How did you get started in linux?

[Talia]

So, two years ago, when my laptop started dying, I wanted to recover the many files that I had gathered over the two years that it was in working order, but XP wouldn't boot. I had heard of Linux before, and after a little research I discovered Knoppix and the wonderful world of the liveCD. I ordered a Knoppix disk (because, at that stage, I hadn't a clue how to burn images by myself) to use as a recovery-it failed as a recovery disk, because the capacitor was the problem- but nonetheless I was hooked. I began booting Knoppix frequently for kicks on my XP desktop, eager to delve into the source code as I was not able to on Windows.

Next year, after I bought a new, clean desktop, it proved to be a great opportunity. I first installed the familiar Knoppix, then decided to try Debian-but, because it was a shared computer, I added Windows XP in a third partition. However, that computer failed rapidly, and Linux essentially left me. I even lost my beloved Knoppix liveCD in favour of a shiny pile of XP instillation disks.

Recently, my enthusiasm of Linux has reawakened, for whatever reason-(I guess I am a born enthusiast-I remember exploring in the System folders of Win95 when I was five) -and I haven't lost it since. I've since tried Slax, Slackware, Knoppix 6.0.0, and even plan to embark on an LFS project on a fifteen year old legacy system. It's been a thrilling experience-and it makes that time of desperation when my laptop was failing....sort of worthwhile!

[Bemk]

(I guess I am a born enthusiast-I remember exploring in the System folders of Win95 when I was five)

Sounds familiar. The age for me is a little different, I was about 7 if I remember correctly. That was with my first laptop.

We had a computer with 98. I loved to play with it. I made a whole virtual file system, made of shortcuts and things like that. It drove my father crazy and I really wanted a laptop. He got an old IBM Thinkpad (486 system) from his work. It ran windows 95. I had a new tool to play with. My father quickly erased my early shortcut experiment. I loved to play with that system as well, breaking and fixing things. The machine died of old age. Too bad I didn't know about GNU/Linux back then. If I did I could have had much more fun. My first experience with GNU/Linux is now almost 1,5 years ago.

EDIT:

Look back in the thread and you will be able to read how I started with GNU/Linux, this is how I started with computers all together.

[bdecker0922]

Everyone seems to have such cool stories about how they started in Linux. I honestly haven't started yet, I am still reading on it...I know I am going to make mistakes, but I don't want to be completely blind like some when I go into it... I actually first started taking notice in Linux when my husband started learning about it. I took an interest by watching him...and started learning on my own. I like reading about it...reliability, the learning experiences...theres always something new to try. When I do my first install...everyone here will know believe me!

[D-cat]

A background of my username and computer history until 1996 can be found here:
The story behind "Dcat of FM"

I first learned of something called Linux in my BBS days, but it was largely a text interface then and I was quite happy with DOS+DesqView (anyone remember that one?). I knew Windows 3.1, but I didn't use it for the board since the response was too slow. I was still the go-to kid for fixing computers in my school. In 94, I became quite familiar with unix and had my intro to c programming. My first time seeing Linux in action didn't come until 1996.

I had a job as tech support for a fairly large for a local ISP (operated in all states in New England except Maine). Being the new kid, I got stuck on the least capable Windows 95 machine they had. One day, during a network glitch incident, I got a call which I realized was unique and related to what was going on, and I personally walked over to a network engineer in the operating center and explained the situation. Looking at his terminal, I saw a very clean high resolution graphical interface with a task bar and start button menu, all that good stuff. I asked him what that was, he said it was Linux. I was shocked, that is Linux? Yep. I knew this was going somewhere, but I still lived an hour and a quarter away and my free dial-up account still wasn't going to get me a copy anytime soon. BTW: our "glitch" turned out that user was a victim of an IP theft. AFAIK, such an incident hadn't ever happened again at that ISP.

Years later and I finally had access to high speed Internet, I was getting sick of Microsoft products and everything that went with it. The near monopoly they had meant that they didn't need to make sure the software was stable before they released it. Viruses, registry corruptions, BSODs, and just plain lack of compatibility (everything is proprietary, that's the path to efficiency. Well, I don't care if it's efficient if it doesn't work). I had already been keeping an ear out about Linux and decided to try Red Hat first. It was late 2002 and the current (and sparkling new) version was 8. Since I had to do an OS re-install anyway, I decided I'd load up RH an try it out. I was immediately stunned, the Internet connection worked right away, no setup required. However, I quickly found that my ATI AIW-128 Pro was not directly supported by Linux, and attempting to load the 3rd party 3D drivers some rogue developers released resulted in locking up the system, so that was bust. Since I was a gamer at the time, this broke my ability to really use it, however, I kept it around for other computers and kept playing with it. Sometime in this era, I had a bad experience with gnome after a crash, and I couldn't load any window anymore without the sides being waaaaay off the screen; I couldn't press any buttons to okay or cancel. I switched to try out KDE, and I haven't looked back (until recently).

When I got my first wireless card, it also didn't have a Linux driver available for it. With some legal wrangling and pleading, TI released a binary only driver for the chipset, but it required a Mandrake kernel compiled with gcc3. Off to download a new distro. I found Mandrake quite a bit easier and I really liked it, but I didn't like how not all aspects were free (as in "free beer" free). I kept running into scenarios where other hardware wouldn't work because I needed to enter the unlock code first. I also found that the computer was prone to lockups with that wireless module anyway, so Mandrake didn't stay.

If it wasn't clear now, I had gotten used to and proficient with the rpm style of package manager, so when Red Hat dropped its public project, I went looking for a new distro. I heard Fedora was replacing Red Hat, so I tried it out. It worked, but I found the lack of functionality hindering at best (it was still new and primitive at the time), so I went looking for another distro, preferably RPM based. I found it in SuSE.

SuSE 10.0 was the first distro I found truly usable right out of the box. The yast structure was brilliant, what all control panels should be IMO. I'm still using 10.2 on my laptop and my daughter's computer. It was also on my server (128 MB Ram) in text-only until recently, when I got my new printer which didn't have a driver for it. Honestly, I'd have never upgraded from 10.0 if I knew ahead of time that they changed the package manger from Yum to Zypp, and just what that would mean to the time it took to use the package manager, especially with low RAM systems, but it was necessary for certain peripheral hardware reasons. Otherwise, it still works perfectly fine.

Anyway, the new printer required new CUPS, and I wasn't about to play with the package manager any more on the server. I tried to upgrade to SuSE 11.1 on the server, but I got a rude awakening when I couldn't even load the installer (with tweaking, I got it up to 90% of stage 2, out of 6). Skewer it, it's time for a new distro, and this time I didn't care the PM, just something fresh and functional. I heard plenty about Ubuntu, so I went for it and found it had a server version, perfect. Having discovered how efficient the apt system is, I'm really glad I made the switch. I now run with SuSE and Ubuntu. I also have a collection of Live CD's for various uses, probably most used is Knoppix, but I'm also familiar with DSL and Puppy, as well as some specialty discs such as Dyne:Bolic, RIP, INSERT, and FIRE.

Well, just to add a little to this story, a close female friend who didn't like Linux before (Mandrake days) and was a total Die-Hard Windows user was complaining that her system wasn't doing what she wanted it to and giving constant errors. Attempts to update usually broke more than it fixed. I convinced her to try Linux again. This is her original machine, a 450MHz Dell. I upgraded her RAM and installed Xubuntu. I didn't really like xfce at first, but with a little tweaking, I managed to twist it into something familiar (it's actually quite configurable, just how isn't very intuitive). It's been approximately one week and she's playing Frozen Bubble right now.

[darkrose0510]

Apparently I haven't put anything in here yet, so...

I was on a completely non computer related forum, someone asked for help resizing an image or something, which lead to someone suggesting the gimp, which after sever pages and multiple topic changes - as was the norm for that forum - ended up with someone saying how crap Linux was. As the guy who said this was known to diss on anything and everything, especiallky if it was good but wasn't his, I set to finding out about what this Linux thing was.

As my pc at the time was the first windows system I'd owned, and inded used for any amount of time, I was at least aware of the concept of other operating systems. Seeing as it was trashed with viruses anyway I'd been looking at the possibility of another OS anyway... I had thought of downloading solaris, except it would have taken far too long on the dialup connection I had at the time.

Eventually I stumbled across the idea of a live CD, and ended up downloading feather; it took 2 days on dialup. I tried for a few days to write it to cd and get it to boot, but failed miserably; I now know it's because I wasn't burning it as an image, as I later burnt that first download to disk and ran an old laptop off it.

So I ended up buying a copy of SuSe 10.0 from ebay. So a few days later when the disc arrived I installed that as a dual boot with winXP. It took a couple of days to get my dialup modem working (I think that's when I joined here), as I ended up having to buy drivers for the thing... winmodem.

After that the only time I used windows when when I needed to print something, as my Lexmark printer didn't work in Suse. When I eventually got to the piint that i hadn't printed anything for a few weeks, I decided there was no pooint having windows taking up hard drive space anymore, copied all my files to CD, and reinstalled Suse.

That was about 2 years ago I think and I've hardly used windows since (at college, untill they let me install Ubuntu on a system there).

And so began my experimenting, I started buying Linux Format magazines and trying out different distros, used slackware for a while, Mandriva for a while, tried Debian (sarge) and didn't like it. Ended up buying a cheap old laptop off ebay and after trying out the feather disk on that, installed slackware 10.2 on it, I still love that release.

Then started experimenting with shell scripting, and compiling things that weren't in repositories. This lead to learning a bit of C and PHP, as I had already been experimenting with html. Bought some old servers and set them up, played about with compiling a kernel and so on.

And now I'm sitting on a train, with my laptop running Gentoo, a custom kernel, rewritten init scripts, and everything setup the way I want it, including a couple of applications I wrote myself, and I find I really can do anything I want with my computers, including running running a Linux system inside a web page!

[oboe17]

My first computer, hmm, was a long time ago... I believe 1988 or 1989. All were PCs running some version of Winblows. Bought SuSE Linux 10.0 in early 2006, yes bought the discs and book new for $50. Installed it and used it some but didn't really delve into it much. XP is going the way of other Microsoft OS. I've had this PC (with XP) since 2003 and I'm tired of having a perfectly good computer quit working because the OS is "out of date". (See "Monitor won't work with Linux 10.0" in the SuSE Linux help forum.) I want to learn more about Linux so I can give Microsoft the shaft.

Live in Texas, have a nephew in Amsterdam but not sure if he uses Linux. I might have to convert him eventually.

[sanderd17]

About 8 months ago I wanted to try Linux but I didn't dare, I was afraid to install Linux because if you have to install windows again, you loose all your data and I didn't want that. But a friend said I had to try it, it's easy to dual boot with linux, so I tried it and now I've got ubuntu on my computer for 8 months and I love it, I can not imagine to go back to windows.

[assembly]

I was introduced to Linux by my son. After which I could not get over the idea of driving the computer instead of it driving me. I am now going to drive the box!

[mariane_08]

Just over a year ago I purchased a new and very compact Acer Desktop. I loved the PC and was excited to have Windows Vista on it. OMG what a dissapoinment! I hated, hated Vista. Within a week I had wiped it off and reinstalled XP.

But there was one more ting that really pissed me off about Vista. I have lots of accademic videos that I give out to students. These are legal copies of privately made videos. 100% legal copies. But noooo Vista decided they were "pirated" copies and refused to play them. So I had to get back to XP. After someone gave me some articles about how Vista is so controlling and would be even more so I started to think about alternatives

Linux had crossed my mind before but never took the time and knew little about it. (eg I thought there was one single called Linux) I burned a live CD to try it. Then installed a dual boot and have been learning ever since. I rarely use windows any more

[dsparil]

Redhat in 1998 about the time when KDE came out. I had so many issues (dependency hell) that I went back to Windows after 6 months of trying to like it.

I then came back in 2007 when Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty came out, but I eventually grew out of it and am now a Sabayon user.

There's more too it, but that's basically it.