I've gone back to running my first distro: Mandrake 8.2

[Dapper Dan]

It's not often I get "down time" but recently I've had a little time on my hands and thought it would be fun to attempt running my very first distro again! I knew it would be a nightmare trying to get Mandrake 8.2 running on hardware that came seven years after its first appearance way back in 2002 so I thought it might be possible to do it with VirtualBox on my present distro, CRUX 2.5!

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Interesting that I'm able to run the very first distro I ever used on the very latest distro I now use via VirtualBox! How I love Linux!

[GNU-Fan]

I like the fonts and the icon theme of it.
You just reminded me that there was a time when I considered KDE more visually appealing than GNOME.

[techieMoe]

That brings back memories. Mandrake was one of my firsts as well. At the time of 8.2 it was much prettier and stable than Redhat, IMO.

[daark.child]

Brings back memories as well. The first Mandrake release I used was 5.1 which I believe was the first ever Mandrake release. I didn't have a clue what I was doing, but I still had fun anyway.

[oz]

I used to like Mandrake back in those days... but I've not tried the last Mandrake versions, and I've never tried Mandriva.

[Tomtompiper]

I actually paid for this in PC world boxed set of 5 CD’s and a book. I still have the CD’s in a binder somewhere and the box maybe in a box in the loft. Can’t remember what happened to the book, it wasn’t up to much, 60% on installation and 20% on the terminal and file system, the rest was the index and trouble shooting. Those were the days : )

[Dapper Dan]

A few more memories...

Mandrake 8.2 - Gnome

Mandrake 8.2 - IceWM (This was where I first fell for IceWM. It was love at first sight!

Mandrake 8.2 - SawFish

One thing that stands out to me is how "finished" everything seems. I guess I had this idea that upon revisiting my first distro, it would appear very archaic and difficult. Now though, I realise that it was my inexperience with Linux that made it feel that way. Knowing what I know now, I'll have to say Mandrake 8.2 was a very decent distro! Hats off to them!

[djap]

Sweet memories...

My first was IT-Linux 2001. A distribution based on Red Hat 7 with some modifications for Finnish users. At that time (around 2001) my home didn't have any internet connection since my parents didn't see any reason to get any. I got the installation discs from local library.

I had troubles with it rigth from the start since the computer I was using was realy old (had something like 400 MB hard drive and 16MB RAM and originally came with Windows 3.11). It installed but there wasn't enough space for GUI and I realy didn't have any idea what I could do with it so I went back running DOS/Win 3.11.
Anyway there was something about it that made me try again 2 years later when I got better computer.

You could say the transformation was complete in summer 2005 when I got my hands on Mandrake 10.1 and was guite impressed about it. Slowly it crawled its way from my secondary computer to the secondary OS of my primary computer and soon the only OS of my primary computer.

[Dapper Dan]

You could say the transformation was complete in summer 2005 when I got my hands on Mandrake 10.1 and was guite impressed about it. Slowly it crawled its way from my secondary computer to the secondary OS of my primary computer and soon the only OS of my primary computer.

Hi djap! Sounds like you've been at Linux a lot longer than most of us!

For whatever reasons I still don't understand, I had a lot of trouble with Mandrake 10 and 10.1 on my Dell 4550, even though Mandrake 9 (my favourite release) ran like a dream. At the time I was trying out other distros and eventually lighted on Red Hat 8 for a while. In my mind, Red Hat 8 was a real milestone. You can still see a lot of it in current releases of Fedora! I also tried Mandriva a few times but it didn't feel like a good match for me since by that time, I'd been using Slackware.

I still have many of the screens from those days...

Mandrake 8.2 (from 2002)

Mandrake 9

Red Hat 8

[djap]

Hi djap! Sounds like you've been at Linux a lot longer than most of us!
Red Hat 8

I wouldn't quite think that way since my first contact with Linux in 2001 was very short one and it wasn't before 2003 that I started actively using it.

I allready thougth I wouldn't have any screenshots from past but just found one. This is from the time I started playing with compiz and sometimes it caused some rather interesting things to happen. What you are seeing in this screenshot is jakdav sound visualization rendered in fullscreen. It just happened to be litle transparent for some reason and you could actually see the desktop through it. Too bad it was in the foreground and blocking me from actually doing anything because I think having desktop like this would have been awseome (even though it did put my computer on its knees).
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