Been there, done that. Mandrake 8.0 tweaked the CDROM settings until it couldn't read anything, then aborted the install. If I hadn't been a poor student with a dial-up connection and no more money for CDs, I'd have switched to something more newbie-friendly, like Slackware. As it was, I played whack-a-bug for a month or two and then stayed with Mandy for the next ten years - aside from the flaky installers and bloat, it was an excellent distro.

I recently dived into the complicated world of Slackware 14 (64bit).
It's a nightmare to install if your not very competent with the Terminal (like me).
I eventually got it installed but I still can't set up my wireless connection.
(Any offers of help would be appreciated)
Slackware IMO is a learning curve to the next level of competence.
Having said that, if your happy with whatever you already have installed, don't torture yourself
with Slackware ... it's a geeky OS, made for the expert and knowledgeable user.
Not offence meant to those who run Slackware, I tip my hat to your expertise.

gael.

Well, you should post this question in the Slackware-forum here at LQ, as you know this is the official Slackware-forum and you will most likely get you wireless running very soon.

Markus

The distro that i'm starting with Linux Ubuntu, because it was near windows,especially with KDE....
Now i am feeling good on Red-hat...Ubuntu is still in my hand... lol

Mandrake 10.1 is my first linux, which i install on my PC. :-)

Must have been somewhere in 1994. Got a local brewed cd. The guys who made it only did it once because they discovered it was a lot of work to keep up-to-date.
After that I tried slackware, sls and some other distro's. At the moment I'm running Kubuntu (desktop), Debian (server), Opensuse (laptop) and Smoothwall (firewall).

Cheers

The first Linux I installed was M. N. I. S. in 1995 or 1996 on
an AMD 80846 133MHz PC with 16Mb of RAM and 1Gb of hard disk. It was
a slightly modified version of Slackware 2.3 with addons such as Rasmol (to visualize molecule structures)
and Arena (an early web browser from W3C that used some kind of MathML) so I voted for Slackware.

My first was Red Hat in the 5 or 6 version series. I remember someone over IRC instructing me how to get my SB Pro working by compiling kernel modules... certainly a new experience for me at the time.

My first exposure to Linux was in 1995, where I sat and watched someone else install Slackware. Not exciting by any means. In November of 1996 I got my hands on Slackware v 3.1. I installed it on an old 386 which took me around a dozen and a half tries to get it to work. And I was able to get some of the hardware to work. But overall the PC was functionally useless. Once again not very exciting and thought Linux had no future on the desktop.

Fast forward to 2000, Debian 2.2 Potato was the first Linux distro I successfully installed that resembled a desktop OS. But it was nowhere near the level of BeOS or OS/2 Warp 4. At this time I was running BeOS on one PC and Win 98 on another.

It wasn't until 2002 when Debian 3.0 Woody was released that I had a truly functional Linux PC which actually worked for me. Around the same time frame I bought packaged sets of Mandrake and SuSE install disks with manuals. SuSE installed OK with a few tricks. But I never could get Mandrake to install, as it just did not like the hardware I was using. And for whatever it is worth, Linux was way behind in development compared to Win 2000 during this era, IMO.

Anyways I voted for Slackware as it was the first distro I tried. But Debian was the first distro I used that was mature enough to be of any use.

Several thousand Linux installs later, a few fried monitors, dozens of cooked power supplies, dead hard drives, many cycles of hardware upgrades, I have become very content with Linux Mint. Linux Mint is my everyday to go OS. Clem and the Mint team have done an excellent job of polishing the latest v 15 of Mint. Linux Mint is definitely prime time for the desktop. And as far as Win 7 or 8 goes, no thanks, I no longer have any use or desire for you.

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I lucked out and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS was my first GNU/Linux distro. It was really great and very intuitive for me. Now I'm using 13.04 which I really don't like. I'm going to switch to 12.04 and install GNOME.

Redhat 5.x back when linux was poised to take over the desktop (yes friends THIS is the year of the linux desktop )
I was also a registered Netscape user (4.75 iirc) anybody remember the browser wars?
Redhat 5.x as i remember it wasnt a learning curve so much as a learning cliff, but it was still better then windows 95.
There was a graphical rpm management tool that was just awful, i beleive it was called glint. Looking back, going straight for slackware would have been much easier, but it had a rather intimidating rep at the time.

First Distro: Ubuntu 7.04. I no longer have the laptop I tested it on (Dell Inspiron 5000, 96MB RAM, 10GB IDE HDD, internal 56k modem, bad PCMCIA slots, a battery that practically didn't exist), but I still have the CD (you could fill out a form and get one to three different CD-ROMs sent to you from Canonical Ltd).

It was Definite Linux (I think v 7?) back in 2000. It was a British distro that came wih a Magazine which I bought to give Linux a try. Definite Linux was a RH 6.2 variant.

I moved to Red Hat 6.2 after being unable to get 'make xconfig' to work to compile my own kernel. It kept complaining something about 'wish' missing, which I thought was a problem with the distro. Later after switching to Red Hat I realised that it was because TCL wasn't installed.

My uncle taught me about file sharing through newsgroups by giving me over a hundred disks, as he was organizing, i first had to learn.nfo found RHL6 in there but did not get the three .iso files to work but intrigued i went to a public library ;Linux Bible; RHL6! Around 2001ish... ThxALL

I'm not going to write a long essay as some ppl here have done.

Short and straight to the point. MEMPIS linux