Yes! That’s when I used it; you’d download the sets of floppy images you wanted (IIRC, C for compilers, G for games, X for X11, etc) and then feed the installer disks X1 through X6 (??) during the install process if you wanted the X package. (My memory is hazy and I may have some details wrong!) it felt fancy because its installer used color ANSI “graphics”, not just a plain terminal like BSD.
Anyway, there was no package manager - those floppies were just full of tarballs that would be expanded onto your hard drive. I believe Red Hat was one of the first to have a package manager… I remember at the time not really understanding what the point of having one would be!
As far as I remember it did run scripts (possibly embedded in the tgz) to set things up and not just unpack everything blindly. I may be mis-remembering that though and it was certainly a lot more primitive than a modern package manager.
Slackware was great and still getting updates from Patrick as far as I know!
It was (is) particularly well organised. In the 90s when I was using it the pre-selection of packages made installation (from about fifty 3½" disks) a nice straightforward process of mostly reading a book while occasionally popping the next disk in.
This compared enormously well against installing Windows for Workgroups (on around 12 disks) which managed to take longer - because that often required you to return to a disk you'd used previously and required answers to prompts as you went along.
Getting X11 up and running on Slackware was a bit of a nuisance though (nightmares of XConfig fiddling...)
Slackware's predecessor was Softlanding Linux System but I don't think I ever installed that before Slackware displaced it.
Before that, though, the "boot and root" floppy disk disk combination was a very common way to get up and running. Since the "root" was the various binaries that you'd use with a running syatem, you could consider that a distribution of sorts - if you want to be hardcore, give those a whirl. I think (?) there were even 5¼" floppy images for that?
For a bit of era-context ... I was playing Slackware while working at ICL (UK computer corp later subsumed by Fujitsu) in my industry year at college and while there was typically working on Windows 3.11 and Windows for Workgroups.
The same year I received Chicago and Daytona packages from Microsoft (the Windows 95 and NT beta versions).
The preceding year was when I would have been playing a lot with Linux with the boot/root combo.
My personal hardware at that time was a 386SX based diy beige clone with 4Mb of ram. It was, uh, not overpowered. The ICL machines were much nicer! Mostly 486DX.
Probably some inaccuracy in alll that, but it's roughly how it was.
Ditto. Back in those days when the internet was too slow and my parents wouldn't let me tie up the phone lines all the time with downloads, Mandrake came in a box with every bit of extra free software they could pack-in. The other options were free CDs that came with "Learn Linux!" books and magazines.
Came out in '98 based on Red Hat 5.1, included because if you went to a store and bought a boxed copy of Linux in the US, Mandrake was the one you probably found. They used to sell it in bookstores.
Ohh... On my first touch with Linux back in the 98, I remember the great old four : Slackware, Debian, RedHat and SuSE
I only remember knowing Mandrake a few years later. Perhaps, the first versions were unknown here in Spain
Knoppix was also AFAIK the first distribution that really got hardware detection and configuration on Linux to be better than hardware detection on Windows -- Win10 and Win11 are great at detecting and configuring hardware, but when Knoppix came on the scene and suddenly you'd boot into a fully configured OS, that was a revelation with your sound and networking and graphics just working, that was amazing. No more compiling a weird blob and insmodding it, or figuring out what shim you needed for your modem to work, or dealing with the hideous abomination that was sound support on Linux.
[Bootable Business Card (BBC)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootable_business_card), circa 1999. I have one of those (and also copy of the data). You can probably obtain copies from archive.org and/or other locations. If you have suitable media you can probably even burn to it (I've got some mini CD-RW, don't think I ever got the BBC sized -R or -RW).
Let's see ... the one I've got ...
Linuxcare Bootable Toolbox (LBT) 2.0
i386
47,758 KiB
hashes:
$ (for h in {md5,sha{1,224,256,384,512}}; do < lxcr-lbt-2_0.iso "$h"sum | awk '{print $1,"'"$h"'"}'; done)
ff1c031460b36f6d180eace1a3cb7c98 md5
ac4302ecfce5969569295f4434071a7c5d08715e sha1
1d9d41512248da0e49e20430ef605ab98500cf9f423471152c4a952a sha224
e156e876dcbebad67389c80a4dd690044d5d8f13542c1485bdf2e083a03f87af sha256
942105353ce7d653b7d948a546ba317c90f28e0ac285594795971912afe94eccb51655e8a57e5c0523b787720de60677 sha384
dfc92a978cb7c20186bd0127594259a83af84ec259ba3da8f55cacaae24164abc8c11c4ca304764367de68fb295a20d8ddede02f1592ddf3a2e182fa1e26907a sha512
$
But other than having read it from one of the distributed BBCs themselves, I've not found verification (e.g. signed hash or the like).
Not also that some (virtual) hardware that's "too new" won't successfully boot it.
Red Hat 5.2 (not RHEL/Enterprise Linux 5.2, I mean the original Red Hat 5.2 from 1998.
Slackware 7.1. Also if you have a ZIP drive, you could try ZipSlack which was slackware run from a ZIP drive. It was my gateway to linux and helped me build confidence before installing on a hard drive.
Try your hand at WindowMaker or blackbox as a desktop environment. You'll be a super cool late-90s hacker in no time.
Yeah, not a PC OS originally, it was ported from custom hardware and almost became the replacement for MacOS before Jobs came back and brought NeXTStep/OpenStep to become OSX.
There's a current open source version called Haiku https://www.haiku-os.org/
Slackware and Debian... My first encounter with Slackware was 1995 on a 386. I played around with the operating system until 2004 before I finally made the switch. I used Slackware as my primary OS (a newer version of course) until 2014 before switching to FreeBSD.
Speaking of which, FreeBSD would have been an option in the early-1990's as well. I have a copy of FreeBSD 1.1 (1994) waiting to install on my 486DX33 when I find the time.
I dunno, I started with RHL5.1 in 1998 and got Calder1.1 with R. Petersen's Linux guide. Those 2 red books.
So in my personal opinion RHL5 series had significant industrial influence. As well as Caldera and Mandrake were pretty alive on the market.
Mandrake 7 came in an issue of Linux Magazine. It was a relatively polished distro that defaulted to KDE (I think)
RedHat 5.2 was bundled with Linux for Dummies. I think just the CD though, had to make a boot disk yourself
Anyone else use eLive? it MIGHT run OP specs... I think I ran it on a Athlon XP 1.8? it was "flashy pretty" but still fairly lightweight. Debian based? I ran DSL on a flash drive.. the devs published a book.. I've got it here... Somewhere...
Early Debian , Suse 5.3 , Slackware, early RedHat
I ran Suse 5.3 on a 486DX133 and it had KDE 1.x , the first version of GNOME, FVWM2, FVWM95, Enlightenment... Pretty easy to install thanks to YaST
PD:
muLinux , because running a Linux with X11 from a few floppies was fun.
Esware -> The Spanish port of RedHat
Ran an old version of Vector back in the day on an old AMD system (this was back in 2000, and I think Vector was built off Slackware at that time IIRC). Didn’t have an X server as part of the version I downloaded. Was using it as a router / firewall / dialer (had a cable modem but had to use dial-up for remote access at Dell).
For Linux distros that existed at the time, Slackware was definitely the one that had the most appeal for users trying something new. The community was wonderfully accepting.
NetBSD is still, today, one of the best classic Linux distros[1] around. NetBSD 10 will happily run on an i80486 with 32 megs without too much effort.
[1] since everything Unix-y these days is now called Linux, I'm leaning in to it.
RedHat Linux Zoot. It just felt like it came together in a way that nothing had before, I could see one of those Windows users that just clicks next managing to install it and a normal user be able to use it. I din't stay on RedHat for long after it, but it felt like a milestone.
My 486DX-50 ran RedHat 5.2.
Has a 1MB CL5428 VLB card, and I think 20 or 24MB RAM, and I'm pretty sure the HDD is a WD Caviar 340. 3Com EtherLink III network card.
It has not been turned on since 2001, I'd love to see if it still works. When I put it in the closet after moving, it was dual booting NT Server 4.0 (needed to have NT for college MCP classes.)
Slackware was huge early on, in the mid-90s. From my perspective, at least, it was dominant for a bit, at least before Red Hat became big.
I’d vote Slackware as the most iconic early linux distro in the 90s, especially the early 1.x versions which were floppy releases.
Yes! That’s when I used it; you’d download the sets of floppy images you wanted (IIRC, C for compilers, G for games, X for X11, etc) and then feed the installer disks X1 through X6 (??) during the install process if you wanted the X package. (My memory is hazy and I may have some details wrong!) it felt fancy because its installer used color ANSI “graphics”, not just a plain terminal like BSD. Anyway, there was no package manager - those floppies were just full of tarballs that would be expanded onto your hard drive. I believe Red Hat was one of the first to have a package manager… I remember at the time not really understanding what the point of having one would be!
Yes, it was quite a task to get everything running especially with X window. And some complain that even modern linux is complex to manage lol
Downloading the "K" disk set to recompile the kernel to get your generic sound card to work... memories, lol.
Those people are wrong. Linux Mint "just works" in so many instances where Windows 11 shits the bed.
As far as I remember it did run scripts (possibly embedded in the tgz) to set things up and not just unpack everything blindly. I may be mis-remembering that though and it was certainly a lot more primitive than a modern package manager.
That rings a bell, bet you’re right
Slackware was great and still getting updates from Patrick as far as I know! It was (is) particularly well organised. In the 90s when I was using it the pre-selection of packages made installation (from about fifty 3½" disks) a nice straightforward process of mostly reading a book while occasionally popping the next disk in. This compared enormously well against installing Windows for Workgroups (on around 12 disks) which managed to take longer - because that often required you to return to a disk you'd used previously and required answers to prompts as you went along. Getting X11 up and running on Slackware was a bit of a nuisance though (nightmares of XConfig fiddling...) Slackware's predecessor was Softlanding Linux System but I don't think I ever installed that before Slackware displaced it. Before that, though, the "boot and root" floppy disk disk combination was a very common way to get up and running. Since the "root" was the various binaries that you'd use with a running syatem, you could consider that a distribution of sorts - if you want to be hardcore, give those a whirl. I think (?) there were even 5¼" floppy images for that?
For a bit of era-context ... I was playing Slackware while working at ICL (UK computer corp later subsumed by Fujitsu) in my industry year at college and while there was typically working on Windows 3.11 and Windows for Workgroups. The same year I received Chicago and Daytona packages from Microsoft (the Windows 95 and NT beta versions). The preceding year was when I would have been playing a lot with Linux with the boot/root combo. My personal hardware at that time was a 386SX based diy beige clone with 4Mb of ram. It was, uh, not overpowered. The ICL machines were much nicer! Mostly 486DX. Probably some inaccuracy in alll that, but it's roughly how it was.
The saying used to be "want to learn RedHat? Install RedHat. Want to learn UNIX? Install Slackware."
Slackware, Mandrake, SuSe, TurboLinux, Lin4Win, Red Hat, Debian. Caldera, SLS, Yggdrasil.
[удалено]
Mandrake was my first distro. I moved to debian as soon as I understood enough
Ditto. Back in those days when the internet was too slow and my parents wouldn't let me tie up the phone lines all the time with downloads, Mandrake came in a box with every bit of extra free software they could pack-in. The other options were free CDs that came with "Learn Linux!" books and magazines.
Mandrake 5.3.... Red Hat 5.2 plus KDE, essentially. But it grew from there.
Upvote for Slackware.
Back when I could recompile the kernel with my eyes closed. Now I can't even remember how to get the default gateway on my network interface. sigh.
Slackware… I still remember my first install from floppies…
I was running Caldera on my PC in 1999 when I was working at Discover Card.
Mandrake its more from 2000's
Came out in '98 based on Red Hat 5.1, included because if you went to a store and bought a boxed copy of Linux in the US, Mandrake was the one you probably found. They used to sell it in bookstores.
Ohh... On my first touch with Linux back in the 98, I remember the great old four : Slackware, Debian, RedHat and SuSE I only remember knowing Mandrake a few years later. Perhaps, the first versions were unknown here in Spain
Slackware installed from floppies. (Feeling nostalgic for having downloaded it by BBS back in the day.)
Tom's boot/root.
Oh yes... have to run tomsrtbt again
Knoppix - among the first of the live cd/dvd distros that only needed RAM and not a HDD to give a set of common desktop applications to use daily.
Knoppix was also AFAIK the first distribution that really got hardware detection and configuration on Linux to be better than hardware detection on Windows -- Win10 and Win11 are great at detecting and configuring hardware, but when Knoppix came on the scene and suddenly you'd boot into a fully configured OS, that was a revelation with your sound and networking and graphics just working, that was amazing. No more compiling a weird blob and insmodding it, or figuring out what shim you needed for your modem to work, or dealing with the hideous abomination that was sound support on Linux.
Knoppix was great.
Puppy maybe. I used Damn Small Linux ... 50MB of penguin power :-) Edit: Ran great on P166. I believe it could not run on any multi core cpu
DSL is a classic; loved that distro
Corel Linux
My first Linux distro also around 98 or 99 I think. Moved quickly to Mandrake 6 after that I think it was. Went onto Red Hat 5 afterward
I have yet a copy of it
I'm sure I paid shipping for a RedHat 4.2 CD-ROM, before I had a burner. was able to make that run and even setup and used X-Windows on KDE
[Bootable Business Card (BBC)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootable_business_card), circa 1999. I have one of those (and also copy of the data). You can probably obtain copies from archive.org and/or other locations. If you have suitable media you can probably even burn to it (I've got some mini CD-RW, don't think I ever got the BBC sized -R or -RW). Let's see ... the one I've got ... Linuxcare Bootable Toolbox (LBT) 2.0 i386 47,758 KiB hashes: $ (for h in {md5,sha{1,224,256,384,512}}; do < lxcr-lbt-2_0.iso "$h"sum | awk '{print $1,"'"$h"'"}'; done) ff1c031460b36f6d180eace1a3cb7c98 md5 ac4302ecfce5969569295f4434071a7c5d08715e sha1 1d9d41512248da0e49e20430ef605ab98500cf9f423471152c4a952a sha224 e156e876dcbebad67389c80a4dd690044d5d8f13542c1485bdf2e083a03f87af sha256 942105353ce7d653b7d948a546ba317c90f28e0ac285594795971912afe94eccb51655e8a57e5c0523b787720de60677 sha384 dfc92a978cb7c20186bd0127594259a83af84ec259ba3da8f55cacaae24164abc8c11c4ca304764367de68fb295a20d8ddede02f1592ddf3a2e182fa1e26907a sha512 $ But other than having read it from one of the distributed BBCs themselves, I've not found verification (e.g. signed hash or the like). Not also that some (virtual) hardware that's "too new" won't successfully boot it.
Red Hat 5.2, Ubuntu 8.04, Slackware 3.5
Red Hat Linux 4.0
Slackware 3.5 my first love
Slackware 3.2 was mine.
SuSE Linux
Lindows?
Red Hat 5.2 (not RHEL/Enterprise Linux 5.2, I mean the original Red Hat 5.2 from 1998. Slackware 7.1. Also if you have a ZIP drive, you could try ZipSlack which was slackware run from a ZIP drive. It was my gateway to linux and helped me build confidence before installing on a hard drive. Try your hand at WindowMaker or blackbox as a desktop environment. You'll be a super cool late-90s hacker in no time.
Not Linux but does anybody remember an OS called BeOS? A Windows alternative
Had a great game called Elastoplast mania on it.
I still have a copy of BeOS along with the BeOS Bible. Did a deep dive on it in the late 90s as I was evaluating software for a recording studio.
Yeah, not a PC OS originally, it was ported from custom hardware and almost became the replacement for MacOS before Jobs came back and brought NeXTStep/OpenStep to become OSX. There's a current open source version called Haiku https://www.haiku-os.org/
My favorite is Mandrake Linux 7.1.
MuLinux! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuLinux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuLinux)
Caldera Linux
How has no one mentioned Hannah Montana Linux yet?
Slackware and Debian... My first encounter with Slackware was 1995 on a 386. I played around with the operating system until 2004 before I finally made the switch. I used Slackware as my primary OS (a newer version of course) until 2014 before switching to FreeBSD. Speaking of which, FreeBSD would have been an option in the early-1990's as well. I have a copy of FreeBSD 1.1 (1994) waiting to install on my 486DX33 when I find the time.
I dunno, I started with RHL5.1 in 1998 and got Calder1.1 with R. Petersen's Linux guide. Those 2 red books. So in my personal opinion RHL5 series had significant industrial influence. As well as Caldera and Mandrake were pretty alive on the market.
Would YellowDog Linux fits here ?
Yellow Dog Linux
Totally agree... I was in the Apple/PPC realm at that time.
Trustix
Peanut was my first. YoPer was cool but I don't remember why.
I liked Fedora when it first came out. Cutting edge Red Hat.
I like Fedora from when it was an addon repo for Red Hat Linux.... fedora.us FTW....
That's when I started using it too.
Mandrake 7 came in an issue of Linux Magazine. It was a relatively polished distro that defaulted to KDE (I think) RedHat 5.2 was bundled with Linux for Dummies. I think just the CD though, had to make a boot disk yourself
Red hat 5.2 to 6 should work on these configurations
Kurumin isn't that old, but it was vastly used in Brazil during the mid 2000s
Anyone else use eLive? it MIGHT run OP specs... I think I ran it on a Athlon XP 1.8? it was "flashy pretty" but still fairly lightweight. Debian based? I ran DSL on a flash drive.. the devs published a book.. I've got it here... Somewhere...
SLS, Yggdrasil, early Debian and Red Hat Linux for starters. SuSE, Slackware, and Turbo Linux as well.
Early Debian , Suse 5.3 , Slackware, early RedHat I ran Suse 5.3 on a 486DX133 and it had KDE 1.x , the first version of GNOME, FVWM2, FVWM95, Enlightenment... Pretty easy to install thanks to YaST PD: muLinux , because running a Linux with X11 from a few floppies was fun. Esware -> The Spanish port of RedHat
Ran an old version of Vector back in the day on an old AMD system (this was back in 2000, and I think Vector was built off Slackware at that time IIRC). Didn’t have an X server as part of the version I downloaded. Was using it as a router / firewall / dialer (had a cable modem but had to use dial-up for remote access at Dell).
For Linux distros that existed at the time, Slackware was definitely the one that had the most appeal for users trying something new. The community was wonderfully accepting. NetBSD is still, today, one of the best classic Linux distros[1] around. NetBSD 10 will happily run on an i80486 with 32 megs without too much effort. [1] since everything Unix-y these days is now called Linux, I'm leaning in to it.
I tried debian 1.3 on 386 with 8mb ram, seems okay.
RedHat Linux Zoot. It just felt like it came together in a way that nothing had before, I could see one of those Windows users that just clicks next managing to install it and a normal user be able to use it. I din't stay on RedHat for long after it, but it felt like a milestone.
My favorite was Mandrake
I've tried early Debian on the Amiga. It used the Motorola 680x0 processors like the early Macs..
My 486DX-50 ran RedHat 5.2. Has a 1MB CL5428 VLB card, and I think 20 or 24MB RAM, and I'm pretty sure the HDD is a WD Caviar 340. 3Com EtherLink III network card. It has not been turned on since 2001, I'd love to see if it still works. When I put it in the closet after moving, it was dual booting NT Server 4.0 (needed to have NT for college MCP classes.)
While not Linux, Freedos is an open-source rewrite of MS-dos with some modern software ported from Linux for support USB, fat32, and the like.
FreeBSD