What was the first Linux distribution you tried?
My first was Knoppix, it was pretty good I thought, and it supported my old hardware 
Too bad I couldn't figure out how to install it at the time though.
What about you?
Tried a garden variety of distributions, which came to me after a clean up of a government agency that also ventured into deploying linux: openSuse, debian, fedora and slackware.
My first distribution, and first introduction to UNIX-like systems in general, was Mandrake. I got it because I could buy the disk at Office Depot or some-such. This was early 2001-ish. Mandrake Linux doesn't even exist anymore, it became Mandriva.
I did the full install and got with it a ridiculous number of programs and a nice GUI for me to web-browse in. I didn't learn much about Linux or shell programming or shell commands or much at all until the day came I wanted to hook up a printer and couldn't. Building myself a new kernel made the printer work, but violated some dependency thing, and the RPM-based installer refused to do anything at all, ever again.
My next one was Gentoo and I had more luck with it.
SUSE.
Suse 4.2 - I did not like it and never tried linux ever again 
Solaris 9 when I was still in university, spent one of the sem break learning Solaris and finally took the CX105 test last year. It took 3 months and 10 angry emails before I receive my certification
ATT Xenix on an orignal IBM PC.. it was an install on about 30 5.25 floppies... didn't know anything about Unix or Linux at the time....
Horrible experience with Ubuntu 8.04 as a liveCD to install PureData Extended and mess around with it.
Everything was breaking and I couldn't find the cause, little did I know that it didn't give me a warning when the virtual filesystem (which was entirely located in RAM) was getting full.
Went to the #ubuntu channel on freenode and started asking around, that's when I came in contact with the shell commands. I had no idea what I was doing, and what power the commands had when ran with the right privileges. So I accidentally wiped a whole system partition. That's where I learned the powers of the shell... The hard way.
All in all I swore never to touch Linux (-related OS'es) again until a friend of a friend of mine sat down with me and explained the basics of how Linux worked and the power of the shell. I was amazed at the flexibility of the system and that's where I learned the powers of clear explanation
Afterwards I picked up a book called "How to teach yourself UNIX in 10 Minutes" and everything went better than expected. Fast forward a couple of years and I bought a cheap dualcore Atom netbook and installed CentOS 5 on it to experiment with various stuff on it like web hosting.
I am still using Windows as my main OS but that's primarily because of certain DAWs (Ableton Live in particular). However, I'm still interested in learning about *nix systems because I'm always eager to learn things which I don't understand yet.
for unix my first was SunOS 2.5 in about 1992.
for linux my first was redhat 5.2 in about 1996.
My first Unix was TNIX (Unix version 7) in 1984.
My first Linux distribution was composed of a stack of floppies, SLS in 1993.
Red Hat
My friend got me Knoppix live cd saying "It's a Linux distribution, a different OS and you don't even have to install it". It was first year of my Engineering and I barely knew anything about UNIX/Linux. But that was the starting point. I started using the live CD regularly and started reading stuffs about Linux, UNIX, Shell & PERL scripting. Soon I found myself in love with all of these.
Installed Ubuntu as my primary OS. But it was too simple for a geek (no offense) who wanted to dig deep. Installed Fedora and that was my primary OS for 4 years while I was experimenting with RHEL/CentOS, OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, UnixWare anything that runs on x86 platform.
My first encounter with AIX happened at work. Just love poking around things, so I have my virtual infrastructure set up at my home.
I think most of the UNIX/Linux folks of my age started with Ubuntu or Knoppix. :rolleyes:
Zilog 8000. Unix System 3, about 1985. Those were great days, the system had 1mb of memory, and two 40mb hard drives and an 8 port serial card. I sold it for about 15000 dollars with a 25 percent margin.
Mine was Ubuntu 6.06 ...
redhat 2.4kernel for arm processor.
Redhat 9 ... on which have started learning linux from 2010..and prepared for RHCE on rhel 5.4..
But I like to have redhat9 still ..
Redhat was good till was open-source version REDHAT..but on RHEL version lot of packages required registration ...
Today am prefering to go with CentOS instead ...
--Shirish
Redhat, whatever version was around in the summer of 1997 when I left university, I missed Solaris big time. I had Redhat on a machine with a dual boot with Windows NT. NT would give me the blue screen of death on a semi-regular basis. A year or so later the machine got a hard disk reformat, a clean Redhat install and became a dedicated database server - during the next 2 years it was on the whole time, rebooted only on a dozen or so occasions, and never ever crashed despite its low power (it had no desktop installed) and our throwing rather a lot of database activity at it.
Hi ,
I have started with slackware 3.0 kernell 1.2.13 . I remember how difficult was to install this version of linux. I still have the cd set , the original ones dated 1995.
Regards
Mariano
Debian, still with but getting tired with its crap and maybe will develop own operating system. A lot of hard work, but from my experience I know everything is just question of time. For someone who only takes basics everything might be OK, but when digging deep, you want more and better.