Early Knoppix live CDs have a special place in my heart
this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
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I wonder whatever happened to Knoppix. All I've been able to find online is speculation and questions.
Yeah, Knoppix was kind of a 'Tucows vibe' distro. Pretty approachable.
Zen Linux was another short-lived 2005 liveDistro, which had a nice feel and Art.
Also, installing all https://trisquel.info/ versions side-by-side and doing a 17 year fast-forward would be cool.
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Hanna Montana Linux, just for giggles
AmogOS too
Gonna recommend this to ally co workers.
It is not vulnerable to Windows viruses.
:-)
Anyone else get free Ubuntu CDs shipped to their house? I think I had 7.10 (Gusty Gibbon) shipped to my house back in 2007.
Otherwise, Mandrake Linux was my first "good" distro. I first tried one called Lycoris which claimed to be an beginner's distro with it's own DE, and it was impressive how well it handled setting up a dual boot installation and at the time it was a revelation that I could use a computer without Windows. I didn't begin preferring linux until I tried Mandrake with KDE 3, though.
Yes, I remember these days. I had a few Ubuntu CDs from back then.
YESS!!
Slackware like 7-12.
Basically until they pulled fortunemod.
Early versions of Ubuntu,
Red Hat before RHEL,
Mandrake/Mandriva.
Mandrake 6.0 was my first distro in '98-'99. Mandrake hasn't existed for a long time now; I have no idea if you can still find an old iso of it. It used KDE 1.1.1 as it's DE, and to this day, KDE has remained my preferred DE.
Crunchbang (#!) linux breathed live into some very wimpy hardware I’ve had in the past.
Loved the minimalism.
My first distribution was Slackware 7.1 when I was in high school. It took a week to download the .iso on dialup, and I had to use a download manager (GetRight) so that I could resume the partial download any time the connection dropped (usually because someone had to use the phone).
I'm old o_o
I still vividly remember not being able to figure out how to install new packages, or knowing how to compile from source.
Slackware 2.x, on two floppies. A boot and a root disk, downloaded from a BBS using a dial-up connection (I think it was a 57.6 modem). No X, but I still loved it, so much better than DOS.
Oh I remember those disks :D I think I had to either pull them off the ISO, or download them separately so that I could boot the system to the point where A: the install could occur at all and B: it had enough drivers to use the CD-ROM drive XD
I still fondly remember sitting in the Sun Lab at University downloading SLS disk by disk.
SLS 1.0.x still had Linux kernel 0.9x on it.
Just getting X at all on your own PC was like a magic trick.
The number of hours I put into figuring out what X was, the difference between XFree86 and X.ORG , fixing resolution and DPI issues, installing video card drivers (mostly nVidia)... I think all that tinkering prepared me for my career as a systems admin.
I think Slackware came with KDE, which is probably why I leaned toward it for so long. I've been using XFCE for many years, now.
Red Hat used to be a really solid choice for desktop back in the 90s and early 2000s. Some milestone releases:
- 6.2 was the first version to put up ISO images for install. This is the one to get if you really want a blast from the past (early version of anaconda installer, ext2, LILO bootloader, Linux 2.2, Gnome 1 etc.)
- 7.3 was the last version to come with the Netscape browser.
- 9.0 was the last version before they split into Fedora and RHEL. It's the last and most mature desktop release of that era, included the "Bluecurve" unified look and feel introduced in 8.0 but had bugfixed versions of KDE and Gnome.
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I'm still nostalgic for CrunchBang, and I continue to use OpenBox with any distro I try... Keep your DEs, I'm good 😄
CrunchBang was my jam in late high school. I couldn't believe how much more lightweight it was compared to Lubuntu, which had been my main for years due to having a potato laptop
Right? Those terrible low-spec, off-the-shelf laptops can really cook with Openbox on a Linux distro.
Arco, Mabox, and Bunsenlabs are my current vm favorites.
I respect Bunsenlabs for lacking the chaotic instability that I loved to hate about Crunchbang in high school, and which I hate to wish I could love as a busy adult requiring a stable system...
The old Ubuntu pre snap and Amazon era.
Although not my first distro, I feel a lot of nostalgia for SimplyMepis
Me: how many applications have you got installed? SimplyMepis: Yes.
Corel Linux
Uninstalled this recently as well. It is surprisingly slick for the time and way more modern feeling than you would expect.
Linux was just not corporate enough for it at the time.
In a different timeline….
Just for curiosity, where do you get these old distributions?
I might try the Ubuntu version which got me into Linux one of these days😇
https://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/
At least Ubuntu makes it easy to roam through their archives. Have fun :)
Thanks I’ll check it out👍
Wao, Mandriva and DamnSmallLinux 🤣🤣🤣
I’m nostalgic for Ubuntu when it still had Unity as default, and Linux mint around 2014. That’s when I began coding, and that’s the time I liked the look of them more than the current modern offerings. Plus there was more ease of customization it felt like
Get a CD with RedHatLinux, SUSE or Debian 1 or something and try to install that
Gentus Linux comes to mind, obscure distro based on Red Hat (not RHEL mind You) released by now forgotten ABIT, a motherboard manufacturer. I was daily driving it as teenager back in 2001 for couple of weeks until I learned by trial and error how to get windows 98 installed back. Another one would be Mandrake Linux which I was dual booting couple years later.
I read gentoo instead of gentus, found it awkward that someone would call gentoo obscure, did a websearch, came back to the post with gentus as a reply, re-read the post.
The distro used by the one laptop per child project. Fascinating GUI
RedHat 5.3 with fvwm (or fvwm95) is very nostalgic for me because it was one of the few walnut creek CDs I managed to get working. Mandrake and early SuSe were cute as well.
Tom's Root Boot.
One floppy disk, one Linux machine!
I just started using Linux back in 2018. There is no nostalgia for me, as all the distro I used back then are still working now.
I've been meaning to fiddle with OpenIndiana and Illumos for a while, which both trace their roots back to Sun Microsystem's Solaris. It'd be really cool to poke around in a system that didn't grow off of BSD or Linux.
I booted a VM with BeOS for nostalgia a couple months ago. Remember booting that as a kid and drooling over how fast it was.
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First distro I got to work was LibraNet. Easy to set up and use, ran by a father-son team. Died when the father passed away. 😥
I'll probably be alone on this one, but there was this Brazilian distro, fully translated to portuguese named Kurumin, an indigenous word for "boy," that was my first distro. The distro where I learned how to program in Python ages ago.
As a trivia, this distro main maintainer gave up on tech and was living as a monk or something far from any internet connection.
Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Badger, oh my god the color scheme, all the earthy tones. 😊
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