power of oss.
Re:Oddly enough, gaming got me into linux... (Score:3, Interesting)
Virtualbox still isn't low latency enough for sound apps to be truly useful. I'd love to see some sort of virtualbox flavor that we designed purely for running sound applications like live and reason. There's just way too much latency and I wouldn't mind even devoting a good chunk of CPU to having low latency ASIO outs in a virtual machine, but I think that the nature of the beast prohibits it. I mean, this is one of the bigger stumbling blocks to just virtualizing windows, at least for me. Also there are a whole bunch of games that don't run very well without excellent 3d acceleration. It has come a long way with the OpenGL-->Direct3d pipe, and wine still runs a bunch of stuff surprisingly well on the native side. Lately, I'm a lot more interested in running Linux in a virtual box on windows, but I don't think there is good 3d support for compiz and whatnot yet, whereas windows guests in linux get decent acceleration I think. The last time I devoted a significant chunk of time on it, I had linux as a guest on my windows box. Ubuntu 8.10 would run for a while and then corrupt on seamless mode. After a while it got to the point where simply booting into seamless would make the whole windows completely disappear. I posted a bug report to the virtual box team and never got a reply. Who knows. Maybe I'm just cursed. Ubuntu 9.04 won't boot on my machine either. :(
The Adventures of cptnapalm and tankgirl (Score:5, Interesting)
In the 1997th year, much Quaking was being done by myself, a young 2ltnapalm. I fragged and it was good. Yet not all was well in the land of the rocket launcher. There was this fell beast, Windows 95, which ever was watchful for any joy in the world, existing only to bring the blue hell to the screens of the earth.
"Surely, there cannot be this misery alone for the computers of the earth. For in the earlier days of home computing I cast off Windows 3.0, who was then but a pretender operating system, for DOS 5. But Windows has grown more ambitious if not more useful and its infection spreads wide and no retreat to DOS does it permit. Tell me, Quakers, are their no alternatives to this dreck? And speak not of MacOS, for it is a joke."
Out of the depths of IRC, from the servers of EFNet, the oracles of #quake did speak.
"Linux. For it is stable and the Carmack has decreed that Quake shall run upon it with joy in its heart."
"Carmack the Wise is a powerful programmer and much does he understand. Hark, I shall give this Linux thing a shot."
To the merchant Computer City, I did go and they had a boxed copy of Red Hat 4.2 (if my memory does not betray me) which I did buy. Upon returning to my abode, I did begin preparations for the installation upon my whitebox. Partitioning was simple enough. The choices which one needed to make were not difficult, but to one who was but yet a pup it, it was so foreign. Eventually, perseverance and much RTMFing did triumph. Linux was installed. But one other thing must be done. X.
Many were the incantations invoked and the curses hurled due to X. Long days were spent editing text and typing that accursed startx only to find my work in vain. And yet did I endure for I knew that Windows 95 was cackling in the darkness of Redmond, awaiting my defeat to consume my soul should I fail and never again would I be able to hold my head high amongst the geeks of the realm.
Always teetering on the edge of disaster, but never managing to destroy my machine (which the pages of man ensured me was possible), I one day found something new. Something unexpected. For after messing with mode lines and color depths and other things arcane, startx worked. A graphical user interface was mine!
"My heart doth rejoice in this success! I shall install Window Maker and Enlightenment and many others besides so that I may never be bored with the look and feel of this machine, for that is the crowning glory of this victory: I can have any UI I desire."
Feeling very pleased with myself, I looked over all I surveyed with great confidence, yet the victory was not mine alone. For this unnamed box had endured much in the trials of installation. Yes. "Endured much beyond the reckoning of the typical home computer," said I, "and not just endured, but thrived and in the coming days shall have many challenges to overcome, so henceforth let this machine be known as tankgirl!"
Many were the adventures of tankgirl and, now, ltnapalm. Running a website over a cable modem, a MySQL database server, and numerous other tasks that tankgirl did perform, singing all the while with her K6 233 and 128 megabytes of RAM. In time, helper machines were obtained so that less interesting tasks tankgirl would not have to do herself, for her processing time was valuable and wasted on other tasks. A 486 there was, scorned by many as out of date and useless, now raised from its nadir to its apex with Linux installed and became a mighty wall of fire, shielding the local area network from the depredations of script kiddies and other wearers of the black hat of crackerdom.
Many were the nooks and crannies that cptnapalm and tankgirl delved into together, from dabbling in C programming and shell scripting to kernel compilation and switching to Debian. Together we witnessed the horrors of sendmail.cf and learned the mysteries of bind. And Quake there was, of course, too.
After long years, time did takes its toll and its toll was death. Impoverishment prevente
1997, RHL 4.1, gimp (Score:5, Interesting)
My first experience installing and using linux was with Red Hat Linux 4.1 [wikipedia.org]. It was mostly out of curiosity as my younger brother had been using linux but I didn't expect much from a free operating system. At the time I was running Windows 95 [wikipedia.org], Windows NT 4 [wikipedia.org] and OS/2 Warp 4 [wikipedia.org] on the same box so I was already well prepared the difficulties of a multi-boot setup and using a diversity of operating systems.
Its been awhile but I don't recall any major issues with the installation. It definitely required more tweaking than the other operating systems to get a working desktop, but as pretty much anyone in this forum knows there is a high probability of install difficulties with almost any operating system when you build a custom system rather than purchase a pre-installed system.
I don't recall the window manager I used at the time but it was a functional desktop albeit not as polished as Windows or OS/2. But something interesting happened, I found Gimp [gimp.org].
I had a large flatbed color scanner on a SCSI bus that I used in Windows and OS/2. In Windows I used the applications that shipped with the scanner and for OS/2 I purchased an image editing program, I don't recall the name anymore, in both cases the applications absolutely refused to use the full size of the scanner. The scanner was a full legal size 8.5x14 but the proprietary applications would only allow up to 8.5x11 scans. With a little research I found there were applications available for purchase that would use the full scan size but I was not in dire need of full legal size scans so I held off on the purchase.
When I used Gimp+SANE with the flatbed scanner it allowed complete legal size scans! My eyes were opened. In the proprietary closed source software world the extra scan size required extra cash, which seemed ludicrous and disingenuous as I doubt it required any significant code changes to implement, but in the open source world the software was written to take full advantage of the hardware's capabilities and it was FREE!
At that point I was sold. By 2003 I was only running linux based operating systems, my laptop, three desktops in the house, a couple of firewalls/routers and a few servers. During this time I have become progressively aware of the ridiculous demands [catb.org] of the closed source proprietary software vendors. They have become sick and demented on their own greed to the point where they've twisted the purpose of Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 [house.gov] of the United States Constitution from "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" into some bizarre protected and perpetual revenue stream. In this upside down world created by closed source software vendors research and development capital is spent not to advance the science or art but instead to create false limitations [slashdot.org] on there proprietary applications capabilities to create equally false product price points.
Re:I never installed X (Score:5, Interesting)
But the first thing I typed into the shell was:
man woman
Then I giggled.
My first *nix shell experience wasn't with Linux at all, but SunOS. First day at university, and I had received no instruction on how to use Unix at all, had read no books on it, had never even heard anyone _talking_ about it. All I had was a sign on the wall telling me how to sign up for a new account and log in.
So, I finally get to a shell prompt. And the only relevant experience I have is from using either CP/M and/or DOS. So there I am:
$ help
help: command not found
$ commands
commands: command not found
$ what the fuck?
what: command not found
So I start peering around the room. Guy behind me is also doing this. Sneaky look... hmmm... "ls" seems to do things. Try it. It works. So there I am. Only damned command I know is "ls". I know from somewhere that this system uses forward slashes to separate directories, so "ls /". "ls /bin". Start trying random programs in there. So I find 'man' by experimentation. Things start to get easier.
This rather peculiar way of learning Unix shell probably had the bizarrest of influences on my habits. For example, for e-mail I used 'elm', despite 'pine' being way more popular at the time. Why? It was earlier in the alphabet, so I tried it first. I used 'rn' for months before I found 'trn'.
Replaced a way-unstable NT server (Score:3, Interesting)
Spring 2000, iirc. I'd been running a home NT4 mail / web server for about a year, and it was a royal pain in the ass. Half-life of about two weeks between bluescreens. Wednesday evenings dedicated to patches and defrags and reboots. Intermittent, unexplainable IIS freezes.
I was contemplating dropping a couple $K on new hardware, mostly out of desperation. At the same time, I'd played with Linux a few times, liked it, and it already had a well-established rep for stability. This was also the time the first commercial distros were coming into their own. I finally decided to take the plunge and bought (yes, actually paid for) a copy of SuSE, v.5 I think.
Steep learning curve; much swearing and regret; but when I finally put the beast online, it ran. For 14 months, and what finally killed it was a power failure too long for the UPS to handle.
In the nine years since (going from SuSE on a slot-A Athlon, to Mandrake/Mandriva on a dual Athlon XP, to nine Ubuntu VMs on a pair of triple-core Phenoms) I've had exactly two software-related crashes, one due to a misconfigured driver, the other from a runaway app that filled up /var. Uptime for this latest interation, which went online in Dec. is 100%.
And patch-the-server Wednesdays are a distant memory.
Re:First time? (Score:3, Interesting)
Neomonk said "I first installed an early version of slackware, back in 95 or so. I don't quite remember how many floppies it was"
I installed about the same time. It was 40 floppies for a full install. I downloaded them from sunsite onto my SPARCStation at work which fortunately had a floppy drive. dd them onto the floppies and then off home with them.
The install was based on the 1.0 kernel and I was putting it on because I had been working on some code on my SPARC and the SGI Indigo we had in the lab and wanted to compile it on a 486DX33 PC I had at home. Unfortunately, the machine was running Windows 3.1 and the Microsoft C compiler I had simply didn't want to compile the code. That and the lack of any decent network capabilities made me look at Linux. It took a couple of goes but I got the machine up and was able to get X going in 1024x768 interlaced mode. Compiled my code and it was good.
I used the machine to develop new software I intended to run on bigger machines, plus I wrote my PhD thesis using LaTeX since I was able to get the entire text 10x over on a single floppy so I could carry the disc to the office and keep a backup on two different sites. Shortly I upgraded the HD to 200MB, found some more RAM to get it up to 20MB from the original 8, added a 14.4 modem, Sound Blaster card and CD-ROM and it was really going somewhere.
Amazing how much power that little machine gave me.
Was my first very own OS... (Score:2, Interesting)
Slackware in 1993 (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow - brings back memories ;) I think it was 1993 at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. A stage 2 computer science source said we could use the lab for programming, or we could install this thing called Slackware Linux that had gcc and everything we needed for out projects. So, of course I did. Mmmm, floppy installs. So, it was mainly used early on for COSC assignments. A few years later setup Red Hat as a DNS and webserver in 1996 for our fledgling web development company. In later years after I stepped out of the IT field continued to use it for servers in our small business, although starting to fix it up with OS X as well. Never used it as a desktop - have primarily been Windows, and over the last nearly 5 years OS X (which seems to be a fantastic compromise).
But yeah, the first thing was COSC programming assignments in '93.