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I fondly remember the K6-2 system I had with a Voodoo 2 and 192MB of RAM. It was the first PC that was all mine. I also played HL1 and Unreal Tournament 1. The

I fondly remember the K6-2 system I had with a Voodoo 2 and 192MB of RAM. It was the first PC that was all mine. I also played HL1 and Unreal Tournament 1. The big games though were the HL mods TFC and Counter-Strike. I dragged that thing to so many LAN parties. A true golden age. It was also the first PC I ever installed Linux on. My dad would not let me do such a risky operation as dual booting Linux on the family computer. I don’t even remember what distro at this point.

wing-_-nuts 4y ago
>My dad would not let me do such a risky operation as dual booting Linux on the family computer. You were smarter than me. I wanted all those free compilers so badly I just went and installed redhat on the family pc. Ask me how well that conversation went with the old man...
metadat 4y ago
"Risky", it sounds so strange now to call dual booting "risky". But it was a different time, where remediating a borked software change wasn't google-able. Edit: @throwawayx38: I 100% agree with you! Thanks for your reply.
- throwawayx38 4y ago
  To be fair, it may not have been the dual boot itself that was risky. Unless they had a dedicated harddrive, they would also need to resize existing fat32/ntfs partitions and add a couple of new partitions for Linux. This process had a certain risk.
  - bigger_cheese 4y ago
    I have vague memories from early days of using Linux that you used to have to manually set the modeline for your videocard in X11 - if you got things wrong you could potentially permanently damage the monitor.
- time0ut 4y ago
  Heh, I meant it in a tongue in cheek way. My dad thought it was too risky.
  - metadat 4y ago
    I understand, that's what I found amusing. It's easy to imagine a dad in the 90s, when computers were much more costly, being like "hell no you aren't doing that to the family computer!" :) Maybe I'm still misinterpreting, but this was where my mind went. Man, I wish I could've appreciated how distinct the 90s were as a kid, but I was too young and dumb to have a shred of hope of being that aware!
    - to11mtm 4y ago
      In the era of that kind of PC, I remember the boot loaders being a bit more touchy. I never 'totally borked' a PC with LILO but definitely had to fix some things at least once, and that was with a nice thick Slackware 7.1 book to guide me. GRUB, IIRC, vastly improved things but took a little while to get there and truly 'easy-peasy'

wing-_-nuts 4y ago

>My dad would not let me do such a risky operation as dual booting Linux on the family computer. You were smarter than me. I wanted all those free compilers so badly I just went and installed redhat on the family pc. Ask me how well that conversation went with the old man...

metadat 4y ago

"Risky", it sounds so strange now to call dual booting "risky". But it was a different time, where remediating a borked software change wasn't google-able. Edit: @throwawayx38: I 100% agree with you! Thanks for your reply.

throwawayx38 4y ago
To be fair, it may not have been the dual boot itself that was risky. Unless they had a dedicated harddrive, they would also need to resize existing fat32/ntfs partitions and add a couple of new partitions for Linux. This process had a certain risk.
- bigger_cheese 4y ago
  I have vague memories from early days of using Linux that you used to have to manually set the modeline for your videocard in X11 - if you got things wrong you could potentially permanently damage the monitor.
time0ut 4y ago
Heh, I meant it in a tongue in cheek way. My dad thought it was too risky.
- metadat 4y ago
  I understand, that's what I found amusing. It's easy to imagine a dad in the 90s, when computers were much more costly, being like "hell no you aren't doing that to the family computer!" :) Maybe I'm still misinterpreting, but this was where my mind went. Man, I wish I could've appreciated how distinct the 90s were as a kid, but I was too young and dumb to have a shred of hope of being that aware!
  - to11mtm 4y ago
    In the era of that kind of PC, I remember the boot loaders being a bit more touchy. I never 'totally borked' a PC with LILO but definitely had to fix some things at least once, and that was with a nice thick Slackware 7.1 book to guide me. GRUB, IIRC, vastly improved things but took a little while to get there and truly 'easy-peasy'