71–80 of 128 posts
1994 and my friend had a harebrained scheme to start an ISP and we needed to learn Linux to run it. 75 floppies later I was hooked and Free Software and Linux have been my computing lifeblood ever since. Thanks Slackware!
Slackware was my first personal OS back in 1996. Built a PC for college, and instead of Windows, I got slackware floppies free from the school. Took me 2 weeks to install. Never got the sound card to work.
Very nice! Was there a reason your school gave out Slackware installer floppies? Was it required for a class? Or through a student organization? And if you recall, were you running a Creative SoundBlaster? Ad Lib? Gravis ultrasound?
I might be mistaken, I think I had a CD rom instead of floppies.
All Mac for a while now
"Very good year. Nearly as old as I am!"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can only imagine in that era there was quite a bit more learning forced upon you than these days with our plethora of (somewhat) standards-compliant hardware and in-tree drivers. Though I'm definitely going to be channeling some of those experiences as I got a kernel-panic during the first boot after installing Slackware 15.0 on a newly built AMD B550 chipset / AMD Ryzen 5700G -based PC. I'm thinking its likely som…
> I can only imagine in that era there was quite a bit more learning forced upon you than these days with our plethora of (somewhat) standards-compliant hardware and in-tree drivers. It's romanticized a lot, but boy was it painful! hear my story and weep. In 1995 I got slackware with a textbook from the university library. I had a brand-new 486 paid for by a dad with 2 other kids in college and nothing more than a fa…
This is me still when I try to build Gentoo
These days I run Arch Linux, which is the closest I can get to total control of every aspect of my system (without sacrificing prebuilt binary packages - I do not have the patience to wait for my browser to be built from scratch!). I'm quite happy with my understanding of the modern Linux stack! Though I still look longingly at the early days of Linux, when you really had to do everything yourself, and bringing up a Linux system from scratch was worth serious bragging rights.
Do you think I would gain something by trying out Slackware today in 2023? Perhaps see how Linux used to work in the good old days, without SystemD or a fully working Xorg? And should I do so with modern Slackware, or an older version to truly experience the floppy install process (hardware support may be an issue--might try to source an ancient Thinkpad)?
Still have the warm fuzzies every time I think of it.
Relative young'un here, my first introduction to Linux was Ubuntu 12.04 in 2013, when I was in elementary school :). The very first day I installed it, I managed to disable admin access for my user, so I had the pleasure of obtaining a recovery root shell and learning about the sudoers file. These days I run Arch Linux, which is the closest I can get to total control of every aspect of my system (without sacrificing…
your keyboard?
That was my first exposure to Linux in 1995. I remember downloading 30-something floppy disks over a painfully slow T1. I deployed our company's sendmail email server a few months later, running on an old PC. In 2006 I switched to Linux as my daily driver and if I need windows these days, it runs as a VM.
I soon figured out that it was easy to skip the cdrom altogether and make a minimal install using just the boot disk and ftp. So easy yet you had to be deliberate and understand what you were doing. Such a great learning exercise.
I used it as a very solid file server for a long time.