Michael Nelson wrote:
On Tue, Dec 26, 2006 at 10:38:10AM -0600, John Pierce wrote:
Back about 1998 I was a newbie, I remember my first install and the fun I had. I installed Redhat downloaded and did the rpm install. I got the the log in prompt and logged in as root. I had no clue how to do even a simple directory listing. I went back to windows and surfed the web, i found some documentation about the man command and one suggested to type man ls. Imagine what I learned.
Heh... memories.
Before the www and Linux was around, I had been running FidoNet BBS systems on DOS and OS/2. I got laid off from my job and decided I wanted to learn something completely new (to me), so I decided to install Unix. A friend had a set of Esix floppies... 54 1.44MB floppies that made up a basic install of Everex's brand of AT&T SystemVR4 Unix.
I installed it. Aside from the fact that it took 18 hours to do from floppies (and I had to do it three times because of random floppy read errors), when it was finished and I logged in, all I saw was "$". X? GUI? You've gotta be kidding, this was a text mode only install.
Not encouraging.
I had read somewhere that the "ls" command worked like DOS's "dir", and I had also learned about the "man" command. But for a while, all I could do was log in and type "ls", and "man man", "man ls"...
Eventually I learned how to set up uucp networking, downloaded X, compiled it (what a nightmare!) and got twm running.
My roommate and I set up a lan. We heard rumors about this thing called Linux, it would actually boot and run off a single floppy. I didn't believe it, so I downloaded it. It was version 0.98something, IIRC. It worked!
Along came a distribution... Slackware. From there things started progressing nicely, through RedHat, and Mandrake, and a short detour into FreeBSD.
I am amazed these days when I do something like a SUSE 10.2 install, and pretty much everything comes up configured and working.
We've come a long way.
My first Linux install was also Slackware. I recall downloading the various floppy packages, according to what I wanted to install. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org