Slackware, ca. 1993. I picked up a copy from the local computer club, packed onto a couple boxfuls of 5.25" floppies.

Took me three days just to get the bootloader installed and booting, and another week to get to the CLI (there was no GUI). That was on a 66mhz Pentium with 64mb of ram.

Today the whole process takes about fifteen minutes -- 12 or 13 minutes to download the ISO via broadband, and two more to boot it up in VBox on my 3.2ghz hexcore with 16GB ram and 8TB of hard drive.

Can't wait to see what the next twenty years brings.

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Slax running live off a cd was the first linux I used around September 2003.
The first installed distro was MEPIS 2003-10.

You need at least one forum post to vote in any LQ poll. Note that a small amount of time may need to pass after your first post until your usergroup is updated.

--jeremy

Red Hat and Ubuntu where the 1st I tried after finding out that my winodow's os died and needed to recover some information off my harddrive.

For the survey I answered Red Hat Linux. In particular it was Red Hat Linux 6.2 Standard Edition. I still have the retail box with original docs and discs in the shrink wrap (opened) with a Best Buy price sticker for $29.99 (SKU 3895556).

I had forgot about my original Linux use on the Amiga many years before. I do not remember what distribution this was (if it even was a distro). It was very early in the development of Linux. Command line only and no graphics support as I remember. Even the ported tools was limited. For my purpose, which was shell scripting practice, it worked out great.

Hi. My really first GNU OS was Mandriva but I counldn´t make it work to its full capacities. As a windows user with no technical experience but as a plain user. I left Linux but some time later, a friend of mine gave me Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon and I tried it. Since that time I've been in Ubuntu. Perhaps there are better distros but for me, as a plain user, Ubuntu makes the work.

Best Regard to everyone in this community

The first one that I was able to use was Ubuntu 9.04. A friend of mine nagged me into trying it out. I was very pleasantly surprised. I had tried others that I got from PC magazine discs, during the eighties and nineties, but I could never get the graphics to work. So my screen was always blank.

SLS 1.2.

Then 1.3. - but had to reuse the floppies from 1.2. Repeat for 1.4.

After that Slackware, also on floppies.

Also used RH and later Fedora... Though now that Fedora has gone into the toilet, I'll be going back to Slackware.

Fedora, via Linux for Non-Geeks from No Starch Press.

Mandrake Linux 8.2 was my introduction to the fabulous world of Linux and open source. Been hooked ever since.

My first was Debian but I can't remember what version

Nice, your Linux experience predates Linux itself.

Slackware 0.93a, 25 floppies over 2400bps, on a 25MHz 386SX. Tweaking and re-compiling the kernel took over 24 hours. Those were the days you could still boot a runnable kernel directly from a single 1.44MB floppy.

Some version of knoppix from a Linux book

I can't vote and I don't give a Bleep bleep

Very interesting that must have been earlier then my first Slackware, how much RAM did your old machine have.?
I had about 56 floppies and kernel was 1.0, machine a 486SX with 8MB of RAM, but my kernel built in about 2-3 hours (iirc), this was in march 1994.

Markus