KnetKnight's Path to Linux

It all started sometime in 2001 when my boss at a previous job got involved with the genome@home project. His son was on a team of genomers and wanted all the help they could get. My boss solicited my help for the team and I was happy to put my PCs and their idle cycles to good use. Like many genomers, I got sucked into a perpetual quest for more CPU cycles so as to bolster my team in friendly competition against other teams. And, of course, to jockey for position within the team itself. :-) I only had a couple of computers running in my home at the time but I had lots of spare parts. I began to see these spare parts as potential contributors and, before long, I had a small army of old and new machines humming along and adding to my stats.

Linux came into play because I'm a legally straight fellow. I wanted to contribute, compete, and help the team as much as anyone but I'm not a rich man and I simply couldn't afford to buy Windows licenses for my herd of genome crunchers. Also, I had gotten married in May 2000 and my lovely bride wouldn't have endorsed me spending that kind of money on "extra" PCs anyway -- not when we needed furniture, cabinets, a refrigerator, and other updates to our love nest. I learned that the G@H folks had a Linux client... and it piqued my interest enough to push me over the edge to finally try this Linux thing that I had heard about. My boss had just purchased Red Hat 7.1 (though he never actually installed it) so I burned a copy of his CDs... took a deep breath... and installed Linux for my first time.

When I first installed Red Hat 7.1 my knowledge of Linux amounted to just a quantum particle or two -- that I had (a)heard of Red Hat and (b)knew it was freely available. I hadn't ever been to a Linux user support forum nor did I know where I could even find one if I wanted to. Furthermore, no one I knew really knew anything about it either so it was pretty much sink or swim. I was able to get Red Hat 7.1 installed easily enough though, and get the G@H clients to run. I could also surf the web and run the included apps and games... and that was about it.

Of course, I had some things go wrong early on too and I had no idea what to do about them or where to go to get help. e.g. I remember booting the system once, shortly after I had first installed it, and getting a message that I needed to repair one or more of my partitions. "How do I do that?" I asked myself. At that time I barely knew fsck even existed, wasn't familiar with Linux partitioning past what little I had to know to get through the install, and didn't yet know about man pages. Neither had I yet found a very helpful Linux community. I knew from experience with DOS and Netware that this was probably a minor and easily fixable problem, but the solution was simply nowhere to be found within the fledgling pool of knowledge and resources known to me at the time. Slim on options, I formatted and reinstalled the entire system just to get past this error message -- a solution that screamed, loudly and clearly, "You really don't know anything about Linux".

I also remember having some clock problems and the only way I could figure out to set the clock was in the GUI... and that bugged me. Why? I'd been addicted to and using a DOS command-line for years already, since MSDOS 2.11 on my first laptop -- a Toshiba T1000 with 1.2MB of RAM and a 4.77MHz 80c88 processor. It was downright humbling for someone so comfortable at a DOS prompt, regarded by my peers as a command-line wizard, to find myself barely able to do much of anything from a shell in Linux. It puzzled me that I had to preface commands with ./ if I wanted to run them from the current directory (if that directory wasn't explicity declared in my PATH). The idea of needing to set an executeable bit on a file, just so Linux would KNOW it was an executeable, was enigmatic to me at the time as well.

Pouring salt on the open wound of my ego was the fact that my wife, having no desire whatsoever to master the command-line, found something she really liked about Linux before I did... the game Gnibbles. She LOVED to play this silly little game and she'd get "mad" at me any time I booted "the Linux computer" into Windows for some reason and she couldn't get to it. Tired of feeling powerless and lost I turned to the one place where I knew I would find comfort and solace...
... and you should have seen this coming...
... "for Dummies" books.

Thanks to "Linux for Dummies" I was finally able to gain some basic proficiency and understanding of how to get around in Linux. It wasn't long before I found out about man pages (I love those things now) and why requiring the ./ to run commands from the current directory and having to set an executeable bit were good ideas that fostered security. Although I became comfortable USING Linux with Red Hat 7.1 I was still basically limited to just that... being a "user". I hadn't been a "user" for as long as I could remember and it was still pretty humbling to sit down at the Linux box and try to do anything technically interesting.

A few months later Red Hat 7.2 was released and I determined to learn how to set it up as a NAT router and firewall. At the time I was using a Linksys BEFSR41. While it served me well enough I was aware that Linux could do the job too and that seemed like a sufficiently technical task to get me to delve deeper into the guts of Linux. It was at this time that I discovered The Linux Documentation Project and it was (and still is) one of the most useful Linux sites I had ever found. I read the LDP documentation for masquerading and soon had setup my first Linux NAT router and firewall using iptables! I ran it on my internal network for a while until I was reasonably confident that it was safe to expose to the brutality of the open Internet. It was during this project that I developed my sincere admiration for Linux and began to see it's potential as much more than just a free basic operating system. Meanwhile, my wife got very good at Gnibbles. ;-)

In the days to follow I learned to setup Apache, Samba, DHCP, and DNS services on my Red Hat 7.2 router and it's been a love affair ever since. I tried other distros too -- Mandrake, Debian, Trustix 1.5, and Lycoris. I didn't like any of them as much as I liked Red Hat 7.2 however and I kept coming back to it, seeing it as a well documented distro that could easily do everything I wanted Linux to do.

Time passed and I upgraded to Red Hat 7.3, 8.0, and then 9.0 as they were released but 7.2 remained my stalwart favorite. 8.0 and 9.0, in particular, really irritated me so I began looking for another distribution. It was during these months that I found the amazingly helpful forums at linuxiso.org and linuxquestions.org. This was also when I rediscovered Trustix, then at version 2.0, and absolutely loved it! Trustix wasn't a desktop distribution, however, so I still somewhat grudingly used Red Hat for that purpose. Feeding my disloyalty for Red Hat, they started the Fedora project and that pushed me over the edge. (Fedora has turned out to be a good thing I think, but my attachment to Red Hat had already been broken by the time Fedora had proven itself.)

Then, something wonderful happened... Novell bought SUSE! Being a long time Netware administrator, that sparked my interest in a distro that I had previously not even seriously considered. Having learned a great deal more about Linux by this time, I mirrored somebody's SUSE 9.0 ftp structure so that I could host my own local network install source. No sooner did I do that, and get 9.0 installed once, did SUSE release 9.1. Impressed with SUSE 9.0 and determined to support Novell's new Linux endeavor, I bought full copies of both the Personal and Professional releases of 9.1. SUSE is now, without question, my preferred general purpose distribution.

Thanks to a fantastic stack of Open Source Software like Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, KDE, OpenOffice.org, Firefox and Thunderbird, and OpenVPN I've "almost" managed to break completely free!

That's it, that's my Linux story. Thanks for reading.

I enjoy hearing from others who have had their eyes opened by Linux and other Open Source Software -- please feel free to comment here.