Like in the Good Old Days! [Distro Fever]

Lounge
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Hi all,

A few days ago, I decided to test a Manjaro distro, since so many have written nice things about its being quite up-to-date. A new release candidate was just published, so I fetched it. It was quite an interesting experience. Today I noticed that they had a new release available – hmmm, this clearly reminds me of the good old days…

My Linux era started in the 90s with Slackware. A decade later every Linux mag with any self-esteem came with a CD or DVD with a couple of new distros every month. Well, not especially “new”, since those mags needed about 8 weeks to go to press, but still the best we could lay our hands on. I honestly believe that one time, my main hobby must have been to install new distros. Here is a view of what we were offered about 13 years ago:

distros
distros1000×871 1.23 MB

Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden

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Awesome picture.

I am dating myself but I remember downloading slackware onto a handful of 3.5" disks. I also remember the first time I saw Linux on the shelf of a software retailer. I think they carried Red Hat and, later, Mandrake.

As a side note, Manjaro is rolling. Once you are installed, the “releases” have no real meaning. As long as you keep it up to date you can keep it running indefinitely.

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2005… Sun Java Desktop System :laughing:

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2001: Whatever Solaris version at the time. Our admins were big on Colorado 14-ers (mountains higher than 14K ft), so my workstation’s hostname was ‘uncompahgre’ - geesh… couldn’t even pronounce it, much less spell it.

My first Linux was Slackware, on a 386 box I built from parts gifted to me by a neighbor who built computers for exchange student to take home. Talk about ‘manual transmission’

Now, it’s Ubuntu on my desktop, Mint on the grandkids’ computers, and Raspbian on the Raspberry Pies I have scattered around the house. I now know enough about the Debian package architecture to not want to learn any other, from scratch.

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Good old days:) I tried a distro from a magazine, it was a version of Mandriva sporting some beta of kernel 2.6.0, then I bought Slackware 10.0 from California (I had absolutely no way to download it - 56k modem:see_no_evil:)
Thanks for bringing back this to memory, and very nice collection:)

Dario

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My first contact with Unix was AIX. My first personal Unix was a Mandrake Linux (I don’t remember which version exactly, that was in the late 90s). Still have a Mandrake baseball cap somewhere…

Of course, the CDs in the magazines where 8 weeks old, but downloading a CD’s worth at modem (*) speed would also take 8 weeks :slight_smile: (**)

(*) kerning alert: “modem”, not “modern”

(**) because, remember, this was the house phone line, and you couldn’t hog it for hours… even assuming you had a very cheap ISP.

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Remember the sound of the modem dialing?

Working on my masters degree, did a programming project with two other fellows. We’d meet at the apartment the one who had a big parrot that sat on a perch in the corner of the living room. We’d sit down at the dining room table, power up the Kaypro “luggable” computer and dial into school…

One day, I arrived at his place and he’s beside himself, his parrot has stopped talking. “All he does is make these screeching noises!” he lamented. So, shortly, the parrot starts screeching, and it sounds a lot like the Kaypro, dialing the school…

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The main linuxes I tried were picked up at trade shows over the years. Those were ye olde darwin and red hat etc. Darwin was like, oh welcome to our booth how can we help each other, whereas redhat was like WOOHOO USE OUR NEW LINUX BRAH on the street corners, handing out free gadgets and cds. Both turned out to be successful approaches in the Good Ole Days.

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Yes, had a fido mailbox at that time and also can remember playing Doom Deathmatches over modem :slight_smile:

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I could remember life before Linux and the Internet; the dot matrix printing sound and artwork that I made.

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I got my start with Print Shop on the Apple ][+ and an Epson dot matrix.
||: Dzzzzzt Dzzzzzzt Dzzzzzzzzzzzt. :|| ad infinitum

You would think those days are long gone, but then you haven’t been to a US airport terminal, where dot matrix still form the backbone of why they even have a counter in the first place.

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dot matrix are still used a lot. it can print carbon copies, which is really useful in some industries.

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I’m feeling old today, partially because today is my 50th :cake: :candle:, but partially because I, too, remember “ye olden days.” 8-bit TRS-80s at my high school. Networked BBC-micros; university in the late '80s was internet-connected (about the only place it was outside of defense in those days), and I dialled in from home and connected to the world from my green-screen PC-XT clone. It was a major upgrade when could afford a 2400-baud modem! Again, I remember how pleased I was to pick up a 24-pin dot-matrix printer with paper parking at a garage sale, it left my 9-pin for dead! At uni it was HPUX and HPBSD worktations (and a few Sun sparcs), and quite a few dumb terminals.

I identify with the stack of magazines, I tossed about 7 years worth of LXF and LUD not so long ago.
First Linux distro I tried was Madrake (ancestor of Mandriva) in 2001 or so.

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My first unix was actually NetBSD on an Amiga.

I used to be able to tell what connection speed I got by listening to the tones. The 14.4k was quite distinct.

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I think my first Linux distro was a Red Hat, on a Pentium 133 machine, back in 1999. I also tried Mandrake. I mostly spent time trying to get my graphics card supported (a 3dfx Voodoo Banshee), meaning I had to compile my own version of the kernel with framebuffer driver support. And yes, I installed the distribution from magazine CDs, and downloaded extra packages and updated on the 56k modem…

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I went to Linux because of Adobe. :grinning:

When I was a student, it was relatively easy to get a pirated copy of Adobe products.
In contrast to the other, I decided to buy the license for Adobe Suite because I wanted to work with it professionally after my studies.

Shortly after, I got a worm that made my Windows XP Home Edition unusable and I installed Windows XP professional with Antivirus from Mcafee.

But I couldn’t reinstall Adobe Suite because I got a message that my registration key was wrong.
I called Support center, waited 10 min. to get there (“please hold the line…”) and got the answer that because I now have a different registration key for Windows, the installation was blocked.
I needed to wait a short moment and then got answer that nothing else was changed, my hardware is the same and I can get a new registration key.

Me: "So you can see what kind of hardware I have in my computer!?! "

Support center: “Yes.”

That really pissed me off.

Me: “How can I be sure, that you don’t read my mails, too?”

Support center:" Don’t be paranoid, we just want to make sure that you have installed our product on only one computer, because you have the license for only that computer and we need to take some measures to be able to prove that! You will now receive a new registration key by email but be careful, if you want to change something on your computer again, please contact us first, otherwise you can expect some costs!"

Two months later I bought my Nikon camera and couldn’t open raw files with Photoshop.

Support center again, again after 10 min. of “please hold the line” thing: “You have to go to our site,
register there as our customer and then you will have access to various extensions and plugins that you can download and install.”

I went there, registered and couldn’t find any plugins. :confused:

Support Center again: “No plugins? Please wait a moment… Oh, you still have CS1 version.
You will continue to get security updates from us, but if you need extensions and plugins you will unfortunately have to upgrade to a new version released a month ago.”

That was the moment when I got tired of being treated like a potential criminal and a dairy cow.

So I went in search of alternative.

In the computer center of our university we had a room with Linux computers which I used more often because it was always empty. I was curious if I could open my raw files there. I started GIMP, clicked on a raw file and suddenly UFRaw tool started. I made a few adjustments and could easily process my photo in the Gimp.

Went home, found “Distrowatch”, seen that Ubuntu was ranked as best distribution there, downloaded it, burned and tried LiveCD without any issues,
installed it as dual boot with Windows, and two months later ditched Windows completely.

That was a real relief.

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I knew by 2002 or 2003 that I would eventually migrate to Linux. By that time I had already ditched the MS office-pack for Star-Office (the original root of Open- and later Libre Office), swung over to the new and strange Firefox web-browser and photos got the Gimp-treatment for some time already.

There was just a problem with audio-software (ardour was nowhere near what it is today), but I started fumbling around with DeMuDi (Debian Multimedia Distribution) and got close enough to what I wanted. From there I changed to ubuntu 7.10 in … exactly: October 2007.

And that was that. The only change eversince was the switch to Xubuntu in 2011 (unity sucks)

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I started in the early 2005 with a Mandrake cd from some old magazine.
Then Ubuntu Dapper, Debian, Arch and Manjaro.
Now Arch and Manjaro full time (different PC)

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I can’t recall when I first started using Linux, but the last version of Windows I had installed was Windows XP! I also remember ordering Linux cds by mail order due to having a dial up modem!

Browsing the bookcase in the man cave I see the oldest cd I’ve kept is a burnt copy of Xubuntu 12.04 :slight_smile:

I’ve pretty much stuck to Ubuntu in one form of another since then. Currently running Mint 19 XFCE, but thinking that Xubuntu LTS will be a better match :slight_smile:

– edit – Or possibly Ubuntu Mate LTS. :wink:

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For me the old good days were when I was young and started to work, programming on a 360/91.
It was still the computers prehistory.

IBM_Model_91_Front_Panel
By MBlairMartin - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,

for more fun, data and programs were punched on cards with an IBM 029
280px-Lochkartenauswerteger%C3%A4t_IBM_mit_Bedienstation

Nostalgia!

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