Introductions and Current Status

[Matt Graham]

From: Nathan England <nathan at paysonlinux.org>
> 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] <Yoda> Solaris leads to segfault.  Segfault leads to Slashdot.  Slashdot
leads to SUFFERING! </Yoda>  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