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Yes, it was an amazing time. I started with the Yggdrasil distribution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasi

Yes, it was an amazing time. I started with the Yggdrasil distribution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X which ran (I think) pretty happily on a Dell Dimension 486DX2 with a fairly small drive, 300 MB or so. Even then, with getting X running being kinda tricky, Linux was a big step up from Windows 3.1 and all the contortions you had to do to free up base RAM whilst stuck in the crappy memory model.

arethuza 15y ago
I can remember installing Slackware from floppies in (I think) '94 - quite a few boxes of them! Getting X working was certainly entertaining - lots of manual editing of Xconfig. I do remember failing to get X running on one PC and it turned out it was because of the graphics card having only 512K or memory.
- watmough 15y ago
  Ahhhh, glad I had the CDROM version. The biggest floppy software I installed more than once was the 23 disk Microsoft Access which came out around that time. I wonder how many floppies it would take for the current version? Of course, I'd just upgraded to my first CD player, the old Mitsumi one where the entire drive was the caddy, and sort of prolapsed heavily out of the machine. Yes, a glorious 1x speed.
dcminter 15y ago
I started with the root and boot disks - then moved onto the Soft Landing System (SLS) disk set. From that to Slackware on 100 odd disks. I remember getting a pal at Cambridge University (nice fat pipe to the hosting sites) to email the disk images as uuencoded files to me where I was working - in 64Mb slices requiring tedious extraction and reconstruction. My employers didn't really get the internet and even their email was on the X400 suite rather than SMTP. Awful given that they were a major international computer company. I still think it's a shame that Linux missed their first big chance. At that time Windows For Workgroups 3.11 was the de facto standard. Linux was a massive distance ahead in most respect but didn't have the applications. It kept that lead until NT 4.1 came out and it's only recently with the Ubuntu distributions and the general move to web applications that I've started to be hopeful that it can finally displace Windows. Which is a shame because now that the technical advantages are diminished (or maybe even surpassed) I no longer care.
- dcminter 15y ago
  Oh and what I meant to say before I started rambling - I remember being super impressed that my paperback copy of "Portable Unix" was larger than the disk media (2 x 1.44Mb diskettes) that encompassed the Linux clone. In retrospect it's startling that this was impressive!

arethuza 15y ago

I can remember installing Slackware from floppies in (I think) '94 - quite a few boxes of them! Getting X working was certainly entertaining - lots of manual editing of Xconfig. I do remember failing to get X running on one PC and it turned out it was because of the graphics card having only 512K or memory.

watmough 15y ago
Ahhhh, glad I had the CDROM version. The biggest floppy software I installed more than once was the 23 disk Microsoft Access which came out around that time. I wonder how many floppies it would take for the current version? Of course, I'd just upgraded to my first CD player, the old Mitsumi one where the entire drive was the caddy, and sort of prolapsed heavily out of the machine. Yes, a glorious 1x speed.

dcminter 15y ago

I started with the root and boot disks - then moved onto the Soft Landing System (SLS) disk set. From that to Slackware on 100 odd disks. I remember getting a pal at Cambridge University (nice fat pipe to the hosting sites) to email the disk images as uuencoded files to me where I was working - in 64Mb slices requiring tedious extraction and reconstruction. My employers didn't really get the internet and even their email was on the X400 suite rather than SMTP. Awful given that they were a major international computer company. I still think it's a shame that Linux missed their first big chance. At that time Windows For Workgroups 3.11 was the de facto standard. Linux was a massive distance ahead in most respect but didn't have the applications. It kept that lead until NT 4.1 came out and it's only recently with the Ubuntu distributions and the general move to web applications that I've started to be hopeful that it can finally displace Windows. Which is a shame because now that the technical advantages are diminished (or maybe even surpassed) I no longer care.

dcminter 15y ago
Oh and what I meant to say before I started rambling - I remember being super impressed that my paperback copy of "Portable Unix" was larger than the disk media (2 x 1.44Mb diskettes) that encompassed the Linux clone. In retrospect it's startling that this was impressive!