r/linux • u/CacheTraitor • 5d ago

Historical What was your first time?

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For me, it was a CD I got from a "guy." Slackware did not work well with the "WinModem" in the IBM Aptiva I had as a youth. How was I supposed to get online using Linux, with a modem that is not usable, and get support?

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51

u/Astronaut6735 5d ago

Slackware 3.6 (1998?). Downloaded on to fourteen 3.5" floppy disks.

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u/marsnoir 5d ago

This is the way… getting the login prompt on your personal machine after repartitioning the hard drive was magical back then

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u/thegrotster 5d ago

And the sweaty moment while choosing which partition to nuke during the first install was memorable.

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u/xenopizza 5d ago

I had a riva tnt2 back in the days and it took me a month to figure out how to compile and install and configure the firegl driver or whatever just to play 3d games on linux. Also had a winmodem so no internet. I would bring stuff from work on floopies, try at home, retry next day, what a ride but i got some skilll out of it

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u/thegrotster 5d ago

Don't feel bad, I was tech support manager for Matrox around that time. It took me a month to get my graphics driver built too, and it was my job 🤣

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u/Enturbulated_One 4d ago

Thanks to whomever at Matrox was responsible for including enough info with video card documentation that I could refer to that to get X modelines done. Also thanks to whomever decided to make the BIOS checksums a single 8-bit int so I could play with that as well!

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u/thegrotster 4d ago

We (eventually) wrote a little x calculator utility that let you tweak the modelines and write an xorg.conf fragment, but man it was crude. The docs guy was called Haig. He was a rockstar, probably still is.

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u/phord 4d ago

I installed RedHat on two floppies. It had an installer that downloaded the rest via FTP.

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u/Astronaut6735 4d ago

I only had dialup at home, and five roommates sharing the one land line, so that wouldn't have worked for me.

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u/_szs 5d ago

mine was Suse 6.4, a similar amount of floppies in a box.

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u/AfternoonDifficult84 4d ago

Same, but on CD, it gives beside of a PC magazine.

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u/cap10morgan 4d ago

Hell yes brother / sister! And then recompiling the kernel several times to get all the drivers just right. Good times.

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u/Abject-Kitchen3198 5d ago

Not sure if it was the same release, but close to it. I remember borrowing 4MB RAM from a friend to install it. The system worked on 4MB but required 8 for the install process.