My Linux journey

My story starts in 2003 when I was taking an A+ certification training course my high school offered. One day a friend of mine/classmate brought in several CDs and said they had an operating system called Linux on them. I had never heard of Linux before this and so he did his best to explained though he didn't know much more than I did about it. The CDs collectively made up the installation disks for Mandrake. We took the entire class-day to install Mandrake and mess around with it a bit. At that time it didn't look like anything special... Little did I know that this day would change the way I thought, and felt about computers, software, operating systems, intellectual property law, corporate ethics, community, and social responsibly.

After that day in class I didn't think too much about Linux but we had burned me a copy of the CDs (I think there was something like 8 of them) I placed the CDs in my CD case and there they sat. Months passed and one day I was going through my CD case and glanced at the Mandrake CDs... I thought about installing it on my system but I really didn't want to mess with going through the install with all 8 CDs. Around this time I came across an article in a computer magazine I had bought that was about Linux. The article interested me so I googled Linux and Mandrake and looked around at other distros... I finally found one that looked a lot like Windows XP (the OS I was using at the time) and decided that I wanted to give it a try.... The distribution I chose was LindowsOS 4.0 (or 4.5... I can't remember). The only issue with this was that LindowsOS was a commercial distribution and cost something like $40 or $50 dollars. I had the money but, being under 18, I didn't have a debit card or credit card. I asked my brother to use his card and I payed him the cash. It took me some time to download the CD image over my free Juno dial-up connection but, I was persistent (even though my connection was not). Within a week or two the image was downloaded and I was excited to try it out the new OS.

Once I burned myself the LindowsOS CD, I installed my first Windows/Linux duel-boot on my HP desktop. By the time Linspire Five-0 was out, I had it installed on my laptop and was using it every day for school. In 2005 I no longer had any Windows partitions on either of my computers. Then, in 2007 I was using Freespire as my main OS but I started "distro-hopped" quite a bit, installing Fedora, Ubuntu, PC-BSD(where I learned about other UNIX and Unix-like systems) and others. I started seriously reading about UNIX and Linux, learning commands, and became even more interested in and enthusiastic about Linux.

Finally, in 2009 my roommate at the time suggested I try openSUSE. He had been using it at work and was singing it's praises. I installed openSUSE and have been a loyal fan ever since! Even though I originally started my Linux journey with a very non-Linux-like Linux distribution I have progressed, learned, and have grown to now consider myself to be a very devoted and loyal Linux fan, enthusiast, and student.