I remember getting a copy of linux from my friends at a local LAN party (though it was tokenring party for us) around ‘96. 2 floppy disks. I’m 99% sure it was slackware.
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You guys only got alcoholism??!?
Crack is whack, or at least that’s what I keep telling myself
Hah, yeah I got a Debian floppy and then tried to install packages over DSL. Somehow it didn’t immediately kill my interest in Linux, eventually ran OpenBSD as my server for a while.
Shit, what games could be played on token ring?
Token Ring is a network protocol where a token—a small data packet—circulates around a ring topology, allowing only the device holding the token to transmit data, thus avoiding collisions. We played Doom and Quake.
I know what it is, and I played both those on lan, but my older bro set it up so I guess I just don’t remember. Fucking crazy that shit could work fast enough.
I don’t remember, what was the lag like for token ring? Lan just feels like it should be 100 ping or less
Yeah, sorry. Nerded out there for a sec on description. I don’t remember the lag that much, doom was ok. I think we all upgraded to 10Base-T ethernet (you remember the bnc stuff) after playing quake and host tended to have the gaming advantage. A few of us worked at a pc repair shop, so we could source (aka borrow) the parts if we couldn’t afford to buy them.
A few laters Quake world came out, someone finally popped for a hub and we all had 100mbit cards installed. But around then, we got @HOME in my neighborhood and gamespy was my new friend. I hated hauling my whole setup once a month after a year or so.
Not really. It was a local network, and sure the latency increased linearly with the number of nodes, but for a small LAN party it would be quite serviceable.
Whats this meme called, I need to post some things
Just be sure to post some memes to !bikinibottomtwitter@lemmy.world !
It forced me to learn. It took me weeks to get X configured and working correctly. I had an internet subscription and a modem but it also took weeks to get it to work on Linux. My distribution came on a CD from a magazine but some dependencies were not included, so I had to reboot under Windows to download a missing package, reboot on Linux and try again, then need to get the next dependency. We came a long long way from having to specify the vertical refresh rate of the monitor in xf86config.
Starting with a French version of Slackware was brutal but I had nothing else.
Be 12 in 1998
Literally just ecstatic that I could wiggle around a little X on a blank screen after giving up trying to load a window manager.
Pop in a BeOS live CD to feel like I did something cool
Exact same experience. What district did you install for the cursor wiggle? Mine was slackware
Later mandrake was noob friendly enough for me to get a real start
Started on Slackware too. I remember building my own kernel and having to make sure it fit on a 1.44MB floppy.
make menuconfig
Knoppix was the shit back then.
me after installing Ubuntu because it was the only other OS I’d ever heard of, because I accidentally nuked my Windows Vista install by trying to overclock the CPU in a Gateway laptop:
Similarly, my XP install just died and I didn’t have a copy of Windows to reinstall. Gnome 2 taught me computers don’t have to look or feel boring and the terminal taught me they weren’t scary.
Learned a lot that first year.
Why does this capture that feeling so well lol
Dude I remember when live booting knoppix was impressive. Hell my intro to Linux was mandrake. We have so many great distros and documentation available now it’s crazy.
I ended up learning by memory the US keyboard layout because i got tired of having to change it whenever i booted knoppix up.
Now i have all my keyboards set to US international. Best layout for programing.
I remember first learning about linux OS and how to create a Linux USB installer using rufus to bypass the password my parents had put on the windows side. In those days there was no eifi boot loader lock you could access the files just by trying out the new OS you had in your USB. LOL.
Definitely describes my switch back in 2008 when canonical still sent out Ubuntu CDs for free in the mail. We had dial up so it was faster for them to mail me a CD than to try and download the image myself.
If the ping rate is irrelevant, then the good old sneakernet is a great way to transfer large amounts of data.
CD? Hah! Luxury!
We 'ad to install off floppy disk! And the disks had bad sectors and the drive kept grinding them down! Then we ‘ad to build the kernel wi’ two bare hands! And the only window manager we 'ad would spontaneously delete itself and we’d 'ave to start all over at 2am, half an hour before we finished the last install!
Never really thought about it, but that first time exploring after using XP/2000 really did kinda feel like a backrooms kind of experience. It’s all so familiar, but nothing is in the right place.
Seems like the experience difference is less so these days, what with everything being mostly web apps or mobile.
Hm. I started using Linux (Ubuntu) somewhat around 2007. And I was quite fascinated how flashy it was with all those desktop effects compared to the rather boring XP. Only problem I had back in the day was wifi, but I didn’t play a lot of games at that time.
But yeah, once I solved that wifi problem I had internet, so there was a difference.
This was knoppix for me!
SUSE on 6 CDs
My first experience with Linux was trying to install TurboLinux 6 from a CD I got at a HAM Fest.
Short story shorter, I didn’t successfully use Linux the first time until I tried a different distro (probably Debian?) a few years later.
