The very First Linux Distribution Used
 

Hi,
I am just starting a thread in general to know at what distribution people thought its time to fall in love with Linux.

Mine very first Linux distribution was RedHat 5.1. The next one was Suse-6.0. I really liked Suse because I was able to configure my graphics card with correct resolution with it and was working on Gnome GUI without any glitches. Though my sound card was not detected with anyone of those.

I first got started with RedHat 9, but didn't like it. So I tried Debian Woody and it was the perfect fit. Been on Debian ever since. I've done a dist-upgrade straight through and used dd to move to newer hardware, but never had to reinstall yet.

Introduced to Slackware in `99. At that time I never heard of Linux, and essentially had a triple boot system. 98se/NT4 and Slackware (4?). Mostly at that time I worked only in NT4. After that pretty much left Linux, upgraded from NT4 to 2000pro. Tried Linux again with Mandrake 9.1, played with Slackware again. Didn't really plunge into Linux until a few years later. This time Slackware 10.0 (which was the sweet spot for me), and stayed with Slackware ever since.

My first was Debian , when Etch was in testing (2007 I think).

I tried Debian long ago. I think Debian was new at the time. I Struggled with it and managed to do many things, but I never liked it, never was comfortable with it, never was effective with it and then dropped Linux for a long time.

Much later, I had to do some things on existing Centos systems at work. I did fairly little, learned fairly little and needed support for an on site Centos expert.

Then I tried Debian again (some people never learn). It was a lot better, of course, but I still struggled, I still couldn't get either comfortable or effective with it.

Then I tried Mepis. That not only made me comfortable and effective in Mepis itself. It made me comfortable and effective in Debian and Centos as well. It's a great shame that KDE4 (and maybe other factors as well) have destroyed the beginner friendliness in Mepis 8.5, so there is no longer (so far as I know) a Linux distribution as beginner friendly as Mepis 7 used to be (Mepis 8.0 isn't bad, but even without KDE4 it wasn't a step in the right direction).

Started with Mandrake, really really liked it, but after they became Mandriva it started going downhill IMO and started looking for alternatives. Switched to Sidux and from there to Debian proper.

Must have been 1994 that I downloaded, floppy by floppy, Slackware, don't remember what version it was, but the kernel was close to 1.0. Other things besides computers occupied me, then skipped ahead to the CDs for Slackware 3.5; I think the kernel was 2.0.3something. Then again the real world interrupted and I got back into "modern" linux in the last few years. Tried Fedora - too bleeding edge, tried Ubuntu, didn't play nice with my hardware and I couldn't figure out how to modify the system initrd easily, plus the auto updates were killing me... and so forth with some others, Debian, SUSE... went back to Slackware.

It just shows how new I am to linux: my first linux system was 64-bit. It was Fedora Core 4 in 2005. Then I triple-booted for a few years (Fedora/Debian/Centos) with occasional distro-hopping (Ubuntu/PCLinux/Slackware) It was not until I finally got through all the configuration of Slackware 12.1 that I settled down with one distro. Now if I dual-boot, it's only between slackware versions. Recently, I've installed FreeBSD, but I'm not having fun with it:(

I started with some Red Hat version from the mid 1990s. I bought boxed versions in bookstores. I was a long time Unix user, but it wasn't long before I preferred Red Hat Linux to SVR4, 4.3BSD, or Solaris.

I was using unix via a shell account before linux came to past.

But, my first official linux distro was Caldera eDesktop from SCO back in 1995.

After that, I have tried many distros, some good and some bad.

My three personal favorites are listed from my sig and I am currently using two of them now.

Linux Rules!!!

Slackware 10.0 or 10.1. Late '04, early '05. Read about Linux online, sounded interesting. Bought two magazines, one gave away Knoppix, which I used to resize my XP. The other had Slack on 2 CDs. It was the last release of Slack that included Gnome.

Hi

I started with RHEL 4.0 64, loooong ago... then used Fedora for a while Fedora Core 4 and 5... then came OpenSuse 10.x, then came the *buntuz, starting with 7.04, then again came Debian, then Came Slackware ( the first I used was 13 64 ), and then Arch.

Currently I use Slackware and Arch in all my machines.

I started with computers in '76 or so on a Wang (don't remember the model, but I do remember it had a punch card reader, that's how I wrote my first program :) ) at the local community college where my dad was a math prof. Our first home computer was a commodore PET in '81 or '82. We progressed to the SuperPET and had a Commodore 64 and a VIC20 along the way. I didn't get to try a Unix-like OS until I went back to school at Iowa State in '93, where they used Ultrix on the Silicon Graphics workstations (they also had Windows and Mac machines).

I never really liked windows, but struggled with it until '07, when microsoft told me online that I was using an invalid copy of windows (I wasn't, it was installed on the machine when I bought it), but for only $100 or $150 they would happily validate it for me. I threw a fit, d'loaded and burned a copy of OpenSUSE, wiped my HD clean and haven't looked back.

Nowadays I prefer Debian or Debian-based distros with Slackware coming in a close second. I run both of these on my main machines, but always like playing around with other distros. I have yet to find a distro that beats out these two for my purposes, but it's a lot of fun taking others for test drives. :)

I have a server, two desktops and two laptops in the house and have one HD in one of my desktops that has windows XP pro (installed in the last year) on it for the very few things I can't do easily with Linux. I've booted my windows HD about three times since I've installed it.

EDIT: I use peppermint ice on this laptop for now, that explains the Mint logo to the left. ;)

Red Hat 4 I think...Been through a bunch since then. SuSE, Debian, Fedora, Slackware, Arch, CentOS, ubuntu, Mandrake, Gentoo, but usually end up back with either Slackware or Arch :)

From the thread title, it sounds like it's asking a historical question, like "what was the first complete, usable operating system with a working UI (i.e. shell), based on the Linux kernel, that was ever used?". But I see it's more like "what was the very first Linux distro you ever used?".

I started with Ubuntu...I've grown up quite a bit though: I'm posting this from Arch. :p I've gone from WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pop-ups) to KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). :D

Yeah, started with Ubuntu 9.04 on my main desktop, got a sort of "freebie" computer later on, tried various distros on it before settling with Arch (IIRC I tried Ubuntu and Fedora first, whose LiveCDs wouldn't even boot on that machine w/ 256 MiB of RAM :p, then Puppy, which I got bored with, then Arch). Then I got this laptop and immediately decided to put Arch on it since I figured that all the hardware would work out OOB (and it does: NVIDIA graphics, Atheros WNIC, etc. all worked OOB :D), and I'd already learned how to set up a base Arch system on the "freebie" machine, so I figured it wouldn't be too different for this laptop...it wasn't. :)

Everything's been pretty much smooth sailing since. I've scrapped Ubuntu on my main desktop, replacing it with Arch (:D), but it seems to be unusually slow compared with Ubuntu, but that might just be because I need to do more tweaking to make it happy.

EDIT: Wow, I must have some kind of obsession with emoticons...I just pushed the 6 image limit with this post alone!

gOS 2 - and it didn't connect to the Internet at the time - not until I got my new network adapter. See my LQ blog description for more info.

I had EXACTLY the same thought when I looked at it... :D

Ok, to be more on topic for me it was Slackware 12.2

Here's a distro timeline for anyone interested in first linux distributions.

I started using Debian & Slackware around 1999/2000 and dual boot with Win98...at the time those were the only distros that I could install without a lot of installing issues. I did try Red Hat also but didn't like it, I guess rpm hell. Then for some reason I got tired of fiddling around with those and wanted to dual boot Mandrake 7 or 8 and it wiped the hard drive clean and I ended up with it only. I left it like that for about 6 months before switching back to Debian for its package manager ease of use. But I always kept extra partition to try different distros. Currently I'm using Mandriva 2010.1 as my main distro.

Nifty, never knew SUSE was decended from Slackware, I had always assumed since it used RPM that it was decended from RH.

An SVG version, for those interested. :D

EDIT: an advantage to this one is that it has embedded hyperlinks to the distros' websites, so you can find out more info about them.

Started off with Mandrake 9.0 on a Pentium 300
Basically played with Debian 2, Red Hat 8, Suse, Knoppix and anything else that come on the cover of a magazine. Essentially have stayed with Mandrake ( now Mandriva ) mostly for ease of installation, ease of maintenance and I prefer KDE.
I have also used PC-BSD 2, which was also pretty good, and when I get a spare machine I will load that again ( now up to version 8 ) for the same reasons.

floppy

May be 2002/03. Do not remember. Was RH9 which I got for no cost. Then went back to RH7 as well for some time. Left RH for Ubuntu 6 and it has been Ubuntu since then. Still have CentOS on servers though and have tried Debian, Slackware, Fedora, OpenSuse, Mint, Zenwalk and some other too. Currently onto Ubuntu Lucid and getting again hands on Slack.

I Started off with fedora core, RHEL, and Debian i belive.
Back in high school. Messed around with dual/triple boots quite abit in my hardware classes.

From there i got some experience in SUSE while interning for a government subsidiary.

Now i have pretty much stuck with fedora since then.
Trying to decide what to put on an older laptop :) oh the possibilities

Well, this sort of thread is always interesting, so I can't help but to reply...

While my first distro was openSUSE back in '07, I'd have to say it was PCLinuxOS which had me fully committed to using Linux full-time. At the time, I wanted to use KDE, at its implementation of KDE is still much better than openSUSE's or Kubuntu, IMHO.

Of course, it used RPM packages, but I didn't know any better.

I started out with Mandrake 7.0 way back in 2000. I didn't really start using GNU/Linux as a primary OS until about 2005. I distro-hopped quite a bit before sticking with Ubuntu on one machine and Slackware on the other.

Mine was Mandriva, 2008 I believe...

Ded Rat (RedHat) 4.5 for me was my first install; I had used some early version of Slackware earlier, but I hadn't personally installed it.

(At the time, I was using HP-UX part time, professionally, and preferred Ded Rat massively, which I wouldn't have predicted. Looking back, and applying today's standards, Ded Rat 4.5 was such an unsophisticated piece of kit, it is difficult to believe that there was anything that worked that I could have preferred it to, but it was the case. Didn't take me long to find that I wanted to move somewhere else, though.)

RedHAT ! My firt experience was not as bad as I had anticipated.

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.