Sorry, I can’t beat you, but there could be two other aspects of the question:
- Who was the youngest to start with using Linux?
- What version of Linux did you start with?
Personally I think my first Linux was the Slackware boot floppy that had a tiny Linux system (with TELNET, SSH and FTP) on a 1.4MB floppy disk. I’m very proud that I found that image in my personal collection, as I think it’s not available online any more.
The other think I remember was my first real installation on a 20MB partition (something around S.u.S.E. 4.x): It had X11, Emacs and gcc (but I think there was not enough room for TeX). The machine was a 386SX @ 16MHZ with 8MB RAM and s 387SX coprocessor.
When using Emacs in X11 and running gcc with optimizations RAM turned out to be too low…
And some statistics: “make depend” (to compile the Linux kernel) took about 45 minutes on that machine, and a kernel compilation ran ove rnight 