Using Linux Since 2001 - My First Experiences with Linux
Back in 2001, when I was around 12 years old, I installed my very first Linux distribution. At the local newspaper shop in my home town of Tremelo, I randomly bought a Linux Magazine, just like the one you see in the featured image.
The magazine came with a free Linux distro, I think it was Red Hat version 7, but I'm not 100% sure on that. All I know is that when I came home, I spent the entire day installing Red Hat on my computer that was running Windows 98. Installing it was actually pretty easy and I even managed to create a dual boot setup at the first try, allowing me to keep my existing Windows 98 operating system.
Way more difficult than Windows!
While the screenshot above is a slightly newer version, it looks almost exactly the same as Red Hat 7. Using Linux wasn't as easy as it is today. I think I must've spent 2 days, just getting the network drivers to work. This was also when I had my first experiences with the Linux command line. I just scoured through forums and randomly copy pasted scripts that seemed they could solve any problems I had.
I know, pretty stupid perhaps when I look back on it, but remember that I was only 11 at the time and not a particularly smart kid. Still, it was a lot of fun to get into Linux, it had certain features that Windows operating systems didn't have at the time, such as the ability to have multiple desktops and install different window managers.
Compiling Everything from Scratch!
The next couple of weeks, I was busy trying out KDE and Gnome, while also compiling bits of software that I found on the internet. The following commands I must have typed in thousands of times during that time:
tar -xzf app-name.tar.gz
cd app-name
./configure
make
sudo make install
I'm not sure if we could use repositories to install software back then, I didn't use anything lik that at the time. I just compiled everything myself with those commands. Yum, a command-line package-management utility, certainly didn't exist on Red Hat back then, since it was still under development for its first release on Yellow Dog Linux at the time. Source
Conclusion
Nowadays, I sometimes think about how great it was to have those experiences with Linux early on. While I didn't become a programmer, I have to say that it's extremely useful to know your way around the Linux command line regardless of that.
Nowadays I still use a couple of different distributions, mainly Ubuntu. It's pretty amazing to see how much Linux in general has grown since then!
Do you have any experience with Linux? When did you start using it? Let me know in the comment section!
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This is inspiring to me. I like the idea of Linux, but I've never got round to installing it or trying it out. I just don't feel technologically competent enough. I'd like to try it out with the assistance of someone who knows more about it. I have an old Macbook that I bought in 2006, when it was top of the range! At that time Macs really were streets ahead of anything else. It's pretty heavy, and incredibly slow. But I think I could bring it back to life with a few tweaks, and maybe Linux would help. Maybe I need to find a local computer shop or group to assist.
Good luck! It's a bit more annoying to get old Macs running Linux (though since your's is an Intel likely, it's a lot easier), but it definitely breaths new life into them! You can barely get on the internet on something that old anymore, unless you run Linux, since Apple has mostly abandoned them. With Linux, you should be able to get a new browser on it, and maybe a few games, and whatever else you want. There's a LOT of software on Linux that runs on low power machines.
Great to know :)
There's a distro called Elementary OS, which has a really nice Mac-like experience with all of the benefits of Linux (freedom, privacy, open source, better performance and control).
With most distros, you just have to download the .ISO, make it bootable, and boot into it when you start your computer. There's many tutorials out there for that.
Excellent info - thanks.
Back in 2001 when I was 50.... Ahahahaha. I started diddling with Linux in about 2010 in a very limited way.
I had gotten pissed at Norton a few years earlier and removed everything that even resembled a Norton product, in spite of a cousin that worked there. In 2011 I got that kind of hard on for MS and wiped a machine and started learning Ubuntu. I have been exclusively Ubuntu on all platforms since late 2011 or very early 2012.
I still struggle with command line (but I remember lots of keystroke commands from the pre mouse MS Dos days) but all in all am really happy to have made the switch.
Even though my Operational teams where I work have used Linux for years I have never run it myself
LOL showing my age but when I was 12 there were only big main frame computers,
I came to Linux a bit later than you, but I have been using it for a while now too. Usually when I setup a Linux server at work, I skip the GUI all together. This forces me to just use the command line and learn new things. It is funny, but I always feel like a super hacker when I am working on my Linux servers, even if I am just installing Apache or something like that. I am a big fan of Ubuntu as well. I used SUSE for a bit when it first came out too. They had a really nice desktop GUI for SUSE back in the day when they were merging with Novell. I have a dedicated machine at home that just runs Ubuntu now and the upgrades they have made in user friendliness in just the past couple of years is amazing.
I don't remember when I first used Linux. Probably was with servers, since one of my first distros was CentOS, because it was what I used on servers. That was around maybe 15 years ago? Maybe more or less. Could have been as many as 17 years ago. Not sure.
Then I tried Gentoo, and got it running on an old cobbled together machine to use as a media and file server. It worked surprisingly well. It's amazing how low of system requirements you need to play a movie when you aren't running a GUI.
Everything was a LOT more annoying back then though. Drivers were a huge pain. Audio was a PITA. Setting up a computer and getting everything working often took a few days. And sometimes you did have to just copy paste things, because you probably didn't understand everything.
I've tried various other distros over the years, but I always end up getting annoyed with something and going back to Gentoo, cuz as annoying as it can be sometimes, I can usually fix whatever problems it has, and install pretty much anything I want. With other distros, it's a lot more of a pain in the ass to modify anything. They don't even support you running a custom kernel on some distros. What's with that?
Linux is great I use latest ubuntu distro as my daily driver os. No fuzz with updates and lesser virus vulnerability.
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I know that my brother is using it and he likes that. I have never used that as I was always having just my business laptop that didn't run on Linux. If I would have own a laptop, I would consider it as one of the options :)
I have been on and off using linux. But I have decided to go all in and dive into linux just last year, after my laptop was crying for help. Now, I am running the lightweight version of ubuntu, I love it since.
I am also currently learning several programming languages so that helps me with understanding how a system works. Even sometimes, it gives me a little headache with problems I encountered, I won't give up :D
If you're using it for programming, it's certainly one of the best operating systems. Especially when you have to install any dependencies for whatever language you're using, it's just a breeze to install them compared to Windows.
Definitely don't give up when you're encountering those problems. Usually you'll learn a great deal by trying to solve them!
I was also drawn to linux because the security it offers. At least, I know application that I am installing and fully responsible of things that will happen to my device.
I couldn't agree more, it's such a breeze and ease while installing any dependencies. The only thing that I think is the cons of using linux, is the limited games that I can play.
I just stumbled on your post while browsing on Discord Curation Collective, so it shows it works.
I started messing with Linux just a couple of years before you, I was working in Dublin, Ireland as a support tech for Iomega products, remember them, Zip and Jazz drives? My distro of choice was Mandriva back then, now it's mostly Ubuntu.
My major passion today is photography and were it not necessary for me to use Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, I would be running Linux as my daily driver. However, I still dual boot and run Virtual machines to keep my interest. I also have a home server which acts as a backup server, a web development environment and Nextcloud. It's headless and been rock solid for years now.
Nice to see a post on Linux on here, thanks for sharing.
Yeah I definitely remember them, I still have a couple of Iomega Zip drives laying around here. I think Mandriva was still called Mandrake back in those days.
Yeah sadly Linux doesn't have professional alternatives for most of the Adobe products (Macromedia back then, remember that?). I don't think they'll ever release Linux versions for their products.
Since I've never been into photography on a professional level, I do fine with just using Gimp. It's fine for semi-professional image editing, but on a professional level it just cannot compete.
Thanks for leaving a comment!
You're welcome, and that's right, it was Mandrake back then.
I've had a go with gimp and even thought of trying a Linux Photography Workflow and then blogging about it, but to go through the learning curve is just too time consuming and painful. My self discipline would never hold out when I know a half hour (or more) job in gimp can be done in 5 minutes in Photoshop.
There no real alternative to Lightroom either in which my workflow begins and ends seamlessly, and integrates very nicely with Photoshop.
I remember using Macromedia Fireworks before Adobe took it over, I use to use it for HTML layouts before css took off, what a pain that was in the days of the browser wars. Today I use Wordpress for Web Development, much more civilised.
I started messing about with Linux around the mid 2000's and used dual booting to keep windows working since 2006. The frustration brought on by windows often ended on the phone with: What part of "I can't go on line" don't you understand? In those days I ended up going on line with Ubuntu and getting what I needed to repair the windows OS, which usually entailed getting drivers and such. I wasn't interested in programming either, what motivated me was the independence of being able to get any old computer running without any help. These days I do a lot of Mint installs because the distro just works, and most windows users have a relatively easy time getting used to it. I have played around with at least 15 different flavors of Linux, but settled on Mint when Mint 17.3 came around; it worked great out of the box and was the trigger to dump windows permanently. I never looked back...
Never used Mint myself, but I've heard many good things about it. Might try it out in a virtual machine and see if I like it enough to try it out on a real machine.
Yeah I've also brought many old pc's back to live with Linux. Even hardware that's just so outdated, it won't run any version of Windows, still runs something like Puppy Linux, making it fairly usable again.
Thanks for the comment!
Old, erm, ..ancient machine? Try AntiX or Bunsen Labs. I have several versions of Non PAE Puppy Linux, works great for older machines from the Win XP era.
For Mint there is a lot of support from guys like Joe Collins on YouTube. His channel is full of useful Mint stuff: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTfabOKD7Yty6sDF4POBVqA
Go to the tab labeled "videos" to quickly get an overview of what he's got.