OPEN SOURCE YEARBOOK 2018 .
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CC BY-SA 4.0 .
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OPENSOURCE.COM 15
Linux/Fedora since then. A funny story: I remember jump-
ing on an IRC server and going to ask for help. And I typed
something like “I need help getting Xwindows working on
my PC.” I was kicked out of the channel with a reason: It is
not Xwindows, but Xwindow... so, yeah... open source folks
can be tough!
SCO Openserver
Jim Salter [18] writes:
A rough guess for which version is 1.2.0. I can’t nd a de-
nitive answer on the kernel it shipped with, but 1.2.0 would
have been pretty current when SCO OpenServer 5 shipped.
The install was absolutely horrible. Did I mention it was SCO
OpenServer? Horrible. This was the foundation of a very
spendy telemarketing predictive dialing system, with SCO
OpenServer 5.0 as the OS and a proprietary application run-
ning the phones over a T-1. Mostly I remember thinking that
I was for absolute certain going to be a FreeBSD person, not
a Linux person. And for quite a while, I was. There wasn’t
really any doubt in my mind then or now that FreeBSD was a
superior system in pretty much every way in the mid-90s; but
at some point in the 2000s Linux blew the doors off and has
been gaining more steam ever since.
Slackware
Tony McCormick [19] writes:
It was exciting to be able to use a Unix like OS at home
so I could run Perl and Bash scripts. During the installation,
there were lots of 3 1/2” oppy drives and ipping through
the Yggdrasil Linux book to gure out how to compile things.
Getting dial-up working so I could login at to the ofce was
fun too, but great.
Peter Czanik [20] writes:
My rst Linux kernel version was 0.99.11 or 0.99.13. Of
course, I don’t remember by heart, but it was Slackware, and
it was not yet kernel 1.0. It was a pretty basic installation, as
my machine did not have much RAM. It was good enough
for a text console and to learn the basics: bash, init scripts,
server applications, reading tons of man pages. My rst Li-
nux install involved many oppy disks. And, I actually had to
reinstall it a couple of times as DR-DOS (the other OS on
the machine) and rearrange partition numbers on each boot.
Steve Morris [21] writes:
I was another of those early Slackware users; I picked it up
at a local Comdex show in Vancouver. I rushed home and
proceeded to install the 24 or so oppy disks on my PC.
After what seemed like hours later, I was left with a com-
mand-line shell. All I could remember about that rst expe-
non-Windows. I remember taking my computer home for the
summer and not being able to get the modem working, so I
couldn’t get online. My parents still had dial-up then.
Alan Formy-Duval [14] writes:
The rst kernel I actually compiled myself seems like the
most appropriate answer. I believe it was probably 2.0.32
or 2.0.33. I was running Red Hat Linux 5.X as my rst dis-
tribution. My rst installation was onto a basic Dell Optiplex
desktop machine. There were always a few necessary steps
after performing the installation. Those were to complete the
network conguration, congure X-Windows, and compile
the latest kernel. For the kernel, I would head over to kernel.
org and download the latest version. I remember (mostly)
the command used to run the compilation as something like
“make dep clean bzlilo modules modules_install.” It seems
like the compile took an hour or two.
David Both [15] writes:
My rst was probably kernel 2.0.32 in Red Hat Linux 5.0
in late 1997. My rst install was long and slow on my IBM
ThinkPad—which was even then quite old—with a CD. It re-
quired me to make a number of choices that I did not then
understand, including ones about hardware and the list of
software to install. As I recall, there were no groups of soft-
ware that would install required prerequisites so after the
basic installation I had to endure hours of dependency-hell
to install a few additional top-level packages. Package man-
agement with RPM was a nightmare because it did not deal
at all with nding and installing dependencies like YUM and
DNF. It must have been even worse before RPM. I never did
get the display on my ThinkPad to switch to graphics mode.
But that was probably excellent as it forced me to learn how
to use the Linux command line, and I have been a CLI fan
ever since.
Chris Hermansen [16] writes:
My rst kernel version would have been around 2.2.12.
I remember getting Red Hat Linux on oppies shortly after
returning home from my rst visit to Chile in November 1999.
If I recall correctly, the rst install did not go at all well—it was
on a Thinkpad. The second was on a desktop and it seems
to me that worked just ne. The thing that struck me about
that rst brush with Linux, once I got past the huge packet of
oppies, was how generally decent it was compared to my
work machine which at the time was a Sun SPARCStation
something or other.
Anderson Silva [17] writes:
Red Hat Linux 3.0.3 (Picasso), kernel 1.2.13. My rst in-
stall was a total failure. I had to open up my Packard Bell
computer, to see if I could identi-
fy if my CD-ROM was Primary or
Secondary Master or Slave, as
my BIOS wouldn’t tell me, and
Linux didn’t auto-detect it, and
then it died on the X install. I only tried the install again six
months later, successfully. I’ve been running on Red Hat
My rst install was
a total failure.
I remember thinking I was for
absolute certain going to be a
FreeBSD person, not a Linux person.