From: Nathan England > I'll start it off, how about you? When did you get started with Linux, > how did you find it? What are you doing with it now? In 1998, I found that students with regular user accounts could use gcc on the Solaris boxes. I thought this was really neat, because I could code in C, which was difficult on my Mac SE/30. Then I learned about Linux by stumbling onto now-defunct humor website segfault.org [0]. It was another year before I scraped up enough money to buy an x86 and try Linux out for real. And I spent about 7 months reinstalling things, tweaking the kernel, and trying different desktop environments because the machine was unstable and I thought I'd done something wrong. No, the motherboard was low quality, and replacing it fixed *everything*. I did some stuff with the U of M's LUG, played with raytracing, settled on KDE, and burned a bunch of Linux CDs for interested friends/students/randoms. The refurbished laptop I bought later was the only machine in my workplace that could read MacOS-formatted floppies, which was REALLY useful at some points. Later, I ditched SuSE for Gentoo and zorched the Windows install on my desktop since I never used it. Anyway, I use Linux for just about everything at home and work. At work, I herd a bunch of standalone boxes and DRBD clusters, keep the databases from exploding, fix stuff that people are complaining about, write new features for existing stuff, and serve as a repository for interesting and weird knowledge.[1] At home, I do standard user stuff and bang on small cheesy web applications.[2] The only thing I need Windows for is VPN access to work--and that's a political problem, not a technical one. > I'm not trying to start a flame war, but I really think Unity is a > mistake. Lots of people seem to have the same opinion. (KDE forever! Code for the Code God! Bits for the Bit Throne! :-P ) [0] Solaris leads to segfault. Segfault leads to Slashdot. Slashdot leads to SUFFERING! I actually wrote several stories for segfault, one of which got the site slashdotted. [1] We've got an internal wiki, but I have better fuzzy matching than it does. [2] I don't have as much time as I used to for this, which is why they've been dead in the water for months. -- Matt G / Dances With Crows The Crow202 Blog: http://crow202.org/wordpress/ There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss