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Lindows was my first Linux distro c. 1999. It was my first year at college, majoring in Business Administration, living on campus with internet speeds above 56k
by miquong 3y ago
Lindows was my first Linux distro c. 1999. It was my first year at college, majoring in Business Administration, living on campus with internet speeds above 56kbps for the first time. Trawling through the internet at that time, I stumbled on a (likely bootleg) Lindows installer somewhere and fell down the rabbit hole.
Looking back, I realize now I’d been a self-denying computer geek before then but for whatever reason Lindows, it’s wacky installer, dual boot support, and fortunate hardware compatibility gave me the right nudge at the right time to send me on a lifetime of hacking.
Almost 25 years later, most as a professional software engineer, I have a completely biased affection for this strange OS.
Thanks for sharing!
- xattt 3y agoAlso quirky was their Lindows Rock: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QSdRTOh2jeA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QSdRTOh2jeA
- dopeboy 3y agoMany here share that journey. For me, it was printing out the Gentoo "hard mode" installation guide where you compiled _everything_ from scratch, including the kernel. Didn't make it but it taught me the terminal and some foundational concepts in an OS. Set me down the path of linux (ubuntu - bit easier to install) and hacking.
- miquong 3y agoOh that was the holy grail. I also never got there… had to settle for the lower levels of Gentoo purity.
- shaky-carrousel 3y agoI did it. Worst part was compiling KDE in an Athlon XP. Took days.
- int_19h 3y agoFor me at least, the longest part was compiling OpenOffice.
- oblio 3y agoWent on a weekend trip. Started the OOO compilation, allowed it to also install some dependencies like Blackdown (?) Java. Decided, hey, might was well time it, for fun. I came back 2 days later, it had just finished. The compilation took almost 2 full days :-)
- Tommstein 3y agoI did it with a 300 MHz Celeron. You heard me.
- TylerE 3y agoI did multiple times on a 900-something mhz Athlon. Back when compile everything was the only option.
- senectus1 3y agooh gods, the many many hours I "wasted" recompiling my gentoo installation trying to squeeze more performance out of my gaming machine and prove to all my gaming naysaying friends that linux is no good for gaming. This was back in the VoodooFX days... fond memories prior to having a wife.
- nurettin 3y ago
- guestbest 3y agoEven though it became Lindpire, the spiritual successor to lightweight and windows like was LXDE and Lubuntu. It was Slackware that pioneered the loadlin boot loader installed on a dos partition that I think li does/linspire picked-up. This was all gradually killed off by ntfs and windows 2k It was a magical time for Linux with konqueror as a viable desktop browser and galeon as the best browser available until IBM started sponsoring the project to make it like epiphany. Eventually konqueror was absorbed into WebKit for safari, proprietary flash made browsing on Linux unnecessary difficult (gnash came later), and Microsoft lawsuits were customary towards all friendly UX not on a Mac.
- agumonkey 3y agolinspire who was using ocaml and then haskell, a rare thing at the time http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1506 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1506
- anthk 3y agoMagical expect for compiling MPlayer by hand and doing voodoo to get the TV Tuner working. But XawTV and AleVT were cool.
- heavyset_go 3y agoLike 20 years ago I was obsessed with getting MythTV running with a TV tuner, but kept running into driver issues and low spec'd hardware. It was still magical to me, though.
- anthk 3y agoTVtime worked faster but if didn't have LIRC support, I can't remember. If it did, it was to setup, much more lightweight but without recording support. Nowadays Kodi/XBMC it's the spiritual sucessor.
- WillAdams 3y agoVery fond of lubuntu, which I managed to get installed on NTFS in a directory on my C:drive allowing switching back-and-forth between it and my Windows install, and really wish that that was still a thing.
- girvo 3y agoMine was DamnSmallLinux and Slax. I wasn't allowed to install Linux on my family's computer of course, so live CD's were my go-to. Though once I scrounged up enough spare parts from family friends to build a PC, I then got to learn how to force Slax to "install" to a hard drive, which was quite a challenge for me, as it really didn't want to be run off non-live-install media haha
- tommica 3y agoOh shit, DSL - that was my jam too, felt so special, even though had no clue what I was doing :D Edit: The site is still alive! http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
- _fat_santa 3y agoMy first distro was Ubuntu 8.04 Server. Kind of funny because I was in high school back then and decided to install Ubuntu on my machine, coming from the Windows world, I thought that it would be cool to run the server version, thinking it would be like Windows Server 2008 (with a desktop). After installing I was shocked to find out that I had no desktop to work with, spent the next 3 days figuring out how to connect my machine to the internet and then eventually downloaded Gnome. Now almost 15 years later I still use Ubuntu as my daily driver, typing this on 22.04
- heavyset_go 3y agoI bought those business card shaped CD-R disks just so I could keep a copy of DSL with me before flash drives were popular.
- n3storm 3y agoLindows was released on august 2001 (in case you like to have your memories properly ordered)
- miquong 3y agoYeah it must have been later than I remember. Even if it was a bootleg beta I found, it would have been 2000 at the earliest.
- miquong 3y agoOops… it was WinLinux 2000[1] that came first for me and Lindows shortly after. Apparently the naming permutations worked for at least one person [1] https://archive.org/details/win-linux-2000 https://archive.org/details/win-linux-2000