My 1st linux distro back on 1998 (when I was 16) was Slackware 3.6 with a Linux 2.0.36 kernel. I remember I had a 33.6 kbps modem and downloaded it floppy by floppy. The distro was seperated in letter named packages and you could download only what you needed (iirc it was 'a' for the core system, 'd' for development gcc et al, 'x' for x windows etc).
Slackware had a very nice and straight forward installation procedure considering I was 16 at that time and all comcepts were self learned.
The 'package' manager was as simple as possible: packages were tgz files that were just unzipped to /.
The real problems I had was with my (ISA) sound card and my modem: I rember that I had to boot windows first for the sound card to set up and get the proper IRQ/DMA and them hot reboot to linux. For the modem because of how the telecom provided in Greece worked (no dialtone) I had to configure it to use ATX3DT instead of ATDT to call a number.
All these took me weeks of research but were resolved to great excitement!
Finally, after a couple of months using linux and accessing various IRC channels through the cool BitchX client I executed an innocent looking binary I was sent over. I was running everything as root of course...
You probably can understand what happend then :/
Although I knew (some) of the risks of executing binary acquired binaries in Windows I thought that with linux I was invincible. The good thing was that I noticed strange commands in the root's history (the attacker wasnt that good after all) and I immediately formatted the drive.
That incident kept me away from linux for a couple of years until I felt more confident for my security skills!
Slackware had a very nice and straight forward installation procedure considering I was 16 at that time and all comcepts were self learned.
The 'package' manager was as simple as possible: packages were tgz files that were just unzipped to /.
The real problems I had was with my (ISA) sound card and my modem: I rember that I had to boot windows first for the sound card to set up and get the proper IRQ/DMA and them hot reboot to linux. For the modem because of how the telecom provided in Greece worked (no dialtone) I had to configure it to use ATX3DT instead of ATDT to call a number.
All these took me weeks of research but were resolved to great excitement!
Finally, after a couple of months using linux and accessing various IRC channels through the cool BitchX client I executed an innocent looking binary I was sent over. I was running everything as root of course...
You probably can understand what happend then :/
Although I knew (some) of the risks of executing binary acquired binaries in Windows I thought that with linux I was invincible. The good thing was that I noticed strange commands in the root's history (the attacker wasnt that good after all) and I immediately formatted the drive.
That incident kept me away from linux for a couple of years until I felt more confident for my security skills!