I got started in 2007 when I was in high school, as I was stuck using Windows XP on my Pentium 3 computer. I stumbled on Ubuntu, and they would send you CDs for free. Installation was probably easier than Windows, and I think the hardest part was getting drivers for modem, cell phone internet (GPRS?), printers, and later WiFi working. Haven't looked back since! Still thankful to Canonical for sending out that free disk to my home. I used that computer for next 2 years, during which time my interest in computers probably got twofold (alternatively, had I stuck with Windows in that PC, I may have lost interest with frustration). Twelve years since, seen Linux grow so much over these years, and I still prefer to use it for my personal computing needs.

Thanks for reminding me of these! I remember when they announced shipit. I think I was in middle school and got them shipped to my parents house because they were free and why not. I lived in a rural area and didn't have broadband yet. I can thank those CDs for kindling my love of programming and Linux. Thanks Canonical!

I found shipit so amazing. I went there to order like 5 discs and the form came back saying that hey, actually the discs are pretty cheap and our main cost is postage per shipping unit so why don't you order like 15 more just in case? :-)

Booting could be an adventure. It helped tremendously to know that the LILO printed to the console at boot was itself a diagnostic, with the first 'L' indicating that the first-stage loader had been invoked from the MBR, and the 'I' that the second-stage loader was successfully invoked. Further error codes and behaviours generally indicated specific problems.

I'm having trouble finding diagnostic docs (understandably as LILO was deprecated over a decade ago), but the lilo(8) manpage has some details:

https://linux.die.net/man/8/lilo

As for installing Linux in 1998: I'd first installed Red Hat out of a CDROM from a book, and trialed Debian for the first time using a downloaded Potato (2.2) boot image -- the last installer that fit on a single floppy as I recall.

Instructions for a chroot install based on that were published soon afterwards.

Similar experience though it differed in the details. Downloaded disks from the internet at work. Never had problems with IDE CDROM or booting. Those parts easy.

Getting X or sound working, incredibly hard. Scary warnings about frying the monitor and manually writing "modelines."

I remember wasting an entire weekend, morning until night tinkering with zero progress to show for it. After about a week you'd give up and accept that you made "this much" progress, and would never go further. At least until the next major version came out with improved drivers.

Believe I tried the Caldera (or Mandrake?) linux in the late 90s and it was easier to install.

Caldera was the one with the graphical installer where you could play Tetris. I believe Mandrake was the one that was very similar to Red Hat (back around RH 5.2) but I remember it being a little easier to get working.

X was difficult. I remember sound being fairly easy if you had a sound blaster or turtle beach. The modem and PPP was where I always got hung up. I finally bought an external modem and that made things much easier.

Hmm, I didn't remember using PPP or a modem. Now, I remember why.

At work we had a LAN. At home I had a Windows 98 box that talked to the internal modem and dialed up, which routed to a special orange ethernet cable with the wires crossed to an emachines box in the second bedroom. That one had dual boot linux on it for tinkering and thought it was directly on the internet. Good times.

Installing Mandrake 9.2 (2003?) was in many respects better than installing Windows XP. The graphic installer was incredibly smooth, it had a real integrated partition manager (something that looked like Paragon PM), and a much more accurate estimate of expected time. If you had old enough hardware, everything would just work perfectly. I still have fond memories of Mandrake.

For Red Hat the big jump was with version 6.0. The earlier release, 5.2, still had the text based installer. But still, I do remember looking up the horizontal and vertical frequencies in my monitor's manual :)

> you probably had to create a floppy boot disk by dd'ing it off the cdrom, as your BIOS was 50/50 able to support the El Torito extensions that allowed a CDROM to boot the computer.

I've got mine framed beside my desk[1]. For some reason I printed a label for the disk - it's dated 11/12/1999, what blows my mind is that at that time I'd only just turned 13 years old!

While I was a very smart kid I think whoever wrote the documentation back then to guide me through the process must have been quite incredible, or maybe it was just a better culture of documentation than we have today. I spent so much time reading TLDP that when I forget Bash's if syntax I remember the table from this page[2] before I even think of Google.

I would have been dual booting when I made that disk but after the Windows XP announcement my 14 year old self decided if I don't take the plunge now "I'll be seduced by Micro$oft's shiny new toys and assimilated by Bill Gateus of Borg" so sometime in spring 2001 I switched entirely to Linux and never looked back. At that time switching entirely was stupid and, frankly, masochistic but I'm VERY glad I did it.

[1] https://imgur.com/VHv8mzI

[2] http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guide/html/sect_07_01.htm...

> buy a collection of Linux distributions + the Sunsite archive on a 5-cd set that was released quarterly and available at computer stores.

I don't remember those collections, but I do remember boxed commercial distributions being sold at CompUSA, such as Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, and Corel.

> The dialog-based installer wasn't too different from now, IIRC.

From what I remember, they completely rewrote the installer with Sarge. I don't remember what the old one was like, though.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane!

I have a few of them in a box somewhere.

https://www.amazon.com/Linux-Developers-Resource-6-CD-Set/dp...

Here is a link to the first Linux I encountered that had this CD setup: Yggdrasil. The installation notes show what hardware was required [0]. I remember figuring out how to install Linux from these CDs only to say — what now? Strangely, the version that I remember trying was the 1993 release that is pictured on the wikipedia page[1].

This link is from a few years before the Debian described in the OP, but it was about the same scenario. But either way, these were way before the commercial boxed Linux OSs were available. And this was still back in the day when having CDROMs pressed and shipped was still more efficient and cheaper than online access.

[0] https://www.linux.co.cr/distributions/review/1995/0920-a.htm...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X

I remember it included both a floppy disk and a diskette, so you could choose a suitable one for your system to boot from, and continue with the CDROM. (a 1x speed Mitsumi drive with manual sled loading[0] at the time)

Booting directly from CDROM media wasn't even available until mid-90ies if I recall correctly.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUBeHWVHh9U

I got started with Linux in 2007. Only internet I had in 2007 was a terribly unreliable dial-up and GPRS on my mobile. I was able to install a torrent app on my Symbian N80 which allowed me to download ~700mb Ubuntu images. It took 2-3 days for the downloads to finish and I'd leave my phone plugged in most of the time. That year was probably the most fun I've had with computers. Linux desktop was buzzing with things like Beryl and Compiz back then.

Amazing, how do you remember all that? It was similar for me as well.

I heard a piece on NPR on Linux. I had played with Dos for Dummies and got my parents to buy a copy of Suse 5. After a harrowing 6 hour installation process on my parent's 33MHz 386, I needed the discard rescue floppy to recover the Windows boot.

I would've been a programmer at that age but lacked mentor/support.

I've used Debian pretty much every day since the first day I installed it, which helps.

do you upgrade from major versions (e.g. 7 -> 8) via reinstall or their in-place process? I've seen some burned by the latter. Maybe you've got 7 partitions instead of 1, like those who paid attention to partitioning advice?

Personally I do upgrade-in-place -- my main home machine is an in-place upgrade from its original install of Debian 0.93r6 back in 1996 or so (with different hardware now, of course). Some upgrades have been hairier than others, but fixing up any fallout has always been much easier than doing a clean install, restoring user data and trying to recreate all the configuration tweaks.

Crossgrading from i386 to x86-64 was a particular bear, and I have vague memories that the a.out to ELF transition might have been awkward too...

> my main home machine is an in-place upgrade from its original install of Debian 0.93r6 back in 1996 or so.

That's absolutely marvellous.

My Mac is 12 years worth of installs of betas, upgrades, etc

Years ago I would upgrade-in-place, now I don't bother.

Were you using "old" hardware in '98? I installed Redhat around then and it wasn't very painful. I don't recall bumping into any issues.

In '98 I grabbed a TNT video card the first week it came out and it gave me no trouble. (No idea about Voodoo though.) I also had a CD burner and a DVD drive, but I don't remember if I could boot directly off of CD in '98 or I needed a floppy disk. I think in '98 you could boot off of a CD directly. Oh and by 2001 I had fiber internet, which isn't that far out.

Anyways, your story sounds like how it was in '94 and earlier. I'd dial in to the local edu to get online. The internet was painfully slow. I'd run out of ram so I created a bootup floppy to boot directly into the game bypassing Win 3.11. When Windows 95 and Doom came out it was such a game changer. Though, I still have a fondness for old 80s Mac classic games like Crystal Quest and Return to Dark Castle.

I was buying nothing the-week-it-came-out in 1998.

As late as 2003-2004 I was still hand writing X configs, Debian wouldn't produce a working X Config out of the box

Editing X configs was how a lot of people got started with VIM

The first time I installed Debian was 2002, and I hit X config issues. I eventually got it working, but I swore off the Linux desktop because of it.

Truth. The saving grace to achieve further progress when stuck in PPP/modem hell was discovering WvDial on Debian. Quite literally cut out all of the noise.

I recall the one of the early Linux distributions I tried had a funky X Server of sorts. I think it was Metro-X or similar to this: https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2299 Bask in the beauty of those xlib/Motif widgets. This was an absolute saviour until I got a more "normal" video card.

And Winmodems! You're taking me back, man.

I got started with Linux in 1996 (first Slackware, then Debian later that year), and all I had was dial-up access and floppies. I certainly didn't spend weeks downloading disk images. But then, having no way to burn CD-ROMs, I wasn't downloading CD-ROM ISOs. I'd just download the floppy disk images I needed to do the install, let the installer download the rest via FTP if the distro supported that over PPP, and then download software as needed afterward. dselect really was great, and then apt-get was awesome.

Postgres came with those Sunsite Archives, found one from 1996. Interesting selection of software https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/ftp-archives/suns...

University Ingres preceded Postgres. Hence the "post". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingres_(database)

Oh I'm familiar with Actian, went down that rabbithole reading the history of Postgres a while back. It's owned by an Indian company now.

Yup, I remember the excitation after buying a debian distro and receiving a ton of CDs by mail with the freshly released Debian Woody. It was defiant to raise X and noticed soon that had bought an accelerated intensive training in computers. Lots of esotheric things that would fail sometimes and many new concepts: Lilo, partitions, fdisk, no internet connection everywhere and hoarding deb packages in pendrives.

It came with a wonderful sense of adventure, defy and a chain of personal victories and achievement that would be not possible to experience currently by newer generations. Very well spent time in retrospective. Sometimes, is good to be a ram-level stubborn

I "borrowed" a debian potato CD from a professor's desk back in 2001. Our campus in Germany certainly was a perpetual construction site and certainly not first rate, but we had 10mbit switches and were connected to university fiber network, so I could download KDE at megabytes per second.

oh man, I so remember a lot of this. I started my Linux journey with RedHat 4.2 that I bought from Hastings (Music/Video/Book store). I remember minicom and typing ATDT and the number of my ISP to get the modem to dial, then once connected, that was only half the battle, you had to exit minicom and run some 'ppp' script. I also remember the LI.. of LILO not loading .. and yes 'xf86config' helper script.

I'm actually so glad I had all the weird quirks of the 'early' linux days to work with, like compiling your own kernel to get some PCI or ISA card to work .. if I had not been tinkering all those nights I don't know what line of work I would have gone into ..

I simply downloaded a netinstall, and used the awesome A2000 connection

Don't forget all the fun with IRQ and address settings for network (and other) cards, and boot args.

Absolutely, I remember that until you could pass IO port, DMA and IRQ settings for things like Soundblaster cards on the kernel command line from LILO, it was essential to recompile your kernel with these settings specified in the kernel config. Compiling drivers for network cards and Soundblaster as kernel modules was error prone, and it often would only work if the driver was compiled directly into the kernel proper.

I don't think this situation improved until the PnP and PCI busses arrived.

Slackware was the distro I finally settled on from the Infomagic CD set, since some of the early Redhat and Debian releases were broken, they would install to the hard drive and then not boot.

I remember slackware being 13 3.5"/1.44Mb floppy disks, with perhaps some smaller minimal install collection. Somewhere near 1992? (Completely from memory, perhaps I'm off)

There was also the fun part about compiling the mouse drivers