Your journey of linux discovery

[stubbe]

Hi I'm joe, a 24 yo regular indonesian. Right now I work in a local production house in brunei darussalam, in the 3D animation division. How about we share how we discover the wonderful world of linux?

first distro i ever tried is redhat 6. Back then it's nothing, a crap, in a brutal truth way of saying. My father (he's old but still a tech addiction lol) got it running, but with ugly graphic, only 16 colors or so available. I said "so what's the fuss is all about then?". Dunno what else to do and where to ask help since net is not yet as popular as today.

Then I leave Linux world for couple of years I grabbed a mandrake 8, got it running, but still the same, not much todo for a desktop. Not much games, not much graphic softwares. But already I can see how linux growing so fast. At that time I still havent get what's the idea behind FOSS. After that got my first job, and leaving linux for awhile again.

Sometimes around that, i'm jobless for couple of months, that's where linux crazyness started to crawl under my brain. Tried many distros but mostly redhat and mandrake, looking at the applications thoroughly, also searching for windows application alternatives, specially graphic and animation softwares. I found some solutions such as K-3D, wings and Art of illusion but nothing makes me more curious than blender.

The craziest thing I did to get myself familiar with linux back then was moving all my critical datas to linux partition and remove windows wholely, and using it for some weeks. Got myself into trouble couple of times like it wont boot, but I do anything to get my data back. This way i learn linux faster lol.

Somewhere around that time I experimenting on creating a minimalist redhat removing rpms manually and trying to combine redhat 9 installation with fedora packages but it turn out a mess lol.

Then on a forum somewhere, somebody suggested if I wanted a highly customizable distro slackware is the one. Thus, I never turn back from slackware. To that point I regularly buy a local linux magazine that provides linux CDs, got some distro CDs, but I only tries the live ones such as mepis and pclinuxOS. It's infolinux magazine. The magazine really helps me understanding the whole idea behind FOSS. And so I becaming a FOSS zealot lol

Slackware is fun to play with, but for regular usage i still use fedora or mandriva. Also discovered slax, which I burned on a 3.5" disc and carry it around everywhere. Slax already saved me from some common disaster like harddrive partition mess. Up till today I'm still searching for the ultimate desktop combination from slackware.

one thing that still keeping windows in my harddrive is 3D softwares and games. I'm a crazy gamer addict, this is the only area where linux lacks. for 3D, I need to stick with the same softwares used by my team. If not I would use blender instead. Also internet connection in Indonesia is very crappy and too expensive and the main gateway to the FOSS is the internet. But now I'm in Brunei with super fast net connection, nothing will hold me back

I think linux will be the future OS and FOSS will be the main software distribution in the future. Windows will die someday, seeing some reviews on Vista and how greedy and how close-sourced microsoft is, i guess this won't take too long. The only strong replacement candidate is linux. MacOS? Not everyone can afford the machine. Also Mac community is kinda too exclusive. So I'm keeping myself stuffed with linux and FOSS stuffs in paralel with the 3D stuffs.

[Javasnob]

My journey isn't nearly as long, but here goes:

Two years ago, I built my first computer. This was also the first time I had my own computer; I had been using my parents' my whole life up until then, so this was a huge leap of freedom for me. A friend of mine helped put everything together since he had built his own machine several times, and right before we were to install Windows, his dad asked if I wanted to give Fedora Core a shot. Since my harddrive was (and still is) only 80GB, I said no thanks. So I spent about a year in darkness.

Then I got curious. The offer of Linux a year before had given rise to growing interest inside of me, so I asked my friend's father if I could borrow a few books on Linux. I devoured them and I installed Fedora Core on an older computer I had been given. I used a KVM switch to switch between my two computers, but I rarely used Linux. At the end of the summer of last year, I did some research on Linux and Linux distributions, and I found that Debian mirrored my beliefs on what a distribution should be, so I installed it on that older computer. I used Linux more and more, and after a few weeks, I swore off gaming and decided to switch my main machine to run Debian Linux. After two months of happily using that, I had a slew of troubles with Debian and the 2.6.x kernel series. I had been reading a lot about Gentoo, so I decided to give that a shot. I haven't used another distro on my main machine since; but that older machine is now running Arch.

Nine months after my full switch, I find myself loving Linux and the open source community/philosophy more and more. I've even gotten some friends curious about Linux, and some are switching over. My contribution to Linus' world domination. =P

[apoorv_khurasia]

I started with assembling my computer with the best avalilable crap. The first operating system I loaded on the poor machine was Windows XP Professional. Then as I was working on my minor in Computer Science so decided to give Linux a shot. My friend lended me his Mandrake 9.1 CDs which I copied and installed.

Then as I am me, I got bored of it and went to Fedora Core 3 (which I still regret). Then I upgraded to FC4, then SUSE 9.3. SUSE caused lots of trouble for me, it was very unstable for me, every now and then I had this ugly grey login screen to "welcome" me. Then I gave Ubuntu a shot, it was altogether a different experience which I don't want to have another time. (You know what I mean)

It was then when I decided that since I assemebled my comp on my own, I should do the same with my OS. And I came to gentoo. Since then life's smooth --partly due to the fact that my institute has its own Gentoo Portage server.

Since then I have joined the Comp Science Lab administration team where I have learned a lot and am still learning.

[a12ctic]

about 3 to 4 summers ago me and my buddies started to religiously play counter strike, we formed our own little clan and starte to scrim/join legues, thats when we decided we needed a server, we looked all around for a cheap server that as 12-13 year old kids could afford, unfortunatly we couldnt really afford anything at the time. I decided that sense i had high speed internet that i could host the server. I had a Win ME computer sitting around that wasnt being used and i decided to use that as my server. It was extreamly unreliable and I decided that i needed to reinstall windows to figure what was wrong. Thats when i noticed that i didnt have another copy of windows. I started to search for an alternative to windows and i came up with Debian, im not sure what version it was but i downloaded the first few cd's and went for the install, it all went smoothly and worked the first time I booted it.

I booted it to a VERY clean looking gui, i think it was gnome, but whatever it was it looked 100x better than that windows gui. Well, i got my server up and running, it didnt crash ever, but it still seemed a little slow. I noticed that the gui was taking up quite a bit of that 128mb of ram. I decided that i needed something more minimal, i researched that and found fluxbox (or blackbox, i forget, there both so simular), i LOVED fluxbox, it did everything i needed fast and took almost no ram. Well with my server running 24/7 stablely, i stashed it in the closet and put vnc in it to eliminate it from taking up space under my desk.

After that i continued to use windows for about another year and a half on my mainbox, I a pretty big gamer and i couldnt seem to make the swich, although i would try from time to time. About 10 months ago i installed ubuntu on my main box and stuck with it for about 5 months, i then installed zenwalk and had it for about 4 months, during those 9 months i used nothing but linux, i fed my gaming addiction with NWN, Q4, and Doom 3. I was very happy with it, but then... a elders scroll game came out, my favorite series of games ever. I decided to go for a dual boot.

Right now im dual booting windows and linux (zenwalk 2.6), i play my games when i want to and still have all that great FOSS, my server is at my summer home being used whenever i go up there. I have also got my sister hooked on linux (she loves super tux) and im trying to get my mom to swich over.

[d38dm8nw81k1ng]

a few years back i saw linux mentioned in a magazine (PC Gamer was saying how gamers had no use for linux and therefore 64-bit gaming wouldn't take off). last year i read a rant about MS and decided i wanted to switch. i got hold of a SuSE 9.3 DVD off a magazine cover and decided to try it. well, it refused to work on my machine and, as i knew nothing, i decided to try it when i got a new machine.
the time came: the PSU on the machine blew and i got a new one. my broadband connection was provided by a USB modem and i downloaded a SuSE 9.2 DVD and installed it, dual booting with Win2000. i needed to get the USB modem working which someone provided a driver for. i struggled for a little as i needed to get my head round the CLI. all of a sudden, something clicked and i was able to follow the instructions (although i knew nothing of tab complete or even ls) and get it installed. however, it wasn't perfect. for a start, i had trouble booting as sometimes it would refuse to boot, and sometimes the modem wouldn't connect. unlike many, i stuck with it as i enjoyed using konqueror and firefox (which i installed myself).
then SuSE 9.3 came out and i installed that, solving my booting problems. turned out the installation medium was corrupt. i found i was using linux, whilst my brother kept booting windows to play games. a friend gave me a copy of cedega and i was able to play CS and my bro was able to play warcraft 3 and suddenly the windows partition was rarely being used. i backed up the windows files and erased it, installing debian.
now i'll take time out here to bring to people's attention that my USB modem was still not problem free. ok, i got the modem working in debian and surprisingly the connection was slightly better. i dabbled in FTP, but ultimately i didn't like debian. the settings seemed strange and the GUI gave me a headache (something i can't explain, you have to see it for yourself).
i tried installing gentoo. because of the USB modem, it had to be done offline. i installed it and it refused to boot. after a few tries i used the genkernel, which worked, but i couldn't connect with the USB modem. i ditched gentoo and went back to SuSE for the time being.
then the time came: i got a proper modem/router. i was able to install gentoo using the internet connection. after some hard work (and a stage 1 install), i managed to get a booting gentoo install. i managed to configure everything with the help of sdousley.
i then got my laptop, which i proceeded try and install gentoo on. disaster! the strange combination refused to boot gentoo! i tried suse which, strangely, installed perfectly. i queried the gentoo forums who tried to help, however, due to my incompetence i was unable to follow the instructions. i used suse on my laptop. my geforce FX5200 went boom in my main machine. my brother splashed the cash on a geforce 6600, and proceeded to watch it crunch UT2004, Quake 4 and Neverwinter nights .
in february of this year, i finally installed and ran gentoo on my laptop (as a side note, i'd tried debian, DSL and FreeBSD on this laptop). a couple of config changes and it ran perfectly, wireless and all. i ditched fluxbox and went with xfce on both my machines.
a little time after that, i got myself a Sun Ultra 60 (UltraSPARC). i didn't like Solaris 10 and i tried to install FreeBSD. i hated the install, the interface and pretty much the OS. i decided to go with what i knew and had gentoo on the machine. i couldn't get X working on either BSD or gentoo, tried to install solaris 9, then reinstalled gentoo. i never got X working so i took all the packages off and instead set it up as an FTP server (you can see it at ftp://i-live-to.serveftp.net). before i set it up i was forced to stow it away for a while and i've got it back out a couple of weeks ago and it's been running non-stop (doing nothing) for over a week.
and that's my story of linux. perhaps i'll have more if i try to setup a fileserver or something, so i can keep all my files in a central location.

[Krendoshazin]

I'm 22, I've been using Gnu/Linux for something over 8 years now, I started on computers when I was young and quickly discovered IRC, from there I met people who I became friends with and slowly worked my way up to IRCop status. When we merged with another network I became a network admin and services admin, at this point I learned to ssh onto server boxes and install ircd's for the network, unknown to me we were using Gnu/Linux at the time.

So before I even knew what Gnu/Linux was, I was ssh'ing into Gnu/Linux boxes and compiling ircd's from source, so I gained a lot of command line experience like wget, pico, and the like.
So that was good for me as the first distro I used was Slackware, which dumped me straight onto the command line, at first I could basically use it ok, but I had no idea about X so I thought I'd screwed something up. After a second install I figured I must have been missing something, it was from reading the X man page that I figured out how to get X started and it was all go from there.

So minus the details for those 8 years where I learned a hell of a lot, I'm a fast learner and these days compile my own distro from scratch and fully understand why everything is the way it is, why I did something, and how to repeat it. 8 years may sound like a long time, but there's a big difference between learning something, and learning something until you understand it, we all think we know a lot until we realise there's so much more to learn.

A great resource like http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz is a good place to learn a whole load of things.

[Roxoff]

Well, heres mine.

About 1995 the company I worked for brought in a new Engineering Director, and he set up a new fileserver. We didn't use windows on that machine (even though we were a Windows software development house), he used Linux and supported the development PCs using Samba.

I found it professionally intriguing, not to mention surprising that here was an operating system that didn't crash half a dozen times a day. I got involved in some of the sysadmin, and borrowed the RedHat 4.5 disks to install at home (something else I struggled with getting my head around - not needing a user license to use this OS legally). I've never looked back. I still use windows, but only for those games that I cant play on Linux. And there aren't many of those.

[dapperone]

Just about 6 months ago I started reading about Linux online. It was always a mystery to me and I was intimidated by a friend who told me, "it's a completely different way of thinking".
The more I read the less intimidated I became. I found out it has a GUI/Desktop, Apps, Games, and lots of free programs.
I also had to learn a few commands to compile in CYGWIN.
I have to admit my first distro was actually PC BSD which worked on the first try but didn't every time afterward.
I've become a distro collector (of a sorts). I now have Ubuntu (5.10 & 6.06), Fedora Core 5, Mandriva One (2006), Kununtu 5.10, DSL 2.2, PuppyLinux 1.08, PCLinux p92, PC BSD 1.0-rc2, MINIX 3, and a few tiny bootables like TinySofa, etc.
My Mandriva is a bootable CD, would it be possible to install Mandriva without losing my other two OS's?

[Salgat]

Lets just say, after 3 years of my favorite electronics teacher suggesting for me to get Linux, I finally caved in. Ya, I used LiveCd to check it out before, but when I finally installed Linux(Ubuntu) a few years later and formated that old hunk of junk Windows, there was no going back

[oz]

My first distro was Red Hat about 7 years ago but I don't even remember what version that would have been. I stayed with it a few months before trying Mandrake, but then switched back and forth between the two distros for a while.

Then I tried Slackware and found it to work quite well so kept it on my box for a number of months before trying Gentoo. I loved Gentoo then and still do, but it turned out to be too time intensive for my tastes, so I started distro-hopping and went through about 45 different distros only to return to good ol' Slackware.

After repeatedly reading about "pacman" (the Arch Linux package manager) I decided to give Arch a try and have been using it ever since. That was about 18 months ago. I do still try new releases of the top 20 or so distros as they come out, but I always quickly revert back to my default Arch Linux.