Round up

The first time i heard about linux was back in 96 i think, when at age of 15 i bought my first modem and paid my first subscription to a BBS named Matrix. In the menus, there was an option “Shell”. When i selected the appropriate number i was presented a login screen saying “Beryl login:”. Wow! What a thrill! The most honorable moment of my early years was when i received an phone call, immediately after i hanged up the line and after i had executed “su”. “You tried to become administrator” said the voice on the telephone. “Why?”. “Eeee, a script that I executed did that, by mistake” was my answer.

Linux. That’s me. After a while, i managed to collect some money and went to a bookstore (a more technical one) and bought my first equipment. A book titled something like “Linux, the Complete Command Reference” which had a cd stuck inside of the back cover and a collection on 12 cds in a paper board case. I didn’t know where to start… I had cds named slackware, debian and many other strange names [1]. I started from the stuck cd with the catchy name “Caldera Linux”. Since i am Greek and caldera is a greek word i was excited. I managed to get to a strange graphical environment, with an editor and stuff… Later i understood that this was something very proprietary, because though not bad it was not in any other distribution of the time.

My second experiment was Slackware. “Darkstar login:” dude! That’s it, darkstar! I’m the best hacker EVER! I toyed around slackware for a while and then run back to windows 95. At last i could play fifa 95 again (though it had a terrible flickering). But not for long. My next purchase was a boxed version of RedHat 4.2. Pretty nice! After that an unofficial release of RedHat 5.0. I believe it was a badly created cd. I had many problems, but i don’t know if was redhat to blame, or just the company (?) that created and sold that awful disk.

This way i got up to RedHat 9, with intermediate stops at Suse 6.3, Slackwares and pretty much anything i could get in hold. I remember enjoying looplinux which was the evolution of doslinux (?). It was released at a rate of 1 release per week… it had some enormous release number :-). I was stuck with redhat 9 for about 9 months, a record time for me! I still remember how stable it was, i think it never crashed. If it was busy it may paused for a second (eg. mouse was not responding) but it did its work. Who said preemption? At about that time it must have been the first time i went Linux only. The hard disks were small and windows unneeded.

Then university came, and after 2 year i was plugged in an ethernet connection… Downloading everything… I always was addicted, but now i also had the world under my thumbs. I was downloading every new release, and my pc always had a partition to host it. It still does :D. I liked mandrake a lot, but rather soon it became something strange. Patches were coming and going, stability was a nightmare (of course i always found the way to make linux work) and the feeling i had was that if something worked it was because it just happened, not because someone took care of it. Still, mandrake was a well reputed distribution but not for real men. On the other hand there was SuSE. Rock solid and engineered (or so i thought at least). It always worked like a charm, though it didn’t have all that eye candy of mandrake. A distribution for serious work! But then you know, there was YaST, that non-free thing that made me go away from suse… I really cannot remember how many times i have reformatted a partition on my hard drive to install just another linux distribution.

Currently in my hard drive reside opensuse 11.1, ubuntu 8.04, fedora 10, and windows xp. My heart is fedora, my mind is openSUSE, and a rational choice is Ubuntu. I think that’s all for the start. Next time i’ll get more into the advantages and disadvantages of modern times distributions.

[1] I just recovered that case. Its name is “Linux Internet Archives, Winter 1997″. It is an 8 cd set, including titles like “Debian 1.1 i386 Distribution” (a whole cd!), “Free portions of Slackware 3.1″, “i386 Mach Linux”, “Digital Alpha archives (including Blade 0.3)” and many many more!

PS. Hello Planet ELLAK