Back in the day

brummie · 8 Feb 2009 at 09:46

Well the year 2000.

http://www.tuxradar.com/content/archives-best-distros-2000

I still have the original mandrake7 disks. Cant remember it looking that ugly though :eek:

KDE though, so that explains some of it

Anyone else using one of those distros at the time?

GarethDW · 8 Feb 2009 at 12:57

I started off using a version of Knoppix, back (I think) in '01. I then decided to try out Mandrake and fell in love with it. It had everything I needed at that time... can't remeber what version I was using, but it was when they started doing different Packs.

I only made the switch to Debian when Mandrake merged with some other company and became Mandriva. From that point on, I've always used Debian-based distros - although I did flirt with Sabayon (Gentoo-based distro) for a while.

Currently using Xubuntu 8.10.

brummie · 8 Feb 2009 at 17:53

mandrake was my first choice as it was very good. Shame these mandrake 7 cd's dont work anymore

When ubuntu was released i switched to that and still use it now. Currently 9.04 beta.

Mr-White · 8 Feb 2009 at 18:42

i installed my first distro mandrake back in 2002 until my flat mate killed the HDD

MW

fishfishfish · 8 Feb 2009 at 21:53

Nice to see how things have moved on since then! I used several of these back in the KDE 1 days: including Corel, WinLinux 2000, Mandrake 7, Red Hat 6.1, Caldera and Suse 7. Stuck with Suse for a year or two (because it cost me £70), then switched to Mandrake for a few releases before migrating to Red Hat 9 -> Fedora -> Debian and then Ubuntu.

I was new to Linux then and installing it was the biggest challenge to me at the time (I can remember being totally stumped at installing Debian back then). Amazing to think how far things have moved on. No need to worry about drivers or hardware support (virtually everything works perfectly out of the box these days); no need to manually mount drives; USB devices just work when you plug them in and the network is configured automatically.

riddlermarc · 8 Feb 2009 at 22:04

Mine was Red Hat 6,2 I believe and for someone who was useless at Linux stiff I managed to get an ISA 33.6k modem going (back in 2000).

dave-lew99 · 9 Feb 2009 at 01:29

I came to the linux scene quite late - 2004 was my first install - Suse Linux

Around the same time i also managed a Gentoo install (which is impressive considering my linux knowledge at the time) A bit later on i also did Mandrake and FreeBSD.

These days my servers run CentOS, i abandoned Ubuntu as a desktop as it was too buggy...

Cromulent · 9 Feb 2009 at 05:11

Cool. I think my first version of Linux was Red Hat 4 or 5. Been awhile though since now I have moved on to BSD based OS's and don't really play with Linux much any more.

Mobius 1 · 9 Feb 2009 at 09:09

i started using linux back when suse 10.1 first came out i believe. damn nothing worked back then (personal experience)

it has certainly has come a long long way.

i remember in 10.1 trying to hook my dads printer up to it but that wouldn't work

same for wireless cards, so i had to hook it up to the router with an ethernet cable to update etc.. and huge updates they were! i remember doing a fresh install only to be confronted with a huge amount of updates on a 1mb line

brummie · 9 Feb 2009 at 13:14

riddlermarc said:
Mine was Red Hat 6,2 I believe and for someone who was useless at Linux stiff I managed to get an ISA 33.6k modem going (back in 2000).

I forgot ISA even existed

i remember having problems with my modem so i bought a serial one which worked out the box. Think that was about 2001 though, shortly before the switch to broadband.

Napaim · 9 Feb 2009 at 16:05

The first one I used was Mepis a few years back, even then the graphics were so much better than that!
These days if I'm using linux I generally stick to the terminals :|

BigglesPiP · 9 Feb 2009 at 16:18

I began in 2005 with Fedora Core 4, maybe 3. What does Fedora Core 1 look like?

GarethDW · 9 Feb 2009 at 19:13

BigglesPiP said:
I began in 2005 with Fedora Core 4, maybe 3. What does Fedora Core 1 look like?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fedora_Core_1.png

GarethDW · 9 Feb 2009 at 19:17

Found some of FC3 too....

http://www.thecodingstudio.com/open...hp?linux_distribution_sm=Fedora Core 3 Test 1

Wipster · 10 Feb 2009 at 19:56

Wow blast from the past haha

Rich43 · 11 Feb 2009 at 03:06

I was late, I started with fedora core 5 i think.

task · 11 Feb 2009 at 12:21

I remember Corel coming out, it was even on the shelves of a shop where people have purple shirts where I lived at the time. I also remember it being terrible and going back to Debian or RH.

Caldera didn't thrill me either, seemed quite stable though. Those were the days

PhilGQ · 12 Feb 2009 at 19:09

I very nearly bought Coral Linux, the way the box read you could have though it was a decent OS, bringing the power of Debian to everyone or some such nonsense. Although after Coral bailed, Xandros took over the distribution and they have gone some way acquiring Linspire and having a version on for the EEE PC.

Does anyone remember the United Linux Initiative, SUSE, Caldera, Turbo and Conectiva tried to standardise Linux. Redhat wasn't invited so the others could gang up on it and Mandrake thought it unnecessary. It didn't take off though, Conectivia was aquired by Mandrake forming Mandriva and Caldera became SCO and we all know how that ended.

LizardKing · 12 Feb 2009 at 19:44

1st started out on RedHat 4x or there abouts, that was painful! Took a good few attempts to install and get a working desktop.
Its easy to forget just how un user friendly it was back then. Yum was a very welcome improvement!

TheOtherPhil · 18 Feb 2009 at 11:34

LizardKing said:
1st started out on RedHat 4x or there abouts, that was painful! Took a good few attempts to install and get a working desktop.
Its easy to forget just how un user friendly it was back then. Yum was a very welcome improvement!

Yeah, I hear that! I started around RH4x as well but tried damn near every distro from that era lol. I've tried all the distro's - spent a good few years with SUSE and the same with Gentoo. I'm currently running Ubuntu x64 - mainly for it's ease of use and massive support. I'm not much into kernel kung fu and compilation feng shui anymore - I just don't have the time lol!