Dead Hat's rpm hell was lulz :D ...

At that time, i didn't know how to manage dependencies "The Slacker way", neither to build from source and package into an installable/removable format ( rpm/tgz/deb ) this is why I owe 99% of what i know of Linux to Slackware and Arch.... not to Ubuntu/Dead Hat/Suse/Fedora...

Ubuntu

Arch's PKGBUILD system is easy IMO...

Grab the PKGBUILD and the source tarball, extract the source, run makepkg in the directory containing the PKGBUILD and the source, and (assuming you have all the right dependencies) you have a neat .tar.xz that you can install with pacman -U <filename.tar.xz>. :D

The first distro I ever tried was Knoppix, running it off a livecd. Like many newbies who set out without any assistance, I was disappointed that it "would not" play most of my media and that it "could not" write to my ntfs partitions (the latter is actually correct; ntfs-3g was still under development). So I returned to my Windows ME; unlike the rest of humanity, I did not find it bad at all (given what I knew at that time..).
Then in 2005, as my computer was having more and more trouble running newer software (VIA 666Mhz, 256MB RAM, 128MB integrated graphics), I rushed out to get one of those innovative Core 2 Duo systems. I immediately stumbled over an obstacle that made me reconsider Linux: neither my copy of XP64 (200 euros!) nor my ASUS motherboard (200 euros!) had drivers to support SATA. Puzzled why there should be a SATA option in the BIOS, I got in touch with ASUS and was kindly informed that it was meant for the formidable new MS product that was to be released a few months later (Vista, LOL...).Yep, I felt robbed and had little inclination to hold off those extra months, only to spend another 150 or 200 euros. So I tried Debian 3.1, as I had learned that it was in some way related to Knoppix. Unfortunately, though I liked it very much, it wasn't without its shortcomings: no networking (driver would not compile), no AHCI (not supported yet), no sound (not supported yet) and installing the ATI drivers was simply a nightmare. I replaced it with Fedora 5 and over the following year, I sampled Suse, Mandriva, CentOS, PCLinuxOS, Slackware, Solaris, FreeBSD and Gentoo. I tried Ubuntu some time in 2007, ran it as one of many operating systems for about a year and then it became my main (later my only) operating system.

My first attempts were Red Hat and Mandrake. Neither went well. The first distro I had any luck with was Suse maybe 10 years ago, but I use that term loosely. Mandriva 2009.1 was the first distro I tried after the 9 year hiatus and I like it and Ubuntu 9.04, but they felt sluggish and I wasn't really learning anything which lead me to Slackware 13. 13 was lucky for me I guess. :)

Now that you mention a LiveCD...

I should've mentioned that Ubuntu was the first distro I ever installed and used. The first distro that I ever used (I think) was this silly little thing called "Cool Linux CD" which apparently is based on Gentoo (a very old Gentoo; kernel 2.4 :p). I can't even clearly remember how I came upon Ubuntu...all I know is that I liked it because it was kinda-sorta like Windows (boots to a GUI, uses "friendly" dialogs for a lot of the configuration), but different enough from Windows (for one, free of charge :p, and it seemed to appeal to my "techie" sense :D) that it seemed worthy of exploring.

I've learned so much from learning Linux...at least compared to if I had stuck with Windows. When I started with Ubuntu, I barely knew how to use the CLI (I was still using "dir" to list files, for pete's sake!). Now I can set up a whole system from the CLI, and only the CLI (Arch K.I.S.S. principle anyone? :D).

Hell, when I started with gOS, I also barely knew the CLI (and Mr. Code beat me to it with the dir vs. ls debacle) although I knew the Windows C-Prompt fairly well, which should explain it here. Even now, I *ALWAYS* use a terminal emulator, because whenever I try to set up my network adapter using iwconfig and then save the changes, iwconfig returns an error:

Just testing if the useragent in firefox detects my OS properly.

There's a dedicated thread for that. ;)

Thanks for the tidbit, I will go there now

Nice to see people's experience in the field of computing specially in Linux/Unix. A few have also described the computing env/OS being used by them even before they started Linux.

Finally, someone else who started with Knoppix! I think it was v 3.4 for me, from a coverdisc mount. This was back in the days when I didn't have the internet at home. I was also running Windows 98 on my own PC (at a time when XP had been out for ages), so obviously the bar was set pretty low for Linux. It really wasn't long before Knoppix became my main OS, I was wowed by the software available and glad to see the back of BSODs. I don't recall if I ever did a HD install of Knoppix though, but I think I might have.

Now that you talk about livecd...this was the first livecd and I guess popular was DemoLinux, released in 1998, was the first Linux distribution specially designed as a live CD. Of course I didn't know about it until around 2000.

I thought it was so kool to be able to run a whole OS from the cd drive!

My very first distribution was Linspire (curse it to hell) ... luckily I also had a Fedora Core 4 DVD burned and tried that next, so I would consider that my first working Linux distro was Fedora Core 4. Then I used FC 5, FC 6 (failed miserably, so changed quickly), Ubuntu (very short experience), Debian (short), Gentoo (also quite short after my laptop started overheating from the constant compiling), Zenwalk (longer), Slackware 11.0 - 13.1 (with short period of using slamd64 when I switched to 64-bit). There were others I tried in between, but I don't remember too well which ones, I know I've also tried DSL, Puppy, Feather, Arch, and others.

The first one I ever ever ever used was ZipSlack. It ruined my Windows XP install because I was dumb enough to extract the filesystem to the same partition as my Windows XP install, and when ZipSlack booted, all my windows XP files got renamed to DOS 8.3 format. Not good.