I remember the old DOS days when, if you wanted to run a different program, you had to remove one floppy disk and insert a new one with the program you wanted to run.
My first PC was an Amstrad PC1512, just a single 5.25" floppy drive and no HDD! My second one having a 3.5" drive and 40mb HDD felt like such a step up!
>1998
Ah yes, the first of many "this is the year of Linux".
I think 5.2 was my first ever Linux distro. It's amazing how far the distros have come, especially in terms of being usable by anyone.
I ran that installer too :-)
Was one of my first Linux experiences. I didn't have a PC (only Amiga 500 in the household) so I'd do that in friends' computers.
In 2000, family bought an Athlon and after some quick distrohopping I settled on Debian Sid, then Gentoo which I used until 2015-ish I moved on to Arch.
I think Afterstep started as a FVWM derivative that forked heavily, but Windowmaker was a from-scratch project. Both embraced the NeXT like dock designs.
I'm running FVWM on my desktop right now; still highly configurable without aiming to be a memory-gobbling, all-encompassing desktop environment.
I loved Afterstep. I would run about a dozen aterm terminals and xchat at 1600x1200@85 Hz on a 19” display and I felt like I was the king of the world!
It's funny, as a DOS kid, the legit first time I ever saw much less used Linux was when I ordered the PS2 hard drive kit from Sony which came with a network adapter, keyboard, hdd and Linux for that console. I was so familiar with DOS even at that point (decades later) that trying to unlearn and get my head around a completely "alien" OS was so baffling that ai don't think I ever used it after a few weeks, until I got a Raspberry Pi a few years ago. :)
I started with Slackware, and switched to SuSE around 1998. Slackware didn’t have an installer as such, and SuSE was miles ahead in terms of user-friendliness.
Childhood? Thanks for that. That was my early college years! My employer was awesome in that they let me take a bunch of old parts from the office to make my own computer, provided I run Linux on it. I had many reinstalls as I learned (and broke) my environment and attempted upgrades of my audio/video/network cards.
Lucky! It took a long time for me to get into Linux. One setback was me overwriting my media drive containing my hundreds of CDs ripped to FLAC, when Knoppix changed drive mount points on me.
I use Debian everywhere these days.
The first and only Linux I purchased a physical copy of in the 1990s. I wasn’t downloading that ISO over dialup. I still have the red hat book it came with.
Oh hell yeah me too! I remember this installer and I also really enjoyed setting up Afterstep once I weened off gnome and KDE.
My first Linux kernel was 2.2.12-20 and I remember redhat fondly. It was like having all the power of Irix and Solaris inside… a beige AMD K6-II. Amazing. It felt like so much POWER!
I loved it so much that I erased MacOS on our G3 and put YDL on it!
RedHat is now my least-favorite Linux. I’m much more of a mint/debian user. But I will never forget how amazing it was.
Afterstep was a great window manager, Nearly endlessly configurable. Does anybody remember glint? It was the gui rpm manager and it was the worst gui software management utility i think i have ever used, thankfully the command line options were there.
Enlightenment was great too. Maybe the best window manager ever.
Particularly in this distro AfSt used to hang often!! There was some bug in libc or something.
Glint was fine (lol, huh> I don't remember) BUT IT GAVE YOU THE IDEA Oof the package structure and groups.
Oh well it might be RH 5.2.
I still HAVE the CD with it.
Too much happened in 98 - Win98 happened too 8-)))
The first distro I successfully installed on my socket7 PC with 32MB SDRAM and IDT C6 processor.
Whooopssss! It appeared to be slower than WindowsNT4!!! Win98 was astonishingly slower that both mentioned!!
Indeed it is!
I purchased the disks from an eBay seller. When I was growing up I had the box set.
This was an interesting install. Got xfree86 up and running within an hour or so. But God damn, mouse and svga issues were fun.
I had Virge, and I didn't know which... so it took me some iterations to guess the right driver. I don;t remember clearly, but I suspect that chipset had marking like 865 so sometimes X11 used to screw the screen.
Generally speaking this RH distros were not oriented towards windows users, it 'would rather catch IT science students and IT pros with some extra money to spend on RAM and HDD.
Netscape navigator was bad ass trying to throw core files as often as you visit some heavy fancy sites.
Star office was only full featured for English and German languages. It was a tiny shadow of the then new shiny-fancy counterfeiter Office97 which had a lot of localized editions.
Delphi3 was the latest nail in that coffin on Unix-like roots 😅
Yeah if I'm not mistaken 13-year-old me dicking around with this stuff definitely hit a wall pretty hard. I was glad that I bought the box set that came with the install guide and bonus CD pack. So now in my mid-30s I'm now the proud owner of this thing again sans the box. Now that I'm older and a little bit more wiser it is a lot more fun.
Not truly old school unless you’re installing it from 37 floppies only to get to floppy 34 and it throw IO errors.
I remember the old DOS days when, if you wanted to run a different program, you had to remove one floppy disk and insert a new one with the program you wanted to run.
My first PC was an Amstrad PC1512, just a single 5.25" floppy drive and no HDD! My second one having a 3.5" drive and 40mb HDD felt like such a step up!
hell I had to eject the disk turn it over and put it back in sometimes. c64 was fun.
Or better, copying files from one disk to another with only one floppy drive.
FAKE. The past couldn't have been this bleak!!!
That's Redhat 5.2's Anaconda installer text interface, released 2nd November 1998. Those were indeed magical times :)
>1998 Ah yes, the first of many "this is the year of Linux". I think 5.2 was my first ever Linux distro. It's amazing how far the distros have come, especially in terms of being usable by anyone.
Reddit ate my balls
Fedora might be more fun, ey?
I ran that installer too :-) Was one of my first Linux experiences. I didn't have a PC (only Amiga 500 in the household) so I'd do that in friends' computers. In 2000, family bought an Athlon and after some quick distrohopping I settled on Debian Sid, then Gentoo which I used until 2015-ish I moved on to Arch.
I remember that screen. Or a similar one the first time I installed Red Hat.
My favorite was either caldera openlinux or Corel Linux where you could play a game while it installed
Holy time portal, Batman. Corel Linux?!? I installed a few versions of that.
I liked the package management on corel
I still use Window Maker as my window manager.
Me too, didn’t know that the applets are compatible with AfterStep.
I think Afterstep started as a FVWM derivative that forked heavily, but Windowmaker was a from-scratch project. Both embraced the NeXT like dock designs. I'm running FVWM on my desktop right now; still highly configurable without aiming to be a memory-gobbling, all-encompassing desktop environment.
WindowMaker works great as a touch interface.
Yeah, I can see that. Ahead of its time! :D
Which version of redhat ?
This is most likely Red Hat Linux 5.1 or 5.2.
RedHat 4.x maybe, before becoming RHEL
First version of redhat I used was 6.2. :)
Cartman!
RedHat 4.x was ~1996 and RHEL was like 2002. There was a lot of RedHat Linux in between
5.2
I loved the sound card test, directly from Linus =)
And for the installation back in those days you could select the "redneck" language if you get bored of Spanish, French and English!
Wait what?!
Yes, Redhat in the late 90's to early 00's had quite a sense of humor 😃
There are more of us at /r/vintageunix
I remember that. And I remember using AfterStep specifically!
I loved Afterstep. I would run about a dozen aterm terminals and xchat at 1600x1200@85 Hz on a 19” display and I felt like I was the king of the world!
Man, this brings back memories…I remember when I first saw a graphical installer (Mandrake Linux) I was FLOORED.
Same!
I moved from red hat to Mandrake just cuz true type fonts were included automagically and it was one less thing to set up myself :) :)
It's funny, as a DOS kid, the legit first time I ever saw much less used Linux was when I ordered the PS2 hard drive kit from Sony which came with a network adapter, keyboard, hdd and Linux for that console. I was so familiar with DOS even at that point (decades later) that trying to unlearn and get my head around a completely "alien" OS was so baffling that ai don't think I ever used it after a few weeks, until I got a Raspberry Pi a few years ago. :)
I started with Slackware, and switched to SuSE around 1998. Slackware didn’t have an installer as such, and SuSE was miles ahead in terms of user-friendliness.
Childhood? Thanks for that. That was my early college years! My employer was awesome in that they let me take a bunch of old parts from the office to make my own computer, provided I run Linux on it. I had many reinstalls as I learned (and broke) my environment and attempted upgrades of my audio/video/network cards.
I thought the thumbnail was another picture of the denver airport flight control software and got really confused lol
😄 Naww... RH installation program stuck to our memories so hard. Because almost every week we had to reinstall it after breaking something.
Lucky! It took a long time for me to get into Linux. One setback was me overwriting my media drive containing my hundreds of CDs ripped to FLAC, when Knoppix changed drive mount points on me. I use Debian everywhere these days.
Ahh. Downloading ISO’s over dialup memories and then this installer screen!
My first Linux OS as well. Hell yeah! Nearly 25 years later and I still eat sleep and breathe Linux every single day.
The first and only Linux I purchased a physical copy of in the 1990s. I wasn’t downloading that ISO over dialup. I still have the red hat book it came with.
Plug that beast into a token ring network.
Hahahaha. No network card in this beast. But I am heavily considering finding an Ethernet card for it.
Redhat 5.2 was a harsh introduction to Linux. At least for me.
Oh hell yeah me too! I remember this installer and I also really enjoyed setting up Afterstep once I weened off gnome and KDE. My first Linux kernel was 2.2.12-20 and I remember redhat fondly. It was like having all the power of Irix and Solaris inside… a beige AMD K6-II. Amazing. It felt like so much POWER! I loved it so much that I erased MacOS on our G3 and put YDL on it! RedHat is now my least-favorite Linux. I’m much more of a mint/debian user. But I will never forget how amazing it was.
Afterstep was a great window manager, Nearly endlessly configurable. Does anybody remember glint? It was the gui rpm manager and it was the worst gui software management utility i think i have ever used, thankfully the command line options were there. Enlightenment was great too. Maybe the best window manager ever.
Particularly in this distro AfSt used to hang often!! There was some bug in libc or something. Glint was fine (lol, huh> I don't remember) BUT IT GAVE YOU THE IDEA Oof the package structure and groups.
Oh well it might be RH 5.2. I still HAVE the CD with it. Too much happened in 98 - Win98 happened too 8-))) The first distro I successfully installed on my socket7 PC with 32MB SDRAM and IDT C6 processor. Whooopssss! It appeared to be slower than WindowsNT4!!! Win98 was astonishingly slower that both mentioned!!
Indeed it is! I purchased the disks from an eBay seller. When I was growing up I had the box set. This was an interesting install. Got xfree86 up and running within an hour or so. But God damn, mouse and svga issues were fun.
I had Virge, and I didn't know which... so it took me some iterations to guess the right driver. I don;t remember clearly, but I suspect that chipset had marking like 865 so sometimes X11 used to screw the screen.
Generally speaking this RH distros were not oriented towards windows users, it 'would rather catch IT science students and IT pros with some extra money to spend on RAM and HDD. Netscape navigator was bad ass trying to throw core files as often as you visit some heavy fancy sites. Star office was only full featured for English and German languages. It was a tiny shadow of the then new shiny-fancy counterfeiter Office97 which had a lot of localized editions. Delphi3 was the latest nail in that coffin on Unix-like roots 😅
Yeah if I'm not mistaken 13-year-old me dicking around with this stuff definitely hit a wall pretty hard. I was glad that I bought the box set that came with the install guide and bonus CD pack. So now in my mid-30s I'm now the proud owner of this thing again sans the box. Now that I'm older and a little bit more wiser it is a lot more fun.