It was the late 90s. I had a AMD 486 DX4 120MHz with maybe 4MB of RAM. Not sure how big my hard drive was; all I remember is it wasn't big enough. The physics department had this email server sitting around running Redhat. I wasn't sure what it was at first. I'd seen professors' Sun workstations and not been very impressed: they looked like overpriced junk and CDE was a complete crap UI. At first, I assumed Redhat was similar expensive corporate unix crap. Guess they bought them because they had to finish off some grants....

As I poked around at it, the Redhat server looked kind of neat. It was left in a locked lab, so it was sitting around with root logged in at console. I think I might have been the only person other than its keeper who was interested. A graduate student noticed my interest, explained what it was, and suggested I try it out linux at home. So I did. Installing was Redhat was easy, but upgrading it was usually a mess. I remember the upgrade to 6.1 "Hedwig" was particularly disastrous. Well, as soon as I found Debian, I never used Redhat again: it really was (still is?) corporate junk.

Even for those who hadn't used UNIX, linux seemed pretty familiar to anyone who had used a mainframe OS. Things like file ownership and permissions, and writing and running scripts just seemed so natural to me.

I already put something in here, but I figured a clarification might be in order. I was using Unix 7th edition on PDP-11s back in 1982, various BSD Unix flavors on PDP-11s and VAX-11, for many years. My first personal Unix system was on a DEC Professional-350 prototype (Unix V7M), then tried Venix (wasn't thrilled) and ended up with an Ultrix-16 (I think that's what it was called) running on a LSI-11/23. I moved from that to a Z8000 based "Zeus" machine running Unix System 3, which I ran until I got my first 386DX in the late 1980s; I started with ISC Unix SysV r3.2, moved to Dell's (very nice) BSD Unix distribution, replaced it with Corollary (sp?) Sys5r4. Sometime in there, I got a used Sun SPARCstation 1+ running SunOS 4.11 (I think), and used RFS between that and the (by that time, 486DX) Unix system I used for my public access system (I had 6 phone lines, 5 modems, a full UUCP feed.) This was all before the first ISP started up in Madison, WI. Once the ISP was running (I was providing its UUCP news feed, since UUNET was too expensive for them at the time), I gradually shut down my public access system. It was around that time that I first installed Linux. It may have not been the 386DX, but the 486DX that the test installation was on (it was a *long* time ago; my memory is fuzzy), but having full AT&T and BSD Unix systems, that early Linux kernel was a bit of a curiosity, but not much more than that for me. Linux was in its infancy at the time, I had to bootstrap the GCC build, then compile the kernel sources, making sure all of the paths and header files were correct, and then (if my memory serves me) several hours of compilation before I had the kernel and user-land. The LILO bootstrap was hard to install, and once everything was finally in place, it was a very limited system with a lot of incompatibility with the code pulled off of comp.sources.unix or the tools and utilities I'd written for Unix and Coherent.

At that time, it was really a work in progress. It would be at least a year before I first saw Linux sources on Walnut Creek CDs. Slackware and Yggrasil (sp?) came out over the next few years. I did poke around with various early distros as they came out (and I had more x86 hulks in my inventory), but none were ready for me to abandon my aging Unix systems for a while. The demise of the ISA and VESA Local Bus spelled the end of my x86 Unix distributions lifetime; there was no longer any vendor support, and the PCI bus was not supported. It was then that I finally switched to Linux for my x86 PCs.

It's not exactly about LINUX, but in 1992 I had my first contact with UNIX. An SCO UNIX installation. So many CDs and a huge manual... No experience at all. I literally started on page 1 "Insert the CD into the tray"... It took me a while, but finally I got it. After that, I entered the LINUX world... but never professionally...

I installed Ubuntu on an old laptop. The install went well with no problems.

OMGosh, that's thirty years ago! I was in Uni at University of Waterloo studying everything *but* computer science, and I had some free time over the holiday break 1991/92. I had already installed OpenBSD (don't think it was called exactly that then?) on my 386/387 desktop computer with a *massive* 6MB hard drive that sounded a bit like a hovercraft leaving the beach every time it started up. I had also installed SysVR4 on a couple other computers, I remember that involved a *lot* of flipping around 5-1/2" floppies. I think I still have those floppies in a box somewhere... I had been enthusiastic about BSD because it was open source, and had downloaded (from news groups, uuencode/uudecode...) BSD source and pored over it, however, for whatever reason, it wasn't working reliably on my desktop.

So I was really excited to get my hands on two 3-1/2" floppies for Linux, a unix-style OS made by a Finn in uni! (I'm Finnish Canadian, and was in uni, so you can see why I was excited!) I can't remember the process in too much detail, but I do remember that whatever notes I was using to guide me, I wasn't grasping the process for partitioning. In the end I cheated and used MS-DOS to partition the hard drive (I needed a swap partition!!) and then used hexedit to manually change the partition IDs to what linux was expecting. This was over and above the need to use hexedit to manually edit the MBR to get it to boot.

I never looked back; some of my desktops since then were dual-boot linux/SVR4 or linux/windoze, up until 1999 when I got my first linux laptop. I haven't installed anything but linux on any of my own computers since then. In the late 90's my day job was writing interprocess communications APIs and filesystem APIs for Interix, a POSIX-compliant NT subsystem (privileged code that runs on top of the NT microkernel and provided a POSIX-compliant execution environment on WindowsNT.) So in the office I had pretty much every unix-like OS, including minix and QNX (on of my faves, QNX) installed to use as reference platforms. We usually used the early RedHat distros for linux in the office. Microsoft eventually bought Interix (and me and some of my coworkers, leading to three interesting years living in Seattle.)

...something like 29 1.44 MB FDs for the entire system (less sources).

Actually my first nix install was Bell Labs Unix in 1976 on a PDP 11 at Time magazine. My firsr Linux was actual Novell but I think that was also UNIX Sv V which had partitions broken down into smaller areas called 'Slices'.
So actual first that I knew was Linux was Early Ubuntu all done through the command line. Was simple for me since I had already many years of Programming Assembler Language

I couldn't get anything to work easily, it was the very early days of Fedora and I tried the rawhide versions then beta.... Fortunately my co-worker then knew unix and command line.....so he helped me get started. Gotten easier over the years...now on F34. Got a new MB and all to put together - soon.

That's a tough question. It was a long time ago.

I'd played around with FreeBSD and enjoyed that. I came from a background of using BBC Archimedes machines. Some time back then I was reading about Linux and tried installing Slackware on notebook sized machine. I got it running including getting it to see the machine's network access gadget.

Later I installed CentOS to run as a local server at the place where I worked. That went well for all of us. I enjoyed that.

Absolute first install I think was Slackware.

About 1976, an AT&T/Bell Labs tape from the states. Didnt have a tape-drive on the PDP-11. Went up to Glasgow Uni Computing (Strav Pedolski(sp)) who read the stuff onto a 60Mb removable drive. Back to Strathclyde then we were on the map! Full source code and a system to work on. It beat RT-11 and RK05 disk drives hands-down.

Astounded and amazed, and still am, at the amount of...
> Free: As in free bear...
> Breadth: As in capabilities, selection, and choices...
> Quality: As in, "It works!"...
...software packages that are available, and the stability of the operating system.
Got off the Windows treadmill, and no intention of ever getting back on.

I was ecstatic with the look and feel of Red Hat and how much control I had over every aspect. I also remember the challenge of finding the right drivers for printers. A few years later, I had to learn how to make laptop wifi adaptors work. Things have come a long way.

First Linux for me was Knoppix, in the early 2000s. Not sure exactly the year. I learned from a musical forum at the time about a new operating system able o boot and run in RAM, that was contained in just one CD. I managed to get the iso file and burn the cd.
Most important for me: I was really impressed by the fact to get an entire fully functional operating system in just one cd, at no cost! And what made my amazement even bigger was the number of software packages included in that cd.
Problems? very few, related to the graphics detection. An easy solution was to include something about "framebuffer" in the boot command.


However what I remember always was my first Unix installation:
It was some years before, at 1992 or perhaps 1993. I tried with a job's colleague to install Unix dual boot together with msdos in a 386 computer equipped with a 200MiB hard drive. It was a job's computer. Company's management was very bad then, so everybody could do what he liked! (in fact I gave demission next year, and the company did close later). My colleague had the pack of 70 floppy disks for Interactive Unix, one of the first ports of Unix to the IBM PC and 386 hardware. We started by partitioning the hd in 2 half parts from the msdos floppy, went all the way with the msdos installation and then started with Unix. It took the entire day for all these floppies to copy to the hd, and after reboot nothing happened.
We left it and came back next day, by starting again from zero (fdisk). At the end of the day, the problem remained exactly the same. We finally discovered that we had to partition the hard drive from the Unix fdisk, not from msdos! And the third attempt was successful: After install the system files took at least 70 MB from the 100 MB of the partition, and something like 30 MB has been left for software and user's files.

I remember feeding about a dozen 3.5" floppies into my rig. It may have been Fedora.