I remember the bad old days, dont you agree it gets better & better

[ade234uk]

I remember the bad old days spending 2 hours to get NVidia card recognised in Mandrake 8, only to find my machine was on the command line when I woke up next morning because the XF86Config file needed editing.

Fast forward 5 years and Linux experience is a brilliant experience. Using Ubuntu just gets better and better for me, there is a new suprise nearly every week.

[RobsterUK]

I agree, Mandrake 8 was my first experience of Linux and it put me off for about 2 years. My second attempt at Linux was Ubuntu 6.06 and I've been using Ubuntu since.

[ibutho]

My first go at Linux was with Red Hat 5.1. I spent a couple of frustrating days trying to install it and then gave up. A year or two later I tried Debian 2.2 (Potato) which installed fine but X just would not work. I finally got somewhere when I tried Mandrake 6.1 (Red Hat 6.1 with KDE). Linux has improved so much since those days. The community and expectations of those using Linux seems to have changed a lot as well.

[Wv0wvw88wvw0vW]

My first experience of Linux was Ubuntu 7.04, I couldn't get the internet working... Had to reinstall Vista (I probably should've tried the Live CD, but meh). Finally got it working with version Xubuntu 7.10 - My second experience of Linux, months later. This time Network Manager supported my wireless card, the only problem was my nVidia graphics card... But by version 8.04 that worked too...

[Sunflower1970]

First install was with 6.10 Edgy Eft. Most stuff worked on my computers with Edgy, although I did have to do some tweaking in my xorg.conf here & there...

Part of me misses that. So much is automated now...

[Metallion]

First install was with 6.10 Edgy Eft. Most stuff worked on my computers with Edgy, although I did have to do some tweaking in my xorg.conf here & there...

Part of me misses that. So much is automated now...

Well, if you like the tweaking then why not install a more difficult distribution? Arch seems to be popular :D.

I personally like tweaking but lately I haven't the time so I just went with Linux Mint. Even less configuring to do and imho prettier too. :)

[Maheriano]

I remember spending 2 weeks trying to compile the kernel in Gentoo for my machine before actually booting into a desktop environment making random decision I didn't know the outcomes of.....KDE or GNOME? GRUB or...what's the other one?

I'm thankful for all the nerds who put so much of their time into this so I can enjoy using it as much as I do, I just wish I had the time to do some development on it.

[Sunflower1970]

Well, if you like the tweaking then why not install a more difficult distribution? Arch seems to be popular :D.

I personally like tweaking but lately I haven't the time so I just went with Linux Mint. Even less configuring to do and imho prettier too. :)

I did on the computer in our kitchen :) and I love it. But on my main computer I stick with Ubuntu...and this will sound crazy, but I have a warm fuzzy place in my heart for it. It was the first distro I installed on it after XP crapped out on me, and to remove it from that computer now, just somehow seems wrong (lol)

[ode]

Mandrake 8.0 or 8.1 was my first installed version as well, an release candidate too if I remember correctly :) Hard to believe that was 2001.
Having to kill X and install the driver from the command line are all too memorable.

Using Intel graphics now, no work at all!

[jrusso2]

I consider myself an early adopter of Linux having started when it was only a full distro for a couple years. Thats why I feel I don't have to be a Linux cheerleader like the newbies I can give a real opinion good or bad which makes people on the forum angry it seems. Before that Linux was mostly a do it yourself project.

But I have seen Linux really grow. When I started we had one Video Player and it was Real Player. Once set of sound drivers that were free and only worked with sound blasters or sound blaster compatible. Only hardware modems worked. Barely anything for 3d acceleration. No Gnome. KDE was beta. No Firefox and Netscape was Motif and looked terrible. Open Office was Star Office and it was pretty bad and extremely slow. And you needed a registration code. If you didn't like that it was a text editor or buy one of a couple of proprietary Unix Office Suites like Applixware which was faster but really ugly. Each app had different Windows. And to get a dial up connection you had to write a script.

Very few of you would consider using Linux even ten years ago.

[jrusso2]

Mandrake 8.0 or 8.1 was my first installed version as well, an release candidate too if I remember correctly :) Hard to believe that was 2001.
Having to kill X and install the driver from the command line are all too memorable.

Using Intel graphics now, no work at all!

I still kill x from command line if I have to.

[-grubby]

I tried Warty in a VM a while ago. Ubuntu certainly has improved.

[cariboo]

My first distro was Red Hat 5.2, one of the first tools I found was xvidtune. Using it, I had X, mouse and keybaord configured in no time. I used it until the Xandros beta, when XFree86 started detecting video cards automagically, as long as it was an Nvidia card. :) Now with Ubuntu everything just works, it's almost boring.

Jim

[JordyD]

I started with Fedora I-forget-the-version. It was annoyingly buggy. I didn't touch Linux again for a while. I tried to use it, but I could never get into it.

One day I just decided to try it again, accidentally uninstalled GNOME, and found it useless. That was when I decided to give Ubuntu 8.10 a spin. It worked from the startup, and eventually I got rid of my XP dual-boot.

I'm happy to say that Ubuntu got me comfortable enough with Linux that if my X server ever failed me for some strange reason, I would know where to start.

[TBOL3]

I was originally on Fedora Core 4. It worked fine, unless I wanted something that wasn't built into the OS. Now, everything works. If it doesn't get a .deb. Rarely (if ever) do I need to compile from source, and even then, it's really easy to get the dependencies.

[perlluver]

I started with Red Hat Linux 6.1 from 1999, not sure about there numbering system, it is rather strange. After destroying the hard drive on two computers, I gave up on Linux, until 2007, when I tried Freespire, started reading, and found out it was actually an Ubuntu clone.

So I said what they heck, downloaded Kubuntu 7.10, installed it, and loved it. Since then I have tried Slackware, Gentoo, Arch, Fedora, Open Suse, Linux Mint, Crunchbang, and quite a few others. But I always come back to Ubuntu, it is simple, and easy to configure.

I can't wait to see what the future holds. Hopefully it only gets better.

[thisllub]

SUSE 6.0.

Early 1999.
It changed my life.

[Islington]

My dad first tried linux back when novell was ximian. I gave him an ubuntu livecd a couple of days ago and he was astonished, by the desktop, the themes, the general experience.

Then in true dad fashion, he turned off the gui and went to cli. *Sigh*

[Denestria]

I remember with horror the days of RedHat 5 and 6, it was a dependency nightmare that still makes me shudder to think about. Installing was like Russian Roulette. If you were lucky there was a GUI to help set something up, ncurses :D. Compiling half of everything I needed, no fabulous repositories, rpmfind.net was a godsend.

These days even my mom could pop in a Ubuntu CD, install it and install software. Now that I'm old ;) I like things to just work. Though I do often still type pico into the terminal to get an editor and feel nostalgic for the days of pine with my shell only internet account.

[jrusso2]

I remember with horror the days of RedHat 5 and 6, it was a dependency nightmare that still makes me shudder to think about. Installing was like Russian Roulette. If you were lucky there was a GUI to help set something up, ncurses :D. Compiling half of everything I needed, no fabulous repositories, rpmfind.net was a godsend.

These days even my mom could pop in a Ubuntu CD, install it and install software. Now that I'm old ;) I like things to just work. Though I do often still type pico into the terminal to get an editor and feel nostalgic for the days of pine with my shell only internet account.

The funny thing is you type pico but nano comes up because after all those years someone decided it was not free enough.

[phrostbyte]

I've been using Linux in one form or another since 1998, and hell yes it has improved a lot. I think as so far as making Linux mainstream, Ubuntu has done more in the past 2-3 years then anyone else in the past 7 years I've been using Linux. In fact for a time it felt like Gentoo was one of the most popular distros. Gentoo FFS! :)

[Miguel]

The funny thing is you type pico but nano comes up because after all those years someone decided it was not free enough.

Noob!!! Noob!!! Just joking, of course. It just happens that both Pico and Pine were developed at University of Washington by the same developers, and according to their license, source is freely distributable, but binaries are not. Thus, if you have multiverse (I think) enabled, you can install both pine and pico... from source. In three commands.



sudo apt-get build-dep pine
apt-get source --compile pine
sudo dpkg -i pine*.deb


Note that the third line is probably redundant. Oh, boy. Do I love aptitude or what? Well, yeah, this time is apt, but you get the Idea.

Back on topic, my first linux experience came with Mandrake 10.0 and a Dell Inspiron 8600 (named Dellia) that my parents bought me for my MsC in Physics, in the summer of 2004. Back then, the ati free driver only had 2D for r300 hardware (that laptop has an ATi Mobility Radeon 9600).

I remember learning to compile stuff such as gnuplot because I didn't know what a repository was. You can't imagine the pain of compiling teTeX (and making it work!) as one of the first experiences in linux. Add to that fighting fglrx with a then-uncommon widescreen resolution. I simply gave up on power management, although that radically improved in, I think, Hoary. In any case, I still remember my first day on linux. The installation day. It just happens that the Mandrake 10.0 had one buggy ALSA driver. It also happens that it was the AC'97 driver corresponding to the integrated sound card in Dellia. And it also happens that the result of choosing ALSA (those were the early 2.6 kernel days) was a hard lock and a full volume bloody "BEEEEP".

Today Linux is a luxury. It's way easier to install than windows and, if you are somewhat proficient in the distro you are installing, getting the fully functional set of tools you need will take you two-three commands and some time to download packages. Hardware setup is usually a breeze (I have no RAID experience, though) unless you have a rebel system. Also, the set of tools in a default installation of Ubuntu lets you do lots of stuff. The only real disadvantage of linux today is that it's terribly unsuitable for dialup or slow connections.

[jrusso2]

None of the repos has pine/pico that i have found I have to compile it if I want it and its getting harder.

[yabbadabbadont]

None of the repos has pine/pico that i have found I have to compile it if I want it and its getting harder.

Gentoo has pine in portage, but not pico for some reason... Weird.

[jrusso2]

Gentoo has pine in portage, but not pico for some reason... Weird.

From what I read Washington is stopping development and going to webmail. So its getting old and harder to install on new software.

[lisati]

My first experience was with Red Hat, courtesy of a CD with a Library book. After reading a couple of chapters, I took the book back without even putting the CD in my machine. Thein I discovered Ubuntu 7.04 - I've had some kind of Ubuntu-based distro on at least one of my machines ever since.

[Miguel]

Isn't Pico compiled when you compile Pine?

And trust me about pine. I've successfully installed it that way in Ubuntu Hardy and the commands do work in Intrepid too. This is what I get in my x86_64 box when I issue the first command:


$ sudo apt-get build-dep pine
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libldap2-dev libncurses5-dev libssl-dev
0 upgraded, 3 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 4535kB of archives.
After this operation, 17.3MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?


And the second (without installing the dependencies, mind you, that's why it fails) goes as follows:


$ apt-get source --compile pine
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Need to get 4254kB of source archives.
Get:1 http://archive.ubuntu.com intrepid/multiverse pine 4.64-4 (dsc) [601B]
Get:2 http://archive.ubuntu.com intrepid/multiverse pine 4.64-4 (tar) [4219kB]
Get:3 http://archive.ubuntu.com intrepid/multiverse pine 4.64-4 (diff) [34.9kB]
Fetched 4254kB in 3s (1307kB/s)
gpg: Signature made Mon 28 May 2007 08:15:40 AM EDT using DSA key ID 3EF23CD6
gpg: Can't check signature: public key not found
dpkg-source: extracting pine in pine-4.64
dpkg-source: info: unpacking pine_4.64.orig.tar.gz
dpkg-source: info: applying pine_4.64-4.diff.gz
dpkg-buildpackage: set CFLAGS to default value: -g -O2
dpkg-buildpackage: set CPPFLAGS to default value:
dpkg-buildpackage: set LDFLAGS to default value: -Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions
dpkg-buildpackage: set FFLAGS to default value: -g -O2
dpkg-buildpackage: set CXXFLAGS to default value: -g -O2
dpkg-buildpackage: source package pine
dpkg-buildpackage: source version 4.64-4
dpkg-buildpackage: source changed by Santiago Vila <sanvila@debian.org>
dpkg-buildpackage: host architecture amd64
dpkg-checkbuilddeps: Unmet build dependencies: libncurses5-dev libldap2-dev libssl-dev
dpkg-buildpackage: warning: Build dependencies/conflicts unsatisfied; aborting.
dpkg-buildpackage: warning: (Use -d flag to override.)
Build command 'cd pine-4.64 && dpkg-buildpackage -b -uc' failed.
E: Child process failed


So, yes, if you enable multiverse and follow the steps I mentioned, you end up with both pico and pine installed. You get both because the text editor used in pine is actually pico.

And by the way, I've just noticed that building the package doesn't need root permissions, so I'm editing my original message.

[jrusso2]

Can you give me copies of that repo that has pine and the dependency in it?

I don't have that.

[Miguel]

Can you give me copies of that repo that has pine and the dependency in it?

I don't have that.

Of course! They are in the source part of multiverse (maybe you don't have source enabled?), so this is a pretty standard, even boring, sources.lst (comments grepped out):



deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid multiverse
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid-updates multiverse
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid-security multiverse


EDIT: I just removed all the cruft. If it doesn't help, PM me and I'll send you the full sources.list tomorrow morning.