Remember when they'd send you these for free?

jayandp@sh.itjust.works to Linux@lemmy.ml – 790 points –

I was digging through some stuff and stumbled on this. To think it's been 15 years. Crazy what you used to be able to get a free CD of back in the day.

75

As much as I prefer other distributions over it, I am grateful for everything that Ubuntu has done to grow the Linux userbase.

I was listed on the page of people who might burn one for you for free!

How often did someone take you up on the offer?

Twice, I think? It's been many years, I think I added myself there when 9.04 was the hot new thing, so around 2009.

A friend once ordered a box of 50 to share with students from university and they delivered to the other side of the world not even charging shipping!

I worked at CompUSA back in the day. I did the same thing for coworkers. It was breezy 5.10. Crazy yo this it's been nearly 20 years since then.

Don't, you're making me well up. A while ago my hard drive died and I was looking for a flash drive to live boot. Only one I had was months old. Tried to get a new one, couldn't. Tried to order online, couldn't. It's crazy how hard it is when they used to literally send out the things for free.

This could be of help if you have Android: https://f-droid.org/packages/eu.depau.etchdroid/

@user224
@sabreW4K3
To bad there's no app to turn your phone itself into a live USB, I would have loved that a few months ago

Something like DriveDroid (requires root): https://softwarebakery.com/projects/drivedroid ?

@user224
Unfortunately my phone is not rootable (every phone I get from now on I'm gonna do more research on first to make sure I don't make that mistake again) but otherwise yeah that's amazing

I feel you so much on this. My previous phone was a Samsung Note 3 and man that thing just kept going. I used about 5 different ROMs on it over the years. But it wasn't keeping up with apps anymore. Thought I did thorough research when I replaced it with a S9+. Realised too late that some models can't be rooted and guess what I have? Yep, one of those models 🤦🏻‍♀️ Now stuck with Samsung crap for the next however many years because I can't afford to just buy a different phone. Even more so because the screen has cracked twice (fixed first time, can't afford again). My Note3 got thrown off a 2nd story deck onto concrete twice and abused by my kids and kept on trucking no problem (apart from some scratches and dent to the frame). This S9 feels like it breaks being sneezed at 😞

to be fair if you don't have a Ventoy stick with a dozen or so distros and recovery tools by now you deserve to be scrambling for a boot disk

😱 I'd never heard of a Ventoy stick until you mentioned it. Thank you.

What's the issue with a months old version? Install and then upgrade.

In general, all that free stuff is just not necessary anymore since everyone has fast-enough internet.

Worst case, if you can't write the stick from your phone, go to the local library and do it from there.

Complaining that you only get the OS and the download totally for free without even ads is a bit of a high level to complain about.

Eh? I can't install because the harddrive died, there's nothing to install to. Regardless, there's not been anything new which I'm in love with enough to buy yet and since this happened, the law regarding USB C got passed, so that meant that I wanted a laptop that was good enough to use everyday for writing, the occasional game and lots of media consumption that I could abuse the fuck out of, wouldn't have to deal with the NVIDIA nightmare and was powered by USB. Maybe it is a high level complain, whatever that means but it's just an experience that happened to me. At the same time, my older laptop that I had running something lightweight and also used just to download stuff and then send it to my NAS also died. So I was just that person that was unlucky enough to be in a position where I was running what I could off a live CD while on the lookout for a decent replacement. Luckily I'm a carer and so I don't actually need my laptop for much.

So getting an €5 USB stick from Amazon is too much to invest?

You can get a 120GB SSD for your laptop for <€10 and that would give you a better performing PC than what you had before.

So I don't really get your point.

So all in all: Spend €10 on an SSD, borrow an USB stick from a friend and use their PC to flash it with Linux. And now you got a PC that can last another few years.

Why would you even run this system from a CD? Performance is incredibly bad from the CD and you can't update or install anything on the CD.

PS: Didn't you say you had a "months old" live USB stick? How would running it from a Live CD improve the situation over a much faster Live USB stick?

The USB stick is fine, but where am I downloading the stick too. I didn't know I could get a SSD for cheap? I just hadn't had a conversation with anyone about it. Ignorance isn't a crime, is it? This whole thread has been an eye opener to me and I've learned of things I didn't know existed. The live CD is a Fedora USB, I bought a bunch of USB sticks months ago and flashed various different systems to them. Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, Qubes and Tails.

Sorry, it wasn't meant to be offensive.

I was just wondering what the issue actually was.

This makes a bit more sense.

The probably best way to go would be to get a 2.5" SSD, which should be compatible with your PC if you had a harddrive in it.

Any one you can get will be better than the HDD you had before. The only relevant point to look for is the capacity, but if you are considering running of a Live CD, I guess you don't need much.

Since you already have some sticks, you can just use any of these to install any Linux to the hard drive, then boot off that, download any Linux variant you want, put it on the stick, boot from the stick and install the OS you actually want.

Since you have multiple sticks, you can even boot from one stick, download the OS you want, install to the other stick and boot from that.

Thank you very much, I appreciate the advice.

Coming back to this, if you ever see me in a thread in the future. Please just assume I'm the dumbest fuck in the world who is in desperate need of your knowledge 🙏

Sorry, at no point did I want to imply that you are dumb or something.

I just misread your first post and thought you complained that the Ubuntu people don't give you free hardware. And I'm sorry for jumping to this conclusion without understanding your actual problem correctly.

Also with the install disk's running a live version, even a version from a couple of years ago might get you far enough that you could download the newest version from the website and put it on a stick.

I remember wishing AOL's free disks were on CD-RW :-)

AOL came on floppies originally, but the quality was so poor that you could barely rewrite them.

You are reminding me that I used to keep a copy of Nesticle (for DOS!) on an AOL floppy, along with a couple of ROMs. I saved the fancy Imation Disney disks for my data 😅

Thank you for the flashback!

They even shipped this to me in India. Pleasantly surprised at that point.

Mexico, too. First time I felt the internet was a part of the real world. Took a couple of months but they even sent stickers!

I remember I had a few of these. If I recall correctly there was also a blue Kububtu one.

Oh wow, wish I had one of those. The blue looks pretty nice.

Nowadays you can't even boot Ubuntu from disc. The loader is completely bugged out and you need to specify a few boot args to get it to boot within a semi reasonable amount of time. Last time I did, it took 20 minutes to load lol.

You'd have to use a DVD as well, since it's too big to fit on CDs now XP

Of course. Especially since they now include Nvidia drivers which are like 300 MB each and there's more than one IIRC

I think the minimal/net-installer can still fit on a CD. But then you need an internet connection.

Man, I remember buying a Linux Format(?) magazine once and breaking out the included 7.10 CD.

Later distros I messed with I remember waiting hours for those few hundred MB to download on my parent’s DSL connection, oh how times have changed!

I downloaded several distros in the last days and it was faster to download them then copying them on the USB drive. That felt weird.

And here's me having paid $110 (~$170 in today $) for Red Hat back when I was a poor cash-strapped tech student. 😬 TBF it came with an absolute tome of a manual.

I wish I had this. Although I don't use Ubuntu anymore, it was the first distro that I used and I feel grateful.

I loved that Ubuntu did this back in the day, it really made linux easier to get into for me, especially with my not-so-good internet connection. I still have a collection of these CDs somewhere.

I ordered a box of Ubuntu CDs and they came in a wooden box packed with hay!

I had a bunch of these for the first release. I threw them away ages ago sadly.

Yes that's how they killed Mandrake/Mandriva, which was superior IMO at that time (easier install, KDE based, better hardware support).

Of course, Mandriva's management is not blameless, but Ubuntu's free CDs were the cherry on top of the cake.

I might still have one kicking around somewhere. Probably with my OG Quake discs.

Mine came in a cardboard sleeve. I still have it somewhere.

This is more or less how I got started. I'd order a few of them, and my computers class teacher was super cool. Let me install it on some older machines destined for ewaste.

Nostalgic! Ordered 5 of these at the time and distributed among the good people :)

One of my friends did that and I was amongst the good people. This is how I discovered Linux.

That was the first way I installed Ubuntu. I remember the bootleg ones on eBay for $5 also.

I do remember

i still have a few in a desk drawer at the office.. and was just thinking about them, too, the other day as i watched an .iso download on crappy DSL.

have one from the 10.10 version and a Kubuntu 10.10..I was super excited about receiving international mail for the first time in my life! tried uploading the pictures but I get error messages by jerboa 🥲

Yeah, try compressing the images smaller. Some Lemmy servers have upload size limits. Or you can host the picture elsewhere and then just link it using:

![](URL HERE)```

Hey fellow jerboaer, sometimes the spouted errors are nonsense and if you actually try to upload the image from the website it tells you the image is too big

Thanks man

Lemmy know if u find an easy way to compress images, I'm interested in uploading some too

I remember my dad had one of these when I was young. I think it comes with a sticker too, cuz I remember sticking it onto a kitchen cabinet.

The stickers are that folded white slip behind the disc in the picture. I forgot to take a picture of them, but they don't look great since they were transparent and the adhesive has degraded into a patchy yellow/orange mess. A bit of a shame, but time marches on.