I tired Linux a few times in the past, but didn’t really start using seriously until 2019. I love poking around old OSs and distros, and I want to spin a few up in some VMs my next free evening.
Any suggestions? Open to any distro (or let’s be honest, DE). Any versions that holds a special place in your heart or that’s exceptionally novel? Really interested to see what’s out there!
Hanna Montana Linux, just for giggles
AmogOS too
Gonna recommend this to all my co workers.
It is not vulnerable to Windows viruses.
:-)
Red Hat used to be a really solid choice for desktop back in the 90s and early 2000s. Some milestone releases:
- 6.2 was the first version to put up ISO images for install. This is the one to get if you really want a blast from the past (early version of anaconda installer, ext2, LILO bootloader, Linux 2.2, Gnome 1 etc.)
- 7.3 was the last version to come with the Netscape browser.
- 9.0 was the last version before they split into Fedora and RHEL. It’s the last and most mature desktop release of that era, included the “Bluecurve” unified look and feel introduced in 8.0 but had bugfixed versions of KDE and Gnome.
What do you mean 6.2 was the first version to put up ISO images for install? I installed 5.2 from ISO not long ago. I have installed 4.2 in the past.
Before 6.2 you had to get them on actual CDs which wasn’t an option in many places. Starting with 6.2 they put them online on FTP.
Early Knoppix live CDs have a special place in my heart
Yeah, Knoppix was kind of a ‘Tucows vibe’ distro. Pretty approachable.
Zen Linux was another short-lived 2005 liveDistro, which had a nice feel and Art.
Also, installing all https://trisquel.info/ versions side-by-side and doing a 17 year fast-forward would be cool.
I wonder whatever happened to Knoppix. All I’ve been able to find online is speculation and questions.
Early versions of Ubuntu,
Red Hat before RHEL,
Mandrake/Mandriva.Gentus Linux comes to mind, obscure distro based on Red Hat (not RHEL mind You) released by now forgotten ABIT, a motherboard manufacturer. I was daily driving it as teenager back in 2001 for couple of weeks until I learned by trial and error how to get windows 98 installed back. Another one would be Mandrake Linux which I was dual booting couple years later.
I read gentoo instead of gentus, found it awkward that someone would call gentoo obscure, did a websearch, came back to the post with gentus as a reply, re-read the post.
Just for curiosity, where do you get these old distributions?
I might try the Ubuntu version which got me into Linux one of these days😇
https://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/
At least Ubuntu makes it easy to roam through their archives. Have fun :)
Thanks I’ll check it out👍
Wao, Mandriva and DamnSmallLinux 🤣🤣🤣
RedHat 5.3 with fvwm (or fvwm95) is very nostalgic for me because it was one of the few walnut creek CDs I managed to get working. Mandrake and early SuSe were cute as well.
Crungbang linux breathed live into some very wimpy hardware I’ve had in the past.
Loved the minimalism.
Tom’s Root Boot.
One floppy disk, one Linux machine!
Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Badger, oh my god the color scheme, all the earthy tones. 😊
Anyone else get free Ubuntu CDs shipped to their house? I think I had 7.10 (Gusty Gibbon) shipped to my house back in 2007.
Otherwise, Mandrake Linux was my first “good” distro. I first tried one called Lycoris which claimed to be an beginner’s distro with it’s own DE, and it was impressive how well it handled setting up a dual boot installation and at the time it was a revelation that I could use a computer without Windows. I didn’t begin preferring linux until I tried Mandrake with KDE 3, though.
Yes, I remember these days. I had a few Ubuntu CDs from back then.
YESS!!
First distro I got to work was LibraNet. Easy to set up and use, ran by a father-son team. Died when the father passed away. 😥
Great distro! I ran Lunar Linux so Source Mages sister from the fork of Sorcerer Linux. Lunar I know is still going and updating. Need to drop into their IRC channel for support and what not. Wonder if Source Mage is still kicking. Amazing how great the bash scripts were to run it all. I feel like if they added binary support they would get a lot more traction
Yes SMGL is still active. You can try joining one of their channels. There are still people looking for source based distros, not sure while Gentoo is the only thing that pops up for them. I used it for some time, and it’s fantastic. Sadly having to build stuff takes too much time, particularly on old, and not performance oriented HW. They had support for binaries, and actually include a binaries grimoire, so you could install binaries that used to take too much time, like Firefox for example. Still it takes too much to keep a source based distro. And if you go all the way, then when changing parts of the building toolchain, like gcc, the recommendation was to build everything so that everything would be built with the more up to date toolchain, that was cool, since SMGL has tools for it, but those fancy stuff take as well a lot of time. There I learned 1st about ccache, hahaha.
Sooo fun, :)
Mandrake 6.0 was my first distro in '98-'99. Mandrake hasn’t existed for a long time now; I have no idea if you can still find an old iso of it. It used KDE 1.1.1 as it’s DE, and to this day, KDE has remained my preferred DE.
There is an active fork https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMandriva_Lx
