I recently found one of the liveCD I received with Ubuntu 8.04 on it. Canonical was sending them for free for people interested in Linux.
I was in high school and tried it on my first computer, it was my first connect with Linux and honestly I think that without Ubuntu I would not have discovered Linux until much later in life.
I had most of Ubuntu CDs starting from 6.06, I even remember 10.04 or 10.10 which was about the last one they were sending or soon before. I usually gave all of them away in school hoping someone will like it.
A lot of us were running Debian when Ubuntu came out. It was polished and integrated to a degree that Debian wasn’t. It became popular for very good reasons.
I’ve enjoyed seeing some of these blasts from the past, but I admit it’s not as nice when the VM host window is captured as well. Just something to consider… I appreciate it all the same.
You can just cut the window border, to show the content of the VM. Doesn’t VirtualBox have a screenshot functionality for that? So you don’t need to edit the image or try to select with a border to capture the area. I used VirtualBox in the past (now on something better ;-) Quemu+Kvm+virt-manager), but totally forgot if it has this function at all.
I got a 6.0ish disk after giving them an email back in the day. I also remember the UI being easily modified. It was by far the easiest linux to get up and running with drivers for a couple of years.
I remember when Ubuntu came out I was working in a PC repair shop. Not gonna give any opinion on this but the standard procedure for people wanting a fresh XP but didn’t have a license key was “well it’s $90 for a fresh install, or we can put a pirate pro corporate on it”. I e-mailed canonical and they sent me a whole stack of Ubuntu CDs in nice branded sleeves. I kept it by the register and started offering that as an alternative to piracy for people that didn’t have a license key and didn’t wanna fork over the cash for one, Not many people chose that option, but I had a lot of good talks with people and plenty of people took a CD to try the live Ubuntu. I hope some of them ended up making the switch. I’m kinda disgruntled with conical these days but I’m an old greybeard who grew up in Slackware. I still recommend Ubuntu to beginners along with fedora.
6.06 “Dapper Drake” (iirc) was my first GNU/Linux distro back in the day. I was about 15 and spent a week tinkering with it trying to get the wifi to work on my old HP Pavilion.
I know we all like to shit on what Canonical has become, but you have to respect just how much work they’ve put into the Linux ecosystem to make it more user friendly and mainstream over the years.
Agreed. Before the dark times, Ubuntu was the kickstarter for “wide” adoption to the “masses” (notice the quotes, lol) and making Linux even more accessible at that time. Similar to a degree of what Valve has an effect nowadays.
I actually never used the very first Ubuntu version and need to test it in a VM too. My first experience with Linux was probably Knoppix and my first installation SUSE Linux 9.2, but it was not ready back then. I switched to Linux full time by removing Windows XP and installing Ubuntu 8.04. Time definitely has passed, you can’t argue with that.
Nice! I read about that they would sent CDs for no cost. Also in countries where internet infrastructure wasn’t there yet, they were giving out CDs for free locally in a bus in example, like advertisements. Having a millionaire backing up a distribution surely helped its adoption. :D Actually this was one of the reason why I had confidence in the future of Ubuntu, back then.
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