zlacker

I fondly remember the K6-2 system I had with a Voodoo 2 and 192MB of RAM. It was the first PC that was all mine. I also played HL1 and Unreal Tournament 1. The big games though were the HL mods TFC and Counter-Strike. I dragged that thing to so many LAN parties. A true golden age.

It was also the first PC I ever installed Linux on. My dad would not let me do such a risky operation as dual booting Linux on the family computer. I don’t even remember what distro at this point.

>>time0u+(OP)
"Risky", it sounds so strange now to call dual booting "risky". But it was a different time, where remediating a borked software change wasn't google-able.

Edit: @throwawayx38: I 100% agree with you! Thanks for your reply.

>>metada+E7
To be fair, it may not have been the dual boot itself that was risky.

Unless they had a dedicated harddrive, they would also need to resize existing fat32/ntfs partitions and add a couple of new partitions for Linux. This process had a certain risk.

>>metada+E7
Heh, I meant it in a tongue in cheek way. My dad thought it was too risky.

>>time0u+Gr
I understand, that's what I found amusing. It's easy to imagine a dad in the 90s, when computers were much more costly, being like "hell no you aren't doing that to the family computer!" :)

Maybe I'm still misinterpreting, but this was where my mind went. Man, I wish I could've appreciated how distinct the 90s were as a kid, but I was too young and dumb to have a shred of hope of being that aware!

>>metada+ks
In the era of that kind of PC, I remember the boot loaders being a bit more touchy.

I never 'totally borked' a PC with LILO but definitely had to fix some things at least once, and that was with a nice thick Slackware 7.1 book to guide me.

GRUB, IIRC, vastly improved things but took a little while to get there and truly 'easy-peasy'

>>throwa+yg
I have vague memories from early days of using Linux that you used to have to manually set the modeline for your videocard in X11 - if you got things wrong you could potentially permanently damage the monitor.

>>time0u+(OP)
>My dad would not let me do such a risky operation as dual booting Linux on the family computer.

You were smarter than me. I wanted all those free compilers so badly I just went and installed redhat on the family pc. Ask me how well that conversation went with the old man...