Harvey
Wow, this brings back memories! I bought a red hat 5.0 box set (released December 1997) from the local Micro Center. I brought it home and I did what everyone else did and still does ... I installed it on an old Gateway i486 machine that was beginning to gather dust. My primary machine at the time was a shiny new Pentium, running OS/2 Warp. With Warp, I was anxious to learn something about Ethernet and networking, so I jammed a 3COM card into everything that moved and over time the i486 morphed into a combination router, print server and NAS. A second i386 machine acted as my gateway/firewall, which had a US Robotics 56K modem attached.
It was a fun time of exploration and kernel compiling ... which on a i486 took most of an afternoon! I must have read that Red Hat Linux Unleashed book, cover to cover, at least three times!!! 😀
If I'm truthful, I was late to the desktop Linux party. I didn't begin to use desktop Linux with any regularity, until Linux Mint 6 was released (December 2008). I remember installing it and then about a month later, Mint 7 was released. Since then I've used Linux on the desktop nearly exclusively, keeping a copy of Windows around only to play a few old favorite Windows games from time to time.
