So what got you into Linux? - Page 2


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Thread: So what got you into Linux?

  1. #16
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    Jun 2003
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    It was 1996 and I was a SysAdmin at General Electric. I was reading this story (can't remember where) about this "alternative to Windows" that could be had for free. Ok, so I downloaded it, had no idea how to make it work and gave up. I then ordered the box set of Redhat 4.2, finally got it installed and had no idea what to do. I had some weird GUI popping up at me with a thing that looked like a DOS window. I typed commands and it threatened me with bodily harm, such as "bash: dir/w: No such file or directory." How rude! The OS just threatened to hit me! Think I'm kidding? I'm not, that's how clueless I was. It took me about six months of reading and researching before I started to get the idea. As my profile says, by 1999, I truly realized how superior Linux was to Windows.
    I equivocate, therefore I might be.

    My Linux/Unix Boxes:
    Home: Slackware 10, CentOS 5.3, RHEL 5, Ubuntu Workstation 9.10, Work: RHEL 5, CentOS 5

  2. #17
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    Dec 2003
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    Middle of no where (Lyons kansas)
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    I've always been a large fan of the Apple's, always hated Microsoft, and as OSX was built on top of linux I thought it would be fun to give it a go. I also had a friend who had been into linux for a long time and he really helped me out when I was gettign started.
    That was I believe something like a year and a half ago.

  3. #18
    Join Date
    Oct 2002
    Location
    Rochester Institue of Technology
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    308
    I originally heard about it while browsing a joke site. There was a list of ten signs you have been abused by Microsoft, intended to be a joke. Well, most of them held true for me, especially in 2001 running all the latest IE/MSN/AIM updates on a 100mhz Cyrix with Win95 on it.

    At the time I lacked the bandwidth/available resources to install it, but when I got a new computer, on it went, and I have never looked back. I still remember when I originally got my (win)modem to work, it was midnight-ish, and i jumped up and yelled out, promptly drawing admonishments from my parents regarding sleeping younger siblings.....

    Good times.....
    http://counter.li.org
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  4. #19
    Join Date
    Sep 2003
    Location
    Rochester, MN
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    3,604
    For me it was school. I went to college and discovered that our CS department used primarily Linux for the classes, and thus I was interested. It took me a full year to actually give Linux a try though because I was a little gunshy about leaving my nice comfy (boy was I wrong) Windows. Plus I didn't want to mess with repartitioning my hard drive for a dual-boot install.

    Fortunately, one day early in my second year of college I was in the CS lab after having finished a project. Red Hat 9 really impressed me because the Gnome theme that it used by default was really nice looking and made it look like a "modern" operating system. I'm embarrassed to admit that I used to judge my OS like that, but that's the way it was

    Anyway, I was surfing the net in Mozilla and came across http://www.linuxiso.org and was poking around when I discovered the Suse 8.2 LiveCD. I played with it for a weekend with no intention of actually installing it (it ran well enough off the CD drive that I didn't need to), but I wanted to try installing some programs and liked it so much that I did a hard drive install (which, incidentally, probably led to my first post here).

    I suppose I was technically into Linux at that point, but I had actually gotten to the point where I quit using it much because there was so much I didn't know how to do. Then during January I had only one class that was taught all in Linux. For convenience sake, I left my computer booted into Linux a lot and through experimentation learned a lot about it. Ever since then it's been my primary OS.

    Whew, that was a long, really boring story

  5. #20
    Join Date
    Mar 2003
    Location
    Tampa, FL USA
    Posts
    2,193

    I'm another Slackware to Debian convert

    I had actually learned about GNU/Linux from teaching myself how to program in Java. On the Java site it told about all the OS's Java runs on. My first distro was ZipSlack, because I'm on dialup and I wanted the most GNU/Linux with the least download time. After testing it out for about a month, I was already starting to brag about how great an OS this was. Soon after that, my dad said something like, "Please don't bother me with this thing. In another month, you'll be bored of it and move on to something else". Well that was the kicker. I was able to ditch MS completely after about a year. (Also, I've quit Java in favor of Python)

    As for my dad... I got him dual-booting Ubuntu about a month ago.

  6. #21
    Join Date
    Apr 2001
    Location
    SF Bay Area, CA
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    14,936
    School here too.

    One of the two guys across the hall (in the dorms, in college) my freshman year had one machine running Linux, being a Counterstrike dedicated server. I'd been ticked off at a lot of the stuff Windows was trying to force on me (new media players, more insecure crap tied inseparably into the OS, etc., etc.), so I figured I'd at least try it out.

    I got it installed (Mandrake some-old-version-perhaps-6.x?), and up and running, played a few games, then I booted back to win98 and just stayed out of Linux for some reason. Mostly because it wasn't really all that different (or so I thought at the time ).

    At some later point, I replaced my Voodoo3 video card with a GeForce2 (the machine actually came with that GF2, but I got the Voodoo3 for about $40 somewhere, because it supported Glide, and Glide looked much better in the two games that I had). Some point after that (and after realizing that I was running Microsoft's Personal Web Server on stinking win98... and rebooting it every day because of it), I decided to reinstall the current Mandrake and start really using it. Apache, Samba, games, the works. I've been teaching myself about whatever I needed to do next ever since then -- real networking, then iptables, then more kernel stuff, etc., etc.

    I've never really looked back.

  7. #22
    Join Date
    Sep 2002
    Location
    South Jersey Shore
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    292
    I got really into customizing Windows, first Windows ME, then 2000. Alternate shells, window decorations, winamp skins, anything and everything, even better if I could modify the skins myself. But it wasn't enough. So in my great search for the ultimate in customization tools I kept running across this thing call Linux. Eventually I asked an uber-geek friend of mine about it and he explained that he'd never been able to install it and get it to work because it's so difficult to use. That didn't stop me, I got a copy of Corel Linux, failed miserably several times, then downloaded a copy of Mandrake 8.0(? maybe 7 something) got it installed and running and I've been hooked since.

  8. #23
    Join Date
    Nov 2002
    Location
    Sheridan, Michigan
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    320
    1) I was living in a small town. I HAD to use AOL. Moved to a better town. Uninstalled AOL and the ADD/REMOVE programs thing in windows quit working. I couldn't do anything with it after that. +tons of other stuff like spyware.

    2) open source is a great idea.

    3) I could try linux for free. Nobody forces me to pay for it. This makes me want to pay for it. I've given 10x more to linux distros than I ever did to MS.

    4) hate monopolies

    5) want to bring down da man
    Patrick Verner
    www.partedmagic.com

  9. #24
    Join Date
    Jun 2003
    Posts
    173
    I started out at school with a remote unix account and could do nothing. The next year I started doing programming projects on a unix remote account and then actually started using hp/ux and sun/os computers. After that I finally decided to load up linux at home and I began using Mandrake 8.2, sill haven't replaced windows completely but use both about equally.

  10. #25
    Join Date
    Dec 2002
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    1,008
    Originally posted by Hmse
    I've always been a large fan of the Apple's, always hated Microsoft, and as OSX was built on top of linux I thought it would be fun to give it a go. I also had a friend who had been into linux for a long time and he really helped me out when I was gettign started.
    That was I believe something like a year and a half ago.
    OS X is in no way based on linux.

  11. #26
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    Mar 2003
    Location
    U.S.
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    337
    Really the main thing was all the compilers it came with especially gcc/g++. I was using these in my college computer science courses on Solaris machine. The idea of being able to do this work at home got me started into Linux.
    My Systems:
    Custom Desktop: Kubuntu 8.04.1 x86 + 2.6.24 kernel
    Thinkpad T61p: Debian SID x64 + 2.6.26 kernel

  12. #27
    Join Date
    Aug 2004
    Location
    Salem, OR
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    368
    bout a year and a half ago, I became fed up with the incompetence of windows, while at the same time learning what linux is and how it related to UNIX, I installed suse 8.2 as my first distro. When I built my Athlon 1.2ghz, Installed Mandrake 9.2 as my second distro and by that time I was hooked. When I really got into linux was when I built my first gentoo system, because I learned soo much during the install process.
    Registered Linux User #365191

  13. #28
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    Dec 2003
    Location
    COLORADO
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    439
    well my first computer i built when i was 14, ran out of cash needed an os, found a rh 7.0 weekend crash course book w/rh cds. read up, installed, and left the book in the corner with the cds left in it, payed up to the beast, and later got tired of bsod's so i found a set of slackware 9.0 cds and gave it another shot, and liked the speed increase i got (rh is soo slooooow installer and runtime).

    From that first moment on i have dispised rh for ruining my first linux expirence (and now their business choices) but the intrigue of building a custom system it gave me kept me courious.

    Now i run mdk and slackware
    Last edited by thaddaeus; 02-09-2005 at 02:54 AM.
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  14. #29
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    Jul 2002
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    near the pine trees
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    blobaugh.
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  15. #30
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    Aug 2001
    Location
    Somewhere, Texas
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    I never liked how Windows was built, always felt like driving someone elses car with the gauges hidden from view

    I felt like learning some thing new and with Linux being free it was an easy to try...so I made a CounterStrike server and then proceeded to Samba, DHCP and then started using Linux as a desktop

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