SuSE Linux 8.1 Professional

[wove]

You live in a house for 35 years and you end up with lots of cruft. I was weeding out some book cases and I came across my boxed set of SuSE Linux Professional 8.1 from 2002. Looks like I paid $80 for it. Seven CDs and a 375 page manual came with it (and a lot of advertizing fliers too).

It came with KDE 3 as a desktop Open Office v1.0, Netscape browser GIMP, AOL instant Messenger. Real Player, VMWare and Opera Browser. New to this edition was CUPS for printing and you can according to the box "control the full range of Linux Performance using only your mouse. The OS requires a 368 processor and 64MB of RAM. It is optomized for a "586" processor. (I am not sure I know what a 586 processor is.) I do not remember what I ran it on specifically, but probably like a ThinkPad 380? I have never owned a PC desktop.

Kind of a fun thing to come across. I am not sure how many people remember that like all the proprietary OSes Linux did come in a box and it often included proprietary software. I had SuSE Linux 6 in a boxed set, but it was for PowerPC and I gave it to a friend who collects Apple hardware. I also have a boxed set of Corel Linux, which also came with Corel Draw for Linux. The last Linux I got on a CD was Ubuntu 6.04, which I ordered on CD. After that point I got all my Linux software via download.

bill

[tlmiller]

586 = Pentium/Pentium MMX. The Pentium Pro was the first 686 chips.

[crosscourt]

I remember going down to Babbages and you could buy Linux boxed in various versions. Xandros was one of the ones I initially tried and it was quite good. I started using Linux a bit in 2005-2006 as I was very entrenched with Windows at that point. Lost a lot of my older software in a fire but use to have a lot of older goodies.

[bin]

My first real use of Linux was kicked off in 1998/9 with a magazine cover CD of SUSE 5.8

It was interesting. I also bought the full box set of 6.0 - why I'll never know as it was a real PITA!!

[crosscourt]

1998/99 I was still using Win98SE but looking towards Win2k which eventually became my favorite Windows version. I started looking at Linux as XP was approaching.

[bin]

Yes I must admit that Win2k was a breath of fresh air. I was responsible for around 150 users with laptops all over the world - running NT4..............talk about a marriage made in hell!

and yes I do recall lost nights trying to talk someone through an NT4 mess on the phone in Singapore at 2 in the morning and no I don't miss it!

[tlmiller]

By 2K, I did switch to Windows 2K, but the writing was on the wall. I had been using linux for about 2 years, and had already decided I preferred it from a functional point of view, but it would still be a couple years before I switched to it full time as I didn't yet have success getting online with my Winmodem. Around 2000 is when I finally succeeded, and so Win2K was the final version of Windows that I used as my primary OS.

[crosscourt]

Win2k like all Windows versions had issues but by SP2 it was pretty nice to use and SP4 made it muchy better. Continued to use it even while XP had launched but began my Linux path. Eventually switched to XP while continuing to play with Linux but XP wasnt very good till SP2.