Voice of the Masses: How did you discover Linux?
For our next podcast, we want to hear how you got into GNU/Linux. Where did your journey begin? Maybe you saw it on the coverdisc of a magazine somewhere, or a friend recommended that you try it. Perhaps your company switched to Linux which encouraged you to install it at home, or you simply became so enraged with Windows that you had to find something else.
In any case, let us know what got your started with Linux in the comments below, and we’ll read out the best in our upcoming podcast!
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About The Author
Mike Saunders
Mike stores his data by printing out hex dumps and laminating the sheets. He's the author of The Haynes Linux Manual and the creator of MikeOS, an operating system hand-built from assembly language.
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“What? You mean you don’t HAVE to use Windows? But this is 1996! … There’s no way I’ll get the Aureal Vortex II sound driver working on this RedHat thing … oh wait! I did! It works!”
… and the rest is history!
TLDR: Sheer curiosity!
(Apologies for the over zealous use of the exclamation marks, here. Whoops!)
My dad installed Slackware for me on a first gen Pentium desktop in 1995. I used it for my work on solar flare physics research and for £1000 it outperformed sun workstations that cost 5-10 times more, plus I could listen to CDs using software called workbone (remember that?). I switched to Red Hat after a few years then (sigh) switched to windows mainly because of office docs arriving attached to ever more frequent emails. A conversation with a friend got me interested in FOSS, which I was quite ignorant of before, and that led to my Dad reintroducing me to Slackware again, ten years after my first dalliance with it. I’ve used it ever since but also enjoyed hopping between Ubuntu, mint, centos, tiny core and more ever since.
I first heard about Linux when the, now defunct, Guardian Tech supplement did a cover story, in I think 1997, about Linux and specifically Red Hat. They put an illustration of a red bowler hat on the cover with the article featuring an interview with, I think, Bob Young.
It also included an explanation of Free Software – “Open Source” wasn’t a thing back then – and so introduced me to the idea of software freedom.
I got straight online and bought Red Hat in a box which included an installation CD, a CD containing all the source code, a CD of CPAN and a manual.
When I installed it for the first time I didn’t partition my drive properly and accidentally wiped Windows of my PC, which, considering Linux wasn’t really up to being an everyday operating system at the time, was a bit of a pain.
But, it showed enough promise for me to persevere, the idea of Free Software fascinated me, and I was really fed up with Windows anyway.
I was looking for something reliable in 2003 and saw an article in a magazine. Switched straight away because I’d had enough of unreliable Windows which I can’t remember how to use any more
From across WH Smiths on the cover of a magazine. But it wasn’t until a few years later, when I tried SUSE 10.2 and became hooked, dumped Windows XP on my desktop. Very quickly after that, Vista on our Laptop fell to Linux Mint 5.
I was at college and we had to install an operating system, we put an installation disk in the computer and ubuntu with unity showed up, I liked the look of it, it looked very moden and usable.
I wasn’t able to use the OS because I was pushed off to let someone else install it, but thats how I became aware of Ubuntu and thus later linux.
I went home to my windows 8 laptop which was already frustrating me and thought, I’ll give it another shot, that didn’t pan out to well, so I installed ubuntu and replaced windows 8 there was no turning back, so I spent a good while learning about ubuntu and linux and how everything worked and I’ve never looked back.
I heard rumours about linux somewhere in 1995 or 6 or so at the university. I pushed a friend to try it out at that time, but we didn’t get our heads around it, and soon reverted back to dos.
Then, in the beginning of the 2000’s I bought a suse box and tried to get that running, but gave up when I couldn’t get the display settings right.
In 2008 I changed jobs and received a laptop with the brand new windows vista which was terrible.
A colleague of mine had the same problem and installed ubuntu. I used him as guinea pig: after seeing all was right, I followed shortly afterwards and
never regretted.
I was studying for an HND and saw a television interview with RMS talking about free software and thought I should look into that. A friend’s 15 year old son bought a book with Slackware and Redhat disks in 1995/6 and i messed about for a couple of years not installing, then on a trip to Paris I bought a magazine called LinuxLoader with Mandrake on a cover disk and installed that.
Saw an article about LUGs and found that there was a South Wales LUG which I joined and at the inaugural meeting someone installed Debian on my second computer and I have been using variations of Debian/Ubuntu/Mint ever since.
A friend described Debian’s Apt as a ‘living organism’. A month of living without a fully functioning desktop later (circa 2001) I got a fully functioning Debian desktop up and running
Hackers…
Seriously, I was a punk kid in the 90’s who fancied himself a hacker. Someone I met online recommend Linux. I already disliked windows and Mac at the time was horrid. So, there you have it.
Had a failing HDD with windows on it. Local computer magazine published an issue with Ubuntu CD. So i give it a try. Ubuntu booted just fine and I was able to get my data back. (Realizing that now I’m able to poke at things, watch them fail and fix them back, without reinstalling whole OS, I never bothered to go back.)
Back in 2008, my stepson was breaking WinXP (and sometimes the computer running it) roughly every six months. Reinstalling all the software, PIN codes, hardware and drivers took a weekend every time. I was delighted to find this thing called Ubuntu which was quick to install and setup, didn’t get viruses and allowed me to move the OS hard disk from one computer to another in minutes, not weekends. Brilliant! I’ve been signed up ever since.
Back 2008 my laptop lost it’s dial-up Internet connection thanks to a Windows update not supporting my built-in modem! Seeing a Ubuntu starter pack in WHS I bought it and tried Ubuntu Hardy Heron (burning my Windows bridges in the process). So I had to get Ubuntu to work and since it also didn’t work with my built-in modem, I ended up buying an external US-Robotics USB modem which thankfully worked so I could continue with my job hunting on the Internet whilst still on the dole.
I was first told about the existence of Linux by a programmer friend back in the mid 90s when I was complaining about how unreliable windows was.
Later, a magazine put Corel Linux on its cover CD and I tried it out but couldn’t do much with it.
Still later I came across a huge 5-CD Linux set which included red hat 5 and slackware. I had heard of red hat before so I tried that. I slowly began learning how to use it and experimenting with various distros (and BSD).
The defining moment was around 2003 when my copy of windows XP needed reinstalling and during this process I was told that I needed to call microsoft at 3am to activate (I didn’t have internet at home at the time). Instead, I just rebooted into my fedora 3 partition and deleted the windows partition. I never looked back.
Used OS 360 in the ’60s, DEC TOPS 10 in the ’70s, MS DOS in the ’80s NT in the ’90s all the while thinking there’s got to be something better. In ’98 I found it and used it ever since.
My Linux use really took off around 2007 after watching a web tech show called DL.TV hosted by Patrick Norton and Robert Heron. They were talking about Ubuntu and openSUSE, and I just had to check it out. Never looked back.
Cover disc of a LXF special can’t remember which incarnation of Ubuntu it was, but tried it on a whim. I rather liked Windows XP but hated Windows versions afterwards, so have been distro-hopping between Ubuntu derivatives ever since with Mint Cinnamon being my favourite and now permanent OS.
I don’t remember how I heard about Linux on the whole originally, but I got started using it because I was curious.
My Grandpa had spilled coffee on his laptop and it didn’t work, so he took it to a tech friend of his, and ended up just buying a new one. Turns out, the laptop was actually fine, so I ended up getting it.
While we were picking up the laptop he was helping me install some basic things onto Windows (XP at the time) and I ended up asking him if he knew what this thing called “Linux” was and if I could try it. He burned me an Ubuntu Live CD (11.10 IIRC) and I ended up installing that very night. Didn’t really use it for much for a while, but slowly I started booting into it and using it more and now it’s the only OS I use on a regular basis!
Firstly, GNU/Linux profoundly changed my life in 2003/2004. I was performing the role of an electronics technician and was told by my supervisor to grab a documentation laptop from between some cabinets. I went searching for the laptop but mistakingly picked up the cabinet test laptop. Unbeknownst to me, it was running Red Hat 9 on which I naïvely pulled up a terminal and began to play. Not having enough time to play around seriously (but it having an impression of being a powerful OS) and needing to get back with the documentation, I got a copy of Solaris 10 from a magazine. Despite getting no X server on my personal laptop after installation, I was not discouraged. A colleague told me about OpenSUSE and I also tried Kubuntu. Finally, I moved to Gentoo and utterly failed to get a working KDE 3.5.9. I learned by breaking and fixing things in the OS. I have never looked back since that serendipitous discovery.
Mistakenly*
Around 2000 I was working at a Windows software company and using Win95 on an old PC at home. Started reading about Linux out of curiousity. Talked to the boss who wasn’t interested and saw it as a threat to his software company, so eventually I bought SuSE 8.0 to run in dual-boot mode at home. Unofficially I got an IT student to figure out how to run the company product (a CAD system for schools) under WINE and even drive CAM machines from it. I set up a demo at work, showed the bosses but they still weren’t impressed. So I carried on tinkering at home, bought a secondhand PC to play with tried a load of distros bought from a listing in Micro Mart, no chance of downloading on our dial up modem! I learnt a lot about hardware, networking, OS, software and problem solving.
In 2006 I went freelance rather unexpectedly and now use Linux for work.
Thinking about this immediately made me feel old. The first time I installed it was in 2005 when I inherited an old Sony Vaio laptop. I installed Red Hat 7.3 and would use it for 30 minutes before it crashed. Never knew why, but then I found openSuSE and used it at college for note taking.
The reason why was I think I was becomming more annoyed with the way Windows was going. I had endured 98, endured ME, and XP was the best of the lot. But the fact I heard about Linux as an OS and that it could do most things Windows could do appealed to me. The fact it wouldn’t play games like Championship Manager was also a bonus to a guy who wanted to pass his college course without being destracted.
Now in 2016, I am destracted all the time by Football Manager being available on Steam. But I wouldn’t change it for the world.
First got into Minix on the Atari ST about 1993 that had come in 16 single sided 360k floppies. Could do very little with it. The Atari Falcon030 could use MultiTOS which allowed a Unix like core with graphical interface that was compatible with existing TOS applications. This lasted me until the 21st Century. Then acquired a thrown away PC from a skip with 16Mb RAM and 160mb hard drive. It could Run Win 3.1 but swapped that for Damn Small Linux. Since then I have stuck to Linux, Distro-hopping on whatever scrap PC that came my way. Windows had been a godsend for me…it has obligated my friends to throw away powerful PCs as each OS upgrade renders them obsolete.
When I started using PCs my peers had preinstalled or pirated copy of Windows and Office they installed from CDs “borrowed” from work. They would scour the internet for key generators (a site, “astalavista.com”, a defunct parody of an early search engine called altavista.com was popular) to run games and expensive utilities. I was a cheapskate, but felt morally unable to take software that the writers didn’t want to give me. So Linux it was. First Distro? Mandrake around about 2001
Oh, you think Linux is your ally? You merely adopted Linux. I was born in it, moulded by it. I didn’t see OSX until I was already a man, and by then it was nothing to me but ….meh.
It was 1998 and I was working on a military project that was based on Unix (SCO). A colleague gave a Red Hat disk with something called Linux on it. Not too much later I purchased a copy of SUSE Linux 6.2 on 3.5 inch floppy disks. Ever since then my own business and personal projects are based on Linux when practically possible. Currently up to LEAP 42.1 for my PC’s and servers but Raspberry Pi’s are being used for embedded controllers. I’m a control freak and Linux gives me exactly what I want.
Sure, I still have to have a few WinXP/7/!0 systems around but they all run under Virtualbox.
1994: I convinced my PC owning flatmate at university to replace Windows 3.1 with this experimental Linux thing. 22 floppy disks and a few late nights later we had it running at the command line, but never managed to get X working with his hardware.
A precarious acrobatic stunt through windows that were 5 floors up, involving two brooms, a 20 foot serial cable I’d made myself, and some archaic Unix commands, resulted in a terminal connection to my Atari ST, and I was hooked.
When I first got a modern computer in 1998, one of the magazines I read was called PC Answers, it used to have a short section in the back called Linux Answers, which I read with interest.
Then in 1999, a pilot magazine called Linux Answers was produced,with a cover copy of Red Hat and full advise on how to install it, but it still looked a bit scary to me. However, 12 months of Windows98 had taken its toll, and when I stumbled across a thing called Macmillan’s Mandrake Linux in PCWorld the very same week as I bought Linux Answers, I decided to give it a whirl. This version of Mandrake had an easy to use installer with a cut down copy of Partition Magic to handle to scariest bit. I had a whopping 8GB drive to play with, so dual-booting would be no problem. And so it proved.
The thing that most impressed me about Mandrake Linux when first using it was having the browser (Netscape Navigator) crash. It did, the rest of the OS didn’t. So unlike Windows98…
… Linux was booted more often that Windows, until I eventually gave up dual-booting.
Didn’t realize we had so much in common Rhakios – Started out the same way with the same mags but i was a gamer back then so took a bit longer before I was running a Linux system. Started with mandrake and build a print server in 2001, then tried Red Hat 5 or 6 before settling on OpenSUSE 7.1 and upwards.
And both our user names begin with “r”. 😉
I forget when I first tried SuSE (as it was then), but it worked better on my Toshiba laptop… and by the time I went 64-bit Mandriva was so broken I couldn’t get it to run properly on my home-built box. SuSE worked like a dream though.
Yes, it was just SUSE back then.
I was an Amiga fan and particularly liked its command-line tools and easy access to programming and other hacking. Eventually Amiga died and everybody had to use an MS-DOS/Windows PC. Computers weren’t much of interest to me anymore. However, I gained some Unix experience because I subscribed to a local service that offered a shell account (via modem) to an Internet-connected Unix system. Unix really grew on me but I thought it was really only for servers and super computers.
But in 2004 I saw my friend trying Linux and it had a real desktop (KDE) just like “real” home computers have. This was really something. During the same year I installed Debian 3.0 and switched completely to Linux. Computers have been interesting again and quickly I started learning new skill, programming etc.
I still use Debian and always the stable release.
Red Hat Linux for Dummies book (late 1990s) with a CD inside the back cover, installed it and fought with configuring X !!
Sometime around 1994-ish I found out about Slackware from a local BBS (remember those?). Too bad I spent more time booting into OS/2 so I could look for help to get it working. Had an on again, off again relationship with ii for a few years until finding debian 7 or 8 years later.
Raspberry Pi. Last century I tried converting a Windows machine to dual boot with Linux. This was a terrible experience that cured me of Linux for decades. Following retirement and with the arrival of the Raspberry Pi I thought I would try again. 3 Pi’s followed by 2 dual boot machines (defaulting to Ubuntu 16.04) later and after setting up my grandson with a Linux machine, I am hooked.
Linux Mint Cinnamon on an I think PC Authority disk back in 2008
I was at university in the late 1990s, and quickly found that Pine was a far faster way of getting my email than using Netscape Navigator. In time I started using the Unix machines with CDE on them, and then I got to know some Computer Science students who kept going on about Linux.
Eventually their enthusiasm persuaded me to take the plunge with SuSe 4.3. Had no idea what I was doing and managed to completely destroy my Windows partition and all my data with it (no I hadn’t backed up)
Six months later I dared to try again, and have been with Linux ever since.
At the end of the 90s I learned about Linux and that it is like a free variant of Unix. Reading about Unix back then only in the context of hacker history, I was tempted to see what it is. Luckily there was some version of SuSE Linux on a computer magazine I read regularly back then. And that’s how it started. In the beginning of the 2000s it became my main system, then I switched to OS X and after a decade back to Linux. Now I am on QubesOS.
I first heard about Linux somewhere around 1995 when I was ten years old and didn’t even own a computer. It took me about ten years to actually discover it in 2005, when I was reading a Finnish computer magazine. There was an article comparing Mandriva, Ubuntu, Fedora and maybe some fourth distro as well. Based on that article I installed Mandriva and my laptop became my first Linux box. It’s was 11 years ago, but it still feels like yesterday.
Hi!
This one is from Lisboa (Lisbon)
Last year i realized my pc was very old, had to buy
a new one and, at the same time, could save more than 150 box if i changed to Linux, what i did it, even before leaving the old machine. I made a partition
with the w. xp :-0 and installed the Mint 14. With the
new pc i tried the Mint Rose, wich was wipped out as
i tried to enjoy the Ubuntu 15.10 in my hdrive.
As soon as i have 700 mbytes of files, to save to a cd,
i’ll try other distros, as i did it before, but did not
find them so transparent as U15 or Rose.
I feel very greatfull to linux community.
The “super”, never again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMkpRtqJwbw
I bought a boxed set of Red Hat (maybe 5, I can’t remember the number) from the university book shop in 1998 or 9. I think I set up a dual boot system, but as I couldn’t play games or use the software the university made us use for statistics I stopped after a couple of months. That is a theme that has continued to this day ( I think I would try to migrate to Linux once a year from about 2005 – and failed each time). I still have a gaming desktop (and laptop) running windows, but I also have a linux laptop which I can game on a bit, and use for a lot of other stuff too. I suspect I will struggle to go entirely Linux until gaming achieves parity on both OSes (or I realise I’m too old for that sort of thing) and you don’t need to use Microsoft Office to be able to easily swap files with others (getting a lot easier now with google docs).
Back in around 2000 – 2002 I had been using Red Hat Linux 7, and I decided to do a proper project and build a MythTV system. Gentoo was the new hotness and I used this as a way to learn about Linux and how it worked. I struggled with getting Hauppauge cards to work, compiling kernels, compiling everything. Upgraded to use a MPV frontend at some point.
One thing I found was that we tended to watch a recorded program, and then because the system stopped at the end it was a natural point to discuss the program, normal TV you have to switch off, take an action, and they try to throw you into the next thing. And auto add skipping worked some of the time…
First heard about GNU/Linux from an old Norwegian communist telling us kids to take back control over our technology from the large corporations. I was fascinated, and of course he was right.
But I first tried it a couple of years later, remembering his words and being fed up with how I could not customize Windows the way I wanted. I was also tired of the feeling that everyone tries to fool you in Windows: Install a program and your browser suddenly has an AskJeeves bar, or install a program and they will never stop nagging you to buy the pro version. Felt like the Windows environment is constantly trying to make you feel you’re not good enough. Coming to Linux (Mint 7 at the time) was an great relief. “What, is this how it can also be? I never needed all that hassle? (and it’s this fast?)”
Never looked back.
Wow, I’m a real noob compared to everyone else. I discovered Linux when searching the internet for a solution to a Windows problem I was having in 2011. I knew it existed before then, but that was the first that i’d heard of live USB sticks, and until then I thought Linux was just one operating system, not the hundreds of versions that are out there. I booted to Ubuntu through a USB stick and was impressed by the look of it, but found Unity pretty unintuitive. Luckily I tried all of the other Ubuntu flavors with the WUBI installer and found that others were really very good. Later discovered that other distros were even better. Been partitioning like mad and hopping ever since. When I work on other peoples Windows problems now it just boggles my mind that people think Linux is too hard. Systems that break are hard, not Linux.
Well a colleague of mine showed me Linux for the first time actually, its been about 14 or 16 Yeats ago i think. Its been Debian 3 (?) i guess. I have been in an apprenticeship back then to an Administrator.
Short after that i switched to Linux in my Desktops and Servers where ever its worth it. Stayed on Debian since then.
Some fellow gave me three surplus computers (IBM PC300s, the original Pentiums). I had heard of this Linux thing so I tried to install something Linux and it failed; then I tried to install Slackware and it worked.
I mucked about for a while rather purposelessly,, then a fellow in a class I was teaching in how to use my employer’s product told me how he self-hosted his website on Linux.
That gave me a purpose. Three months later I brought my website online (up till then it had been a members.aol.com site). That was Slackware 10.x.
I’m not self-hosting any more, but I haven’t looked back, and Slackware, the distro of iron, is still my go-to distro. I do have one Windows machine, but it’s usually booted into Magiea.
fooling around in school, having fun “testing” (read: destroying) computer stuff with windows and linux dualboot without any knowledge end of the 90s.. was fun and experimental 😀
2000 or 2001 got a Thinkpad (thanks sis) for my birthday.
End of Amiga Format, subscription switched to Linux Format. The SuSE Linux 7 CD was first dual boot, then
the whole (10GB ?) HD, then SuSE 8 Professional (in the big box). Now, 4 Thinkpads later….
How did I start with Linux? Windows made me do it. It was back about the turn of the century, and I had a screaming 200 mhz Pentium Pro desktop PC of dubious pedigree at work, running some version of Windows NT. There was a memory leak somewhere that we could never figure out, and the machine would invariably hemorrhage itself into a crash every few days. A colleague suggested I try Linux, and pointed me to a site where a bunch of distros were listed. I found the newly created “Live” distro of SuSE 7.3 that intrigued me, and spent a WEEK getting it to download in one piece (it was 650mb, after all!). Then the challenge of finding a bit of Windows software that could burn an ISO image (you had to pay dearly for such things back then). Found one with a trial option that could burn 3 images. It broke after the first one, but that was all I needed. Not only did Linux run on the PC, it ran as well off the CD as Windows did off the hard drive, and it didn’t crash!. Sun Microsystems had just released the beta version of StarOffice 6.0, which featured compatibility with MS Office (and all the docs others were generating). I was already using Mozilla for email and web browsing on Windows, so loading the Linux version was totally transparent. What else do you need? It was a perfect storm. After a few weeks running off the CD, I scrounged a spare hard drive and installed SuSE. Never looked back (I’m on OpenSuSE 42.1 now). I’m still forced to use Windows for some business applications, but it gets put in a VM with VMPlayer, where it belongs.
In the back seat of an old ford, it was steamy.
I was had an ageing P4 based machine that ran XP. I got tired of having to reinstall XP due to virus attacks and even when it wasn’t crippled by viruses it would always slow down after a few months. I’m only semi computer literate but read on some websites about the strides Ubuntu had made to make Linux accessible to the less technically able and then heard about Linux Mint (from a developer friend) which made it even easier. I bit the bullet and tried it and never looked back.
I’ve bought a new computer where I dual boot Win 7 and Linux Mint. i only use the Windows partition when I can’t work out how to do something in Linux which isn’t very often these days as there is so much good Linux information and so many helpful Linux users online.
I also still have the old P4 machine which is now plugged into my TV running Mint 13.
I was at a uni in the 00’s and non-linux-use was one of the reasons that people gathered in corners to gossip about someone.”Are you sure that he can programme?” “Is he bonkers ?” went the gossip. I took the hint, prepared myself, quite unnessaceraly, for buggy systems filled with in-jokes, rites of passage, etc. I found to my suprise that the world’s biggest richest computer companies could not produce software as flexable and as usable as a cottage industry of 1000’s of SME’s and lone bods. I have been using Slackware ever since.
I bought a high end film scanner in 2000 only to find I had to replace my entire system to the new pentium III to get it to run. Once installed I had to pay to replace Windows to accomodate the new system. It turns out Windows did not support the scanner. I never wanted to go through this again and discovered Mandrake 6.1 and the freedom of open source. 2 years later I read “Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution by Glyn Moody” and went out and found a local LUG to get the support to become a comitted Linux user to this day.
I was aware of Linux starting out. At the time (early 90s) I had an Atari ST and was writing Unix apps for it to match the ones I was using at Uni. A few years later, I installed Slackware on a PC for the first time (it came on 6 CDs, I think).
Several years ago (2008?) I was running Win XP on a home built AMD 32 bit machine. I was just tired of dealing with all of the Windows software and security issues, knew about Linux, and figured Linux can’t be worse than Win XP and may be a lot better. Downloaded three distros (PCLinuxOS and two others). Installed each to see what worked. PCLinuxOS was the only one for which everything worked (wireless network, sound, video) on installation with no configuration issues. Quit using Win XP and removed the other 2 distros. Been using Linux ever since. Eventually updated to an AMD A10 processor and 64 bit PCLinoxOS and KDE.
In 11th or 12th grade in high-school, there was an optional special class about Linux. I checked it out; we learned some very basic stuff about what Linux was and some basic commands, and we also got a small Linux book with a Linux CD. The rest is personal history. =D
My first experience with Linux was in 1994 when I started working at a local ISP. Prior to that, I had started using SCO Xenix System V back in 1987. It was that experience that helped me get the job at the ISP.
If I remember correctly, we were using Slackware. I insalled it at home to get more familiar with it. It was my main operating system until about 2000 when I ended up using Windows XP.
In 2010, I bought a Macbook Pro (I know, not Linux) because I had finally gone digital with my photography and always seemed to have color balance problems with Windows. I went back to Linux in 2011, in this case Ubuntu, for no other reason than I wanted to use Linux again. I have never looked back at Windows, between OS X and Ubuntu.
Like a lot of people, unfortunately I have to use Windows at work. At least my computer there has Win 7 not Win 10.
My story is similar to many here. When a student in the late 1990s, we had coursework that involved
developing applications in C to run on Solaris workstations that used process locks and freed them
up afterwards. There were an OS limited max of 10 per system at the time;
our applications needed 8 to work properly.
If students had buggy code (which was frequent) which didn’t free up the locks then nobody else could run their code on that workstation until the technicians restarted it or killed the locks.
To top it off, the workstations were in an open access computer room and treated the same as windows PCs; people just switched them on and off at will, and frequently my fellow students and I needed to
find the relevant technicians to restart the workstations.
I bought a Linux book with (I think) Slackware 3 CD, partly to get to understand the command line better butI ended up setting up my home PC dual boot with Windows so I could do some of the work at home – I FTPed the source code to a PC, transported it home, recompiled it and was able to do my coursework without this issue.
Soon after this was replaced with Red Hat 4, a magazine cover CD. After graduating I spent many years developing for and supporting with Windows systems and still do, but for the last few years have been involved in application support for a system running on Red Hat very successfully.
Recent bad experiences upgrading PCs of myself, friends and family to windows 10 have reignited my interest in looking at alternatives to Microsoft’s offerings.
It was 2002. I had been system building for some time, and my frustrations with Windows was mounting. The last straw was Windows ME. A friend of mine sympathized and gave me his Xandros linux install disk. The install took about 25 minutes and it correctly detected all of my hardware – including the old winmodem. SO much better than a Windows install.
My main machine is now Ubuntu, and the test box has a different distro every week.
I was a spectroscopist at a northern Uni and I processed my data remotely on a Sun 4 which was about 1/2 a mile away, using early Xwindows. My work station was a PC running Windows for Workgroups and Vista Exceed. Working up the data graphically took several hours. You can imagine the annoyance when the windows X client crashed just before the results were ready to be saved and printed.
I’d heard of linux and found the Debian site. I purchased a 3GB hard drive from the local PC shop and downloaded the 2 installation floppies for the Bo Distribution. Installation was easier than I’d expected and the system booted first time and within in about 4 hours I was up and working. I forget the name of the window manager but the system was bullet proof; never crashed or needed rebooting. I used it for 5 years and have used Linux at work and at home ever sicne.