First Linux Experience

[Alan Dayley]

Wagner, Steven G said:
> With Betty posting about RH9 I got thinking about my first experience with
> Linux. RH6.2 (Cartman) on a dual boot Pentium Pro 233MZ with Winbloze '98.
> feh, last time I paid M$ for anything!
>
> Anyway, I'd be interested to hear about other member's first experiences
> with Linux and what you're using today. I'm now running OPENSUSE 10.1 on
> laptop and desktop (though desktop will be reverting back to hardened
> Gentoo
> as soon as I get some free time).

Next to some of these stories, I feel like a "newbie!"

I attended my first PLUG meeting at East Side in May or June of 2000.  At
that meeting I won a door prize: A boxed retail copy of SuSE Linux 6.4! 
Before the week was out, I was dual booting my Windows 98 home computer.

For some months I would boot into Linux to "play and learn" but did all my
real home work, like email and document creation, on Windows.  At some
point I realized that my learning about Linux was going very slowly.  That
is when I forced myself to always use Linux.  My learning of both the OS
and the community accelerated then.  By 2001 I was Windows free.

In 2002, I had my kids migrated solely on Linux.  January 2003 saw my wife
migrated from Windows 98.  On Saturday the 11th of that month I put the
Windows 98 drive on a shelf where it sits even now, unused since then!

Since that first SuSE 6.4 I have gone through Red Hat 6.x all the way to
Fedora 5, which my kids run now.  I just migrated to OpenSUSE 10.1 a few
weeks ago and both I and my wife rather enjoy it.  I'll probably move the
kids over to OpenSUSE also, when I set the time to do it.

Aside from all the benefits of Free Software, one of the huge pluses for
me has been PLUG and the larger GNU/Linux/FS/OSS community.  I have been
part of or looked into various computer user groups over the years.  None
have impressed me more than PLUG with the willingness to actually help
users instead of find clients.  I rapidly learned that many user groups
are there to get money from the members either by way of paying the group
organization or by becoming clients to the experts in the group or by
purchasing the products hocked at the "educational" presentations. 
Earning money is great but I always thought a user group should be users
helping users, not users being sold to.  PLUG exemplifies the philosophy
that I thought a group should follow but did not find until I found PLUG.

Thanks, PLUG!

Alan