How did you get started in linux?

[questio verum]

<snip, snip>

Looking at he ages in previous posts, (I've read the whole thread, I know I'm mad) 10, 12, 13, DAMN I'M LATE! I am 15 now and this year Ubuntu provides a birthday present again, but this time it comes out on the exact same date as my birthday(30-10, DD-MM). Ubuntu 8.10. Then I'm turning 16.

<more snippage>

Don't be so hard on yourself. 15 is hardly what I'd call late. If that were the case, I would be surreally late.

My first exposure to linux came shortly after getting my first (and only) dial-up internet account in 1993. The internet at the time was not nearly so web-centric. In fact, usenet got a lot more play than the web in those days. Anyway, I started noticing lots of threads on usenet about this 'Linux'. A free operating system. And I started reading these posts. I was hopelessly stuck in DOS-land at the time. True multi-tasking was something DOS and windows users could only dream of. But this linux was supposed to be capable of multi-tasking. So, being curious I went down to 'the drag' in front of the University of Texas and started rifling through the college bookstores. I finally settled on a shrink-wrapped distro of Yggdrasil. I took it home and started what would be the first of many install processes.

I never did get that distro to work. A few years later I picked up a copy of SuSE Linux and was thrilled when I got it to successfully install and run on my pc. Woo-hoo! When my excitement died down I was left with the question; What can I do with it? I couldn't give myself a satisfactory answer, so the rig with SuSE on it got less and less play. In my defense I can only offer that I was working for the world's largest OEM at the time and being fully locked-in to the MS mindset, my judgement was skewed. In retrospect, I should have found a LUG and made a more strident effort. My linux skillset would be the better for it.

Anyway, Last summer I finally had had enough of all of the negatives that are part and parcel of being a windows user. I found this forum, became a member, and the rest is history. Thanks to the patience and support of the members here at LFO I've been a happy, satisfied linux user for just shy of 16 months. Ubuntu was my first choice for a distro. I've sampled a few others along the way with success, noteably, Sabayon 3.5, Fedora 9, and now OpenSUSE 11. I really liked Sabayon 3.5, but my urgent need for a 'secure by default' distro, coupled with my novice user skills has driven me to Fedora and OpenSUSE. I presently keep Fedora and all my important files on one drive, and OpenSUSE and all my toys and learning tools on another. I'm going to order a drive-switching SATA II controller in a couple of weeks so that I can quickly switch between them.

My only wish is that I'd persevered with another distro, like maybe Slackware, when the Yggdrasil installs went sideways on me. But that's only a wish. Not a regret.

Happy Hacking!

qv

[glaston]

1st computer I ever touched was an Apple IIE when I was in maybe 5th grade.
This was in the media center of my grade school.
We learned very basic tasks like loading programs, printing to the screen and making banners with those old dot matrix printers that used those long rolls of paper with perforated edges.
I also had an uncle who had an elaborate setup of Commodore64's that I wasn't allowed to even look at.
Eventually he started showing me stuff.
So this put me at an advantage because most kids back then didn't have any computer experience outside of school.

In 6th or 7th grade when the schools machines finally went GUI we were allowed to play educational games and use pixel paint apps.
Well, being the little wise-ass that I was, I made some nice pixel art with sexual themes, and changed some of the students names in the computers to derogatory derivatives of those names.
Got in alot of trouble for that but I was hooked on computers.

My uncle was always telling me about Sun workstations and how great it would be to have one.
After high school, he gave me an old 486 to play with that had windows for workgroups I think, maybe windows3.11 though.
Then in like 1995-96 he put some new hardware in that machine and installed Linux on it for me at my request.
I couldn't do a thing with it except boot it, login, ls, mkdir, change my password etc.
It was always in text mode because I messed something up, and eventually it took a dump altogether.
So I then had my first experience installing an OS, Win95.
In 1998 I got an HP Pavilion with a 300Mhz AMD chip and Win98 pre-installed.
Hated win98!

So I got a used Apple laptop with System7 on it and loved it.
In either late 1998 or early 99 I got a magazine that had a big article about Apples new OS-OSX, and it was being marveled at by many because it was built on a Unix base.
It wasn't released yet, and my laptop wouldn't be able to run it anyway.
I was so hyped I decided to start learning about Unix in preperation for OSX.
I found a multi-disc set of Linux distros at a local computer shop.
It was the June1998 Linux Developers Resource CD-ROM set from InfoMagic.

I still have it.
I'm looking at it right now.
It had::
RH 5.1 for intel
SuSE 5.2(kernel 2.0.33)
Debian 2.0
Slackware 3.5.0 (kernel 2.0.34)
Apache 1.2.5
Netscape communicator 4.05
Full commercial version of Metro X-Server from MetroLink
XFree86

Slack was the most Unix like so it was the natural choice
I tried for a couple weeks to get a working installation of Slackware.
Eventually got it but couldn't do much with it at first.
Tried RH, SuSE, but kept coming back to slackware.
In 2001 I got a new Mac with OSX on it.
Really got into the Unix behind it.
But still kept some older machines with Slack and Mandrake.
From that point on I kept up on new releases of Slack.

My Slack box has 10.2 on it though since it's an older machine I see no reason to upgrade.
Debian is my secondary distro and I love it because it's simple and solid.

[Bemk]

Don't be so hard on yourself. 15 is hardly what I'd call late. If that were the case, I would be surreally late.

I know, I was only making a bloody joke, but the pronunciation is a bit difficult to type, If I could manage to do that, I don't think I'd have had this as an answer, unless that's a bloody joke as well.

[arinlares]

i first found DS Linux when I was looking for homebrew applications. Read it was based on uClinux, went to Wikipedia, found out uClinux is a linux modification, and then mistyped in Google for DS Linux, found Damn Small, downloaded the cirrent embedded DSL version, looked up different distros, found Ubuntu, and now, i'm trying to get a job, laptop, and linux set up. (the job is to fund my linux exploits)

I love runons!

[SkipDaShu]

Firstly, I introduce myself to our community.I come from china and now I'm an embedded linux application software engineer in Xi'an software park.
I got started in 2001.When I was a freshman and selected Computer Application as my major.At that time I heared about Red Hat/Debian. Then I got a Table model machine and installed Debian by the reflection of one of my roommates and classmates in 2002.But I real got started in 03/06/2006, because since then I have being started to learnning Linux(ThizLinux7.0).
Nowadays I work on my computer with Fecdor7/8 and install Ubuntu8.4 on my own IBM T61 as studying.
I'm very eager to learn and communicate with everyone in our community!
My E-mail:fky168@163.com

Ni Hao.

I am a relative linux noob.

Sometime late 2006 or early 2007, my youngest son (the Gentoo geek) put that distro on an old PIII machine I had. I really couldn't use the thing and couldn't find my way around on it. I got frustrated with it and it got converted back to Windoze after a month or so. I think that 'linux experiment' just wasn't approached correctly and might have not been the best starting point for an old Mainframe/DOS/Windoze dog.

Then late last year (2007) while I was building another of my "basket crunchers" (got hooked on Distrubuted Computing while working in Beijing in 2004), I decided I needed to do something to 'get legal' instead of running the same pirated copy of WinXP Pro on 8 different machines. I'd heard that the linux distros were getting easier to use and I was looking for a 64b OS to take advantage of the hardware I was crunching numbers with. Poked around reading about various distros and ended up downloading and installing Xubuntu on one of the dedicated (headless) number crunchers. Over course of the next month or so I got BOINC, x11vnc and a few other 'essentials' working and then started converting all the 'crunchers' over to Xubuntu. After seeing a good 5% better output from the number crunchers I started to profess this is a better OS for our number crunchers to my 'bro who had a bit more experience (from webserver work) with Linux. He slowly started to ditch Win2K and convert to Xubuntu also. He is even doing some of his web design work on a Linux machine now.

I've since sold my NAS and installed SAMBA on a couple of them. Got apt-cacher running on one of those. It's actually been fun!

While my main desktop (and my work provided T60 laptop) are still WinXP machines, I've been playing around with Ubuntu on a spare desktop. The next step in 'getting clean'... dual boot, may be in my near future.

[hazel]

I've told this story before but there's no harm in telling it again. I was "volunteered" by my local computer club to try out Linux for them because I had some mainframe command-line experience. A friend installed Red Hat 6 on a hard drive in his own machine, then transferred the drive to a computer he was building for me. For good measure he then repartitioned the drive with Partition Magic and put Windows 98 on it too (but without updating the Linux boot diskette!) and also forgot the root password he had set. Result: an unbootable system.

But, with the help of a Knoppix cdrom and a book called Running Linux, I was able to find out the new root partition and rdev the kernel to point to it, delete the unusable root password and set a new one, and generally get things working. And that's when I fell in love. Because if I - a complete Linux newbie - could salvage an unbootable system and make it work, then this Linux must be the most user-friendly system ever. I never looked back.

Unfortunately I have drifted away from the club because they're all Windows users and I use Windows so seldom now that meetings no longer contain much that interests me.

[SkipDaShu]

... The next step in 'getting clean'... dual boot, may be in my near future.

Well after resizing my C: and D: (HDD0), to create a 24GB unused space for Linux, the main desktop is now dual boot. Installed Ubuntu v8.10 x86_64 w/o incident once I got my partitioning down. Detected sound, detected Samsung 20" lcd and set the right res, detected my ATI HD3870. So far all is VERY good. Printer is still an issue but that's a low priority item at this point.

There's a lot more that's "automatic" in this release of Ubuntu than what I first experienced in v7.whatever of Xubuntu.

Back in Windoze now to get my mail server settings out of T-bird. Will be trying this default email client that ships with Ubuntu... forgot it's name.

Maybe it is possible to live life w/o Windoze after all! If this works I might even think about quitting smoking!

[peonuser]

I was a tech at a college where they had dumped their sco server. They wanted to have linux on individual machines as a dual boot. Since I had heard the word linux before (This was a windows shop), I was elected to do the job. Of course I did just one machine and then imaged via multicast to the rest. I saw so much software that came with Redhat 7 and it was free, no more worry about viruses, and a chance to learn something new I dumped windows off of my personal systems and never looked back.

[SkittleLinux18]

I got started back in June of 2007. I was driving past a yard sale and saw a dozen computers. I stopped and bought one. I tried poking around for a cheap XP sale on amazon and "other means."

When I couldn't find one, my really good friend, SierraDump, suggested Linux. I had hear of Linux through a roommate I had back in 2004-2006. He was using a very old version of Slax and was strictly CLI. He showed it to me back in 2004 and I was like, "No way!" So when SierraDump offered it a possibility, I told him I would never user Linux, I had seen it, and I was sick of always being hounded by my roommate and others to use. After my heated rant about it, SierraDump said to check out one website and after that, he would leave it alone. This was my introduction to distrowatch.org, and also the first time I learned that Linux came with a GUI. At the time, PCLOS was number 1 on the H.P.D. list. I checked out the screenshots for it, Ubuntu, SuSE, Fedora, Sabayon, and DreamLinux. I got excited! So I DLed PCLOS 2007 Final and gave it a spin. Been hooked ever since!

After 10 months of distro hopping, I decided that PCLOS and Mint were my favorite Distros. I stuck with those two for several months until just recently, I learned about the difference between a "pretty" distro and a "stable" distro. I had always known the theory, but never really understood it until I experienced what I call an SLFU (Serious Linux F- Up) back in October. I had servers and all running on it. I scrambled to recover mission critical data and went straight to Kubuntu (always been more of a KDE guy than Gnome). The SLFU happened over night while I was sleeping, so I know it was nothing I did. Nevertheless, the experience first hand taught me the difference between "stable" and "buttoned down stable."

[dandart]

My Dad installed Red Hat 5.2 on my PC saying "you won't know how to use this!" (of course he didn't either) so I just taught myself... making a few mistakes along the way... such as when I switched to Mandrake 7, where was my "dir" command? Oh, hang on.... *tries running everything in /bin* Oh, ls.
These were extremely old for the time, about y2k. Since, I've had RedHat 8, various flavours of openSUSE, and now I'm on Kubuntu Hardy (still) and it rocks.