What is on Your Mind?

Tried a garden variety of distributions, which came to me after a clean up of a government agency that also ventured into deploying linux: openSuse, debian, fedora and slackware.

My first distribution, and first introduction to UNIX-like systems in general, was Mandrake. I got it because I could buy the disk at Office Depot or some-such. This was early 2001-ish. Mandrake Linux doesn't even exist anymore, it became Mandriva.

I did the full install and got with it a ridiculous number of programs and a nice GUI for me to web-browse in. I didn't learn much about Linux or shell programming or shell commands or much at all until the day came I wanted to hook up a printer and couldn't. Building myself a new kernel made the printer work, but violated some dependency thing, and the RPM-based installer refused to do anything at all, ever again.

My next one was Gentoo and I had more luck with it.

SUSE.

Slackware version 0.7 or 0.8, in 1995, as I recall, with release dates help from this page.

Suse 4.2 - I did not like it and never tried linux ever again

Solaris 9 when I was still in university, spent one of the sem break learning Solaris and finally took the CX105 test last year. It took 3 months and 10 angry emails before I receive my certification