My Journey to Linux

Ever since I talked my friend Jeff Wall out of this site I haven't been able to provide people with any content due to nature of my current lack of time. I have been interested in Linux since 1998. I was working in a Unix environment, whose name I dare not speak. It was a boring, hard to manage operating system. Then I learned through the intertubes about something called "Redhat". Off to the local bookstore I went to purchase a copy of Redhat Linux for Dummies. I spent hours reading and typing with great enjoyment I installed Linux on a hp Vectra Pentium with a 500mb hard drive that we used for POS Systems at work. I then attempted to install it on a system I had built from the ground up. It had a Trident S3 Virge video card that was not supported by any current Xconfig file. Well I dived into the xfree86 config documentation and opened the file in vi. 4 hours later I decided that I should try another card.

I joined the local linux users group, called LUGOJ , after experiencing numerous aggravations with the terminology. The documentation was sporadic on the web. Many times the people telling you how to fix an issue appeared to be annoyed with you. This was not the case at the LUG. People would give demos and classes. We talked about, experimented with, and advocated different programs and distros. One of my first and favorite classes was on PHP. Until then I had only programmed in C++ and written korn shell scripts. PHP offered me the chance to do what I always wanted, write websites that actually did things. To this day I remember asking "What is PHP?".

The years have gone by and I have watched many distros and programs fade away into obscurity. Many I actually paid for a license. The problem back then was buying a commercial program that ran on different distros. Now many applications work across distibutions. Who would have thought in the early 2000's that debian based distributions would be so popular or that Redhat would be successful even though they offer Fedora for free.

The point of this site is to discuss, learn, and educate about Linux, Open Source, GNU and all things computer related. This is my first article I have ever posted, well besides diatribes to mailing lists, facebook and other assorted blogs. I hope we can build a site that is worthy of your attention.

Jay Longmire.