Linux and I: My first experiences
Submitted by Kirok on Sun, 02/24/2008 - 16:34.
Article Type:
Editorial
Okay I hate documentation; I'm a Sysadminy sort of guy but I thought I should post something and this seemed appropriate as I've finally got rid of my Windows gaming partition.
I'm going to try and describe my first experiences with Linux, before I begin though some background:
I think I've always been a geek in one way or another.
I'd been using a computer since I was about 8, my first computer was an Amstrad with a tape drive and you had to plug it into the TV, I never really did anything with it except play games.
When I was 10 I got my first PC, it was an Olivetti with a 150Mhz processor, 16 MB of RAM and a 1.5 GB hard drive. I managed to break it on the first day; I fixed it the next.
Anyway on to Linux. Its 95/96 I've had my Olivetti for around a year and been online for 6 months. I had heard a bit about Linux but that was it, then one day on the new issue of PC Plus there was a version of SUSE (one of the 4 series I think 4.2 or 4.3)
I skimmed the article in the magazine not really reading it, I made the boot floppy, popped in the CD and off I went, it took me about 2 hours of reading on-screen help and tweaking options to get an install going, after it was finished seems I had a problem, the GUI wouldn't work. I knew there was a GUI as I configured options in the installer, I spent a further 3 hours trying to get it to work with no success. Then I decided to just install Windows again, however I knew nothing about partitions and file systems at this time and the install kept failing. Now I started to worry that the rather expensive-at-the-time computer I'd broken so many times before was beyond repair. I wasn't going to tell my parents so I hid it for the next three days.
Then late one night I decided to have another go, somehow I got the GUI working and then I did a little dance (my apologies for that image) I played around with it for the next week or so, I still couldn't get my modem working which was another big issue (it was a true hardware modem, a Rockwell but I can't remember the problem)
Fate dealt another blow to my early Linux usage when I bought copies of Fallout and Privateer 2, at this point I had worked out how to install Windows again so I said bye to Linux for now and off I went, I'm tempted to download that old version of SUSE and stick it on a VM and finally get everything working. In more ways I'm tempted to travel back in time and help my younger self get a fully functional dual boot going, so my adoption and learning of Linux could have begun sooner, but perhaps thats too ambitious for now.
Its funny how many people
Its funny how many people started on Suse. I had a similary experience, but it was not so far back. I had bought Suse 7 or 8 or something like that, before Novell bought them, and loaded it up. Gaming was my downfall back then. When I figured out I couldn't play any games, all was lost. Oh how things have changed.
Thanks for the great article.
Chad
linux first start
I think I have used every major home computer, but with linux I started out on slackware and the 3 zillion disks (well not that many) that only really worked best with scsi drives. When windows 386 with only ten disks and would work with regular ide drives, my interest in linux waned but I kept an eye on it. I think i next tried rh5.x next. i liked it, but suse seemed to do a better job of hardware dectection. Suse worked with my scanner and tv capture card, It also had a lot more software to choose from. I went from 6 to 8. I have every off the shelf retail tackage from that time. When I when to work in the support industry where i had to use rh7 linux once in a while, I went back to red hat. At school there was a student who was involved in the development of debian. I really shied away from it. Then knoppix came out. i would use it to save data from quite a few windows machines via the samba client. i eventuallly had the guts to try ubuntu, After becoming a bit familiar with that i started into debian, ubuntu, and mepis. Now i put a debian flavor on most of free clunkers I get, I may go back to some slackware derivative for a few of those systems, I am sort of agnostic with linux now, I use whatever os is at hand or will pay the rent. My last job was with osx/bsd. I love to take thin clients and old machines work under linux. If small businesses knew the money they could save witih ltsp and or linux, Microsoft might be out of business iin a day.