eric pareja wrote:
> Most of us have been using Linux for some time now. Some have been using
> Linux for almost a decade. Some have just begun using Linux.
A decade old OS. Imagine that. It took a decade for winblows to go from
version 1.01 to 95 and today, it still _(*&%$#
> Whatever the length of time, we have different reasons for using Linux.
> I'm curious about a few things, which maybe some of you might like to
> answer for the benefit of the rest of us.
True, we have different reasons but IMHO they all boil down to what
Steven Levy enumerated as a part of the "Hacker Ethic" in his book
"Hackers" - Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative. It was further
explained as a "Tools-to-Make-Tools' syndrome. If I may add, it was a
"disease", so to speak, wherein the user continually hacked, kludged,
tweaked and generally improved the tools he used and thus the system he
was working on, which then made his work, (and play?), easier.
> What got you started in Linux?
A desire to learn and use the same or similar systems written about in
books like Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown, Cliff Stoll's The
Cuckoo's Egg, and The Cyberthief and the Samurai - the Kevin
Mitnick/Tsutomu Shimomura affair.
> Who influenced you into using Linux, if any?
No one in particular.
> Where did you first learn about Linux?
I read about it in magazines around 1996 but regarded it like one
regards mainframes. It's something you know exists but will probably
never work with.
> How did you get your copy of Linux?
I downloaded DragonLinux 0.8 from the net. Also see the last three
questions.
> When did you first hear about Linux?
Late 1997.
> When did you actually use Linux for the first time?
Around February of 1998. Coming from a DOS background, I downloaded and
used DragonLinux - an 8 MB UMSDOS distro based on Slackware. It ran off
a directory in a DOS/FAT partition and you could boot into it using
loadlin from a batch file.
> When did you install Linux on your own 'puter?
Same as above, around February 1998, when my wife agreed to allow me to
play around with our pc and potentially endanger her thesis. Later, when
I learned that you could run DOS and Windblows off of Linux - I had the
RH CD from work copied. I already had FreeSCO Openserver installed for
sometime but I installed RH for the first time on that partition, wiping
out FreeSCO. I actually liked working under RH because it gave better
performance on our AMD 166.
> Why did you decide to try Linux out?
Also see (What got you started in Linux?).
In the middle of 1997, I had a boss who was keen on new technologies for
the POS industry. He was trying to set up an intranet for testing new
hardware for a client. The problem was, that client used SCO and the
cost of a license was way too high for our department. Also, Linux,
unlike DOS, was on par with the embedded OS we used on our Japanese
hardware which was not only tiny, but also network aware. So late in the
year, he bought a package from Red Hat which contained a version 5.0 CD
with Applixware and manuals - all for less than a hundred USD. After it
was installed by an officemate, he then downloaded and tried LinuxPOS, a
Tcl/Tk based application. What got everyone's attention was that it
could deploy a fully functional POS with a GUI and display, yet the
whole application fit on a floppy and did not need to be compiled.
> Why do you still use Linux?
It is versatile and very scalable. I myself was surprised at the
capabilities of this OS - packed into a single CD. In another job two
years ago, the only free unit for development was a pentium 90 with 32
megs of ram and a SCSI subsystem. My assignment was to develop scripts
for SCO unix and maintain the DOS serial comm utilities we used. DOS was
not being sold anymore and running either Winblows or SCO on the unit
was out of the question. I tried Red Hat but later switched to Mandrake
6.1 to take advantage of its numerous utilities. By the time I left a
year later, the unit was being used as a test ftp server, (our NT lan
admin hated ftp for security reasons), a local http server, and a unix
development unit. All this and it was still capable of running a couple
of compile and live test DOSEmu sessions for the serial devices we had.
> What is your favorite thing about Linux?
If Linux was a swiss army knife, it is the swiss army knife to end all
swiss army knives. It's the ultimate tool for a programmer. Whether
developing programs or playing games, no matter if those programs or
games are for windows or some other OS, Linux will have an interface
available. If there is a feature you want - it's most probably buried in
your Linux distro somewhere.
To give a different twist to the way we brag about our favorite OS, if
Linux was for sale and it was the most expensive OS out there - I'd buy
it.
--
Paolo
Infoweb Telecom (Global) Limited
POT: (852) 2388-1168/1053/1476 or 2625-1688 loc 127 FAX: (852) 2625-1501
7B CNT Tower, 338 Hennessy Road, Wanchai, Hong Kong, SAR, China 852
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