First distro I ever used. Downloaded it from a BBS onto about 40 floppies. Fun times.
Technically second distro I ever installed, but the first one I actually used. I purchased Mandrake when it was based on RedHat, but didn’t get very far with it. In college I inherited always on Internet in my dorm and ran a Slackware webserver, and later fileserver and BitTorrent machine. I tried running Slackware on my laptop but I couldn’t get the battery management to work, but I dual booted for a couple of years.
Same, same, still remember the install process, and how hard it was to get x11 working, plus how you ended up with twm after.
And of course having to reboot to escape vim.
and how hard it was to get x11 working
Oh good God. If you really want to test someone’s resolve, sit them down at an old computer with a CRT and no Internet and have them configure X11 from scratch. Seeing that default X11 crosshatch background for the first time was practically orgasmic after the bullshit I went through to make it work.
That’s one of those traumatizing experiences I’d completely blocked from my memory until I read your comment.
Traumatizing experience #2 that just came back to me was getting a winmodem working and connected to my ISP via minicom.
Didn’t do winmodems, that would be a nightmare.
I can’t remember how long it was until xf86config made things slightly easier, yeah, getting modelines at first was basically impossible, I think it was trial and error for hours at least.
I used to go into the Sun lab at my university to download floppy images to take home. Good times.
I remember copying the window manager config files from the Sun workstations and using it on my home computer ( still a 486 if I recall ). What a rush it was just to seeing the screen look the same as those super expensive machines.
