@flockofnazguls Very technically, it was installed inside the Windows 95 fat32 partition of my computer in some unholy disk image format that a weird bootloader that predates isolinux or loadlin just handled somehow thorough magic. It was called Phat Linux. I barely count it because I could not get X11 to work, but it interested me enough to try Mandrake, and that was the start of the journey.
@flockofnazguls
My first distro was on floppies. However I never installed it. Ditto for my second. My third distro, which I actually did install, was Mandrake, on CDs.
@flockofnazguls
Linux On A Floppy, baby! Soon followed by coyote Linux (for my first homemade router which was in front of my server cluster of - for real - windows95 apache servers).
My first successful install was Ubuntu Warty Warthog (4.10) from a free CD that came with a magazine. I had attempted OpenSUSE before that and the install failed leaving me with an unusable machine. I was walking back and forth between my house and the library to try to figure out how to fix it, which led to me buying the magazine with the Ubuntu CD.
@flockofnazguls My very first was Slackware, v3.1 I believe, which I installed on a salvaged-from-work 386 PS/2. Via a set of floppy disks each of which had to be painstakingly downloaded and written.
That was a particularly fun adventure as the stock Slackware installation didn't fully support the MCA architecture of the PS/2, so it was necessary to do run a mknod command very early on in the install process to get it to recognise some of the hardware.
The 4MB of RAM didn't help, either. But I got the damn thing running and I don't think I've ever been so pleased at anything I've done as when that initial login: prompt appeared!
@flockofnazguls mine was from an officially produced ubuntu install disc, a big box of which we kept on the counter of the charity shop I volunteered in.
@flockofnazguls I was about 12 installing Lubuntu 16.04 onto my Toshiba Sattelite with a Core 2 Duo that I got from my nanna. It wouldn't boot from a USB so I had to use another computer to burn a DVD-RW and install it from that. Eventually I learnt about Plop, but not before I had gone through my Dad's DVD supplies!
It was really funny. I had a fixation on installing various Linux distros on stuff. Truly, the open source warrior of the future.
@flockofnazguls First I used cds, but things got wild when I bought expensive 256mb usb stick. It could not hold those live cds but netinstall images were just perfect for it
@flockofnazguls@KayJanes I answered diskettes, but actually I downloaded into Zip disks at school, copied into a hard drive at home, and did a pseudo network boot from that disk. (This was on a PowerPC Mac, installing PowerPC Linux…)
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