Non-Technical: Intimidated by Linux :D

wow...

i have been reading most of the posts i could make sense out of in this forum and frankly linux seems pretty much a handful to me.. :lol: so this might be a bit off from the technical problems put up here, but i just wanted to how long u guys have been working around with linux and do u have extensive hardware setups to have tried so much out... i am just a poor programmer(student basically, that too of a subject remotely distant from computers) ,getting off windows, with only a workstation PC..

just trying to find out if it is my cup of tea... (but im not giving up... :D)

I have been using linux since slackware 3.0 was released in 1996 though I did take a break from linux for about a year or so because I was using solaris/win2k instead(comcast kinda forced me into that). Linux really isn't that hard, just takes a little time to get used to. I learned the most when it was 4am and I was trying to figure out how to fix my box that I had broke messing around with stuff. Also helps if you can get system admin job for unix/linux servers. My first admin job was at the college I went to. Gained a lot of experience and got to play with very expensive sun servers. I would check around your school, lot of times you can get an entry level admin job on campus. Since you are a programmer, linux will be a much better tool to use then windows. Once you learn how to use linux, you won't go back to windows. Well unless there is a game that just won't run right under linux, then you might have to use windows for that.

I've just been using since early 2001 or so; my first distro was RedHat 6.1. On the other hand I've been programming since I was 5 years old... =) So I had some computer understanding by then. I learned English through the MS QBasic help files. =)

But really, just like genlee says, you just need to get used to Linux, then you'll find it really easy. In most OSs, you _can_ do anything, even Windows, it's just that in Linux everything is so much easier to do than in Windows. I also agree with genlee that 4 AM is the best time to learn. The best way to gain experience is to find something that you want to do, and then do it. Not only will you learn to do what it was that you wanted to do from the beginning, but you'll also learn a whole lot from different side tracks that you'll find here and there.

Find projects that have a reason in themselves. For example, I got a TV Tuner PCI card for my 18th birthday, with which I also got an IR remote control. In Windows, there wasn't much I could do with it, except controlling the TV application that came with the card. However, I thought it would be fun to make an MP3 player controlled by that remote control, and so I did, and I find it very useful, and I learned a lot doing it. I made the first implementation with shell scripts, and since that was my first somewhat large project with shell scripting, I learned a lot about that. The second implementation, which I made after my hard drive crashed, I did in C, with flex and bison to create a scripting language. I'm extremely content with that. I also learned flex and bison in the process, and I got to design a stack-based virtual machine. That wasn't the first virtual machine I have made, but it was the most complex language I have written (a C clone, somewhat).

In the beginning of my Linux life, I used to switch to Windows to play some games every now and then, but then after a while I found that it was so much more fun to play around with the system and implementing some fun things here and there, so after my hard drive crashed, I just didn't install Windows again, since I hadn't used it for several months.

thanx guys.. well i have been toying around with linux for some time now.. started with Redhat Linux 6.0.. but i couldnt do much cause i hate to admit it... i anm addicted to gui and the xfree86 available then did not support my board.. so i was quite confused... i love programming to and can program most commercial programming lanuages.. including VC++
so i have been around windows programming. however. im currently studying mechanical engineering so eveything i do is strictly extra curricular... i just hope that some day i get to be as good as u guys...

:lol:

to throw in my 2 cents: I started using linux in like '96. Got it to run on my laptop, but like you, XFree didn't support it. Also, my pcmcia modem wouldn't work so all I had was the super small debian bootup distribution. This is where I learned to use bash and all the simpler commands (ls, tar, cp, cut, etc.). I didn't really get back into it until I had a computer of my own (had to purchase it myself, as my parents are poor). I ran linux on my K6 333 from '98 till I gave that computer to my parents. Then I got the computer I have now (still like 2 years old) and have been using that to gain all sorts of experience. My ideas were "okay, let's see if I can do that". I would try to do it, it would break my installation, then I would try to fix it. I learned automake from all the broken source packages that people send out. I learned C from all the badly written programs that people wrote that I wanted to work on my fscked up configuartion. I learned how to read the logs. What went on? Why did the log print that out? Where in the code is the place that this got printed out? Why would it have gotten to that place in the code? Etc. I honestly spend more time reading other people's code and figuring out what it is trying to do than I spend writing my own code. This is just what I do, your mileage may vary.

Ugg... All you programmers. I really hate to write code. I don't mind writing small scripts but coding anything large just seems like tedious work that I wouldn't enjoy doing at all. Unfortunately I am forcing myself to learn c now because I feel I am getting close to the point that if I want to learn anymore about linux, I need to know c.

i been using linux for about 1 year and a half. Started with a mandrake 8.0 dual boot on an old machine at home, except afte rusing windoze for too long i got stuck once i forced an isntall of perl or something (without havign any of the prereq packages) and screwed up my gui. After about 3 or 4 months i got hold of an 8.2 cd. installe dthis on the same machine and started learnign how to do stuff via command line in case i scrweed the gui again. A year later i have all my comps dual booted with mandrake but havent used the windows boot of any of them in over 6 months.

Ok.. here goes..

I'we been using GNU/Linux for about 2-3 years now.
The first distro i got hold of was SuSE 6.4, wich a member of my family installed for me.
I thought that GNU/Linux was extremely fun, but I couldnt get my ISDN card to work, so back to windows.
Somewhat later, I bought one of these yellow linux books from IDG and started playing with that.
The distro wich came along with that one was Redhat 6.0, so you could say I am an ex-redhat lower!
So, I continued to use Redhat until the version of Redhat 7.3 came out, when i switched to Slackware.

And for my programming history, I started programming TurboPascal 7.0 (I think it was, please correct me if im wrong) for some time, when I was like ten or so due to my cousin attended to a course and got a book wich he borrowed to me.
I have now forgotten about everything, all I can do in pascal is just if then else and some simple stuff like that.

But lately, I have downloaded the 'Teach yourself C in 21 days' and been reading that one. My favorite programming IDE of choice is Anjunita (I think it was, maybe some typos) wich is extremely good. Syntax highlightning support for more than 10 languages, etc. Yep, thats ip!

Introduced to linux in late 1997 but using it on and off from one distro to another (I use mainly Windows). Finally settled on dualboot SuSE 7.0 and Windows 98 when I really use Linux more than Windows. Right now still using dualboot SuSE 8.1 and XP sp1 but almost never needed Windows anymore.

I learn many programming languages along the way, but my favourite are C, C++, and Java. I like kdevelop3 for my programming IDE. I use anjuta rarely (I like the neat collapsable sub-codes) and try kylix3 lately.

You better try download those Linux demo CDs first (linuxiso.org). Try on your machine and see if it work and if you like it then download or buy the real version. Dualboot with your favourite OS and learn Linux. Join Linux discussion forums (linuxforums and linuxquestions are my favourite). You won't regret ;-)


Have a lot of fun :-)