Do you remember the feeling of repartitioning and installing the first time? What distro did you choose? What kind of computer was it on?

For me, it was back around the time of Knoppix 3.3 (I think 2004). My first experience with linux was booting up knoppix, but my first install was a distro called Yoper. I don't remember why I chose that one, it was not the easiest to install either I was in Medical School and did all this on my one and only computer. This was a Gateway laptop, which also made things very difficult for a noobie, and I did not want to lose any information that was on it. I backed up certain data on cds, repartitioned with SystemRescueCD (still my favorite for such things), and installed Yoper. I liked it but it did not fit me. There was much to do - no wireless, sound, and other things. Many of them could probably have been easily remedied, but I had no clue! I then did the distro dance and now I find that I keep returning to Debian and Slackware.

What about you?

1998-99, SuSE 6.3, Pentium II 333 Mhz, 128mb RAM, 4.3GB disk, I felt like God

First time linux tried was knoppix in a CompUSA.

Bought Linux CDs later 'cause I couldn't figure out how to burn 'em.

First time I acctually installed something was year 2000+ on a PII 400MHz, 64 mb of ram, 6gb harddrive, SuSE 9.1. Felt so good to have a distro down... didn't like SuSE much though.

Bought Xandros later... ehh,

Figured out how to burn... FC4 was nice, PClinuxOS was nice, didn't like Mepis, tried dozens of live cd's.

Still haven't found the perfect thing... setteling down with Gentoo right now.

I believe it was a PIII 500, with 128MB of RAM, and a KyroII videocard, running RedHat 7.2. Round about 2001/2002
( http://www.redhat.com/about/presscen...press_7-2.html )

My first experience was compiling drivers for the video card, and configuring XFree86.conf on the console in Emacs. Bear in mind I was a MacOS 8 user up to that point. A baptism of fire, you might say.

Dave

Mandrake Linux for Windows 6.5 which installed on my Windows 98 in an image file. My graphics were not supported so the screen was 4 times the correct size and I found I needed to be in safe mode to boot it.
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It was a version of RedHat, but I've no idea which.

I was downloading it on a 56k modem over Kazaa and Morpheus in little chunks. There were a group of about six of us doing this, each responsible for getting the right bits from the right people. We got them all together, burned the CDs, I installed and had no idea what I was doing, and ended up reinstalling Windows.

A few years later I was reinstalling WinXP for some reason, and it was refusing to install onto the NTFS partition. I borrowed my dad's laptop, downloaded SuSE 9.2 (can't remember why I chose it) and installed that instead. That was the first Linux I actually used, but it only lasted a week or two before Yast irritated me so much that I flattened it and put Mandrake on instead.

lol my first distor i suppose woudl be redhat 7 which i got on the back cover of linux for dummies taht i rented form the library!

thsi was ages out of date and next to useless so i tried slackware.
had trouble getting naything to work on that. which was where i blunderd into this forum,...

from there i got suse 10.0 later getting 10.1, then FC6 for a bit and now suse 10.2

am currently burning UBUNTU for instalaton into another partition to see what its like.

Only got my first computer in 2002 - AMD Duron/128MB, Windows ME. Started messing about with GNU stuff - DJGPP, Cygwin, etc -found it interesting. First tries at dual booting late '05 - early '06: Mandriva LE 2005, then Slackware 10.2, given away with magazines.
Got present computer - AMD Sempron 2600/512MB, XP Home, mid '06. Installed OEM XP Pro (genuine!) a month later. Went into a frenzy of dual-booting with different distros late 2006.
Burned a pile of live and/or installation disks. Anyone tried GoboLinux?
From what I've tried so far, my favourites are, for a full distro:
(K)Ubuntu 6.06
Slackware 11
for compact distro:
Zenwalk 4.2
Vector Linux 5.8
Linux From Scratch looks VERY interesting...later definitely.