My Linux Learning Journey
I thought that readers might appreciate a commentary on how I got to be here. I'm not a computer professional, nor am I a young nerd.
The first new learning away from my day job was getting an amateur radio licence, in the early 1980s. Our household formed in the mid 80s and the groom brought a TRS-80 in which I had a little interest. Then later we bought a Vic-20, as the bigger Commodore stuff was too expensive for us. The Vic-20 had games and programming information, which I muddled around with, but didn't get anywhere with. The games were fun as the old TV we used had a constant vertical roll, adding a lot of difficulty to a simple maze game.
At the end of the 80s we bought a NEC APC III and in the early 90s got an Intel 386DX. Sometime here I got my only formal computing training which was a one day session from my employer. I learnt some DOS, but most importantly the principles of file and directory usage and got caught up in computer business from then.
Somehow I heard about Linux and wanted to try. I bought a Redhat 5 book and disc and made all of the computer work with this. I learn by getting a book and trying things out, so I have quite a collection of books which tell me about command line Linux from those early days.
With slow computers it was essential to make your kernel which just covered your installed hardware, just to make the machine run fast enough to use. I can remember Netscape taking 5 minutes to start. We only had one computer in use then, so this had to be shared.
Computers got cheaper, and I earned more money, so we got newer faster computers, more copies of OSs, for which I paid, like SuSE and Mandrake, always being happy to put something back into FOSS.
I had tried Debian but not been able to get through the install process and a friend suggested Mepis.
I made this change because of the hassles of rpm software which didn't have dependency tracking and the difficulty of installing whatever program I found wherever on the 'net.
Now I have several computers in the house running Mepis, and am replacing the old video recorder with a PVR system.
I've been doing some things with Gentoo as well, and this year we will build a PABX on a linux box (that is, a telephone system) to learn how these things work.
