Dude I remember when live booting knoppix was impressive. Hell my intro to Linux was mandrake. We have so many great distros and documentation available now it’s crazy.
Ahh Knoppix :’) I think live boots were my introduction to Linux.
I ended up learning by memory the US keyboard layout because i got tired of having to change it whenever i booted knoppix up.
Now i have all my keyboards set to US international. Best layout for programing.
I remember finding an early ubuntu CD just lying in the street. Took it home, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t turn my ailing laptop right around. Got 5 more years out of that thing.
Wow an Ubuntu CD just casually laying on the streets
Just laying there.
In the street?
In the street. Like the gutter.
It had like a cardboard case covering it, though.
It’s more likely than you think
lying
No, it’s true!
Dad?
Friend of mine once found a frozen-over cd of “Shaggy - Wasn’t Me” in his backyard, and after cleaned and thawed, it worked no problem. I guess someone really hated that single?
Wasn’t me
Hm. I started using Linux (Ubuntu) somewhat around 2007. And I was quite fascinated how flashy it was with all those desktop effects compared to the rather boring XP. Only problem I had back in the day was wifi, but I didn’t play a lot of games at that time.
But yeah, once I solved that wifi problem I had internet, so there was a difference.
SUSE on 6 CDs
My first Linux distro was Puppy Linux, on a computer with no internet. I downloaded it on an internet cafe to replace Windows XP Fenix Edition.
My PC was too weak to run any flavor of the major distros, and I wanted to give it a go.
Best computer-related decision of my life to ditch Windows and use Linux as my daily driver.
Definitely describes my switch back in 2008 when canonical still sent out Ubuntu CDs for free in the mail. We had dial up so it was faster for them to mail me a CD than to try and download the image myself.
If the ping rate is irrelevant, then the good old sneakernet is a great way to transfer large amounts of data.
It forced me to learn. It took me weeks to get X configured and working correctly. I had an internet subscription and a modem but it also took weeks to get it to work on Linux. My distribution came on a CD from a magazine but some dependencies were not included, so I had to reboot under Windows to download a missing package, reboot on Linux and try again, then need to get the next dependency. We came a long long way from having to specify the vertical refresh rate of the monitor in xf86config.
Starting with a French version of Slackware was brutal but I had nothing else.
Be 12 in 1998
Literally just ecstatic that I could wiggle around a little X on a blank screen after giving up trying to load a window manager.
Pop in a BeOS live CD to feel like I did something cool
ah i had forgotten about xf86config. /silenthillvoice
I remember getting a copy of linux from my friends at a local LAN party (though it was tokenring party for us) around ‘96. 2 floppy disks. I’m 99% sure it was slackware.
I told you it’s not a LAN party, it’s a TokenRing party!
Shit, what games could be played on token ring?
Token Ring is a network protocol where a token—a small data packet—circulates around a ring topology, allowing only the device holding the token to transmit data, thus avoiding collisions. We played Doom and Quake.
I know what it is, and I played both those on lan, but my older bro set it up so I guess I just don’t remember. Fucking crazy that shit could work fast enough.
I don’t remember, what was the lag like for token ring? Lan just feels like it should be 100 ping or less
Not really. It was a local network, and sure the latency increased linearly with the number of nodes, but for a small LAN party it would be quite serviceable.
me after installing Ubuntu because it was the only other OS I’d ever heard of, because I accidentally nuked my Windows Vista install by trying to overclock the CPU in a Gateway laptop:
Similarly, my XP install just died and I didn’t have a copy of Windows to reinstall. Gnome 2 taught me computers don’t have to look or feel boring and the terminal taught me they weren’t scary.
Learned a lot that first year.
hehe, mine was Ubuntu too. I thought I’d fucked up the emachines tower my parents just bought me.
us emachines and gateway kids grew up to be lightweight distro enthusiasts
like now my laptop has 16 gigs RAM, quad core fuck even knows GHz processor, and a GPU but if a process starts using >2% of my resources i will
-killall -9it from orbit
I used xp for 15 years and i miss it. Fuck this ribbon nonsense too. Where is the desktop cloud? My precious is lost… i’m lost…i have no fucking idea where that file i just saved went… i built a pc in 2002 and progranned a vcr as well. Now i’m toast.
thats me installing windows in the 90s, waiting for hours, not sure if it just froze
Lmao I did this exact thing. Installed Ubuntu on the home desktop. Immediately occurred to me that I couldn’t connnect to the internet to look up how to do anything else. Scrambled so hard to find that XP disc and atone for my reckless folly.
Still have my physical Ubuntu Hardy Heron DVD somewhere
Whats this meme called, I need to post some things
Just be sure to post some memes to !bikinibottomtwitter@lemmy.world !
My first was SuSE 6 or something like that, back in the 90s. And my mom freaked out, because the PC didn’t boot Windows95 anymore. And I had a huge book, telling me what to do. It came with the CDs.
Iirc Suse used to give away previous versions to highschools, so probably yours was running Yast with a lot of software included.
