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Old 09-09-2002, 04:24 AM   #1
michaelangel
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Registered: Jul 2002
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My Linux Stories


my conclusion after i logged out my linux box today is that i am crazy,like go visit linux {mental} institution for only there would i find rest for my unquenchable desire to have smooth running,easy to install or use,easy of drivers, software and program installation a linux that would start and run without asking questions.
Why do i like this linux that forces you to create a user account you would not ever want to use,why is this linux not made for fools college drop outs, why is linux not for home use.
you better call me crazy than to think that i don't know what i am talking about here,call me a fool than to think that i am wrong, i am completely, or, not well educated i should say, but the people at micro$oft do not have to remind me that each time i needed to use my computer.
you represent those who know howto {s} or at least people who could learn how to compile system files or drivers for their linux box,you may know how to find DEPENDENCIES to be able to use RPM {HAVE YOU TRIED TO INSTALL THE LATEST VERSION QT OR UPGRADE TO KDE DESKTOP WHICH IS AVAILABLE ON RPM}
forgive me folks,but i represent those who just heard about linux and want to try it themselves,those who want to try something other that micro$oft product,those who cannot, could not or would not look for any RPM DEPENDENCIES, off course people who are not or well educated.
finally before you write me off or prescribe a hospital,a doctor and or drugs for me i want you to know this.
i bought my first linux 2000 it is called CORRELLINUX, few months latter i bought mandrake-linux 8.0 and many months came to pass i downloaded redhat,mandrake 8.1,slackware,debian and .....and as i am making this insane conclusion i have bought SUSE 8.0 REDHAT 7.3 MANDRAKE 8.2and downloaded MANDRAKE 9beta from 1 to 4,REDHAT ''NULL'', ICEPACK 2.1,YELLOWDOG, CONECTIVA,TURBOLINUX.
i have probably convinced you now and please don't try to teach what i know, i have installed and used them all in every manner and i am a single user with a good computer very big hard disk and a lots of memory.
lastly, we are here to stay because we want some change,because best offered by micro$oft is not enough to stop the desire for a change.human that is what we are i am waiting for release of REDHAT i have to buy this too {it looks good} and i am searching for a link to download iso cd of ICEPACK 2.5 {easiest linux ever}.
this is just my story,you can tell yours or prescribe a ................

Last edited by michaelangel; 09-09-2002 at 05:58 AM.
 
Old 09-09-2002, 05:45 AM   #2
GT I.N.C
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geeez man, i think i know what your going on about, and i kinda agree.....when i first found out about Linux i thought it would be real good, but when i installed my first distro (debian 2.2) i dredded it to hell, i didn't like it i thought it was too hard etc. i left it for a month or so.....then i found rh 6.2 installed that dredded it too, i left Linux then for agesss.....then i hear about this Mandrake 8.2, so i thought last go, and even though i hated linux there was something driving me back to it, and thats the thrill of a challenge, even though Linux should become more easier, expecially about those RPM's which should be reaplced, i just guess you have to be born with a Linux gene or something to understand Linux, and i am still a newbie.....but i just love it....

anyone else have there story ?
 
Old 09-09-2002, 10:57 AM   #3
NSKL
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I fortunately heard about Linux long time ago, and after reading up on it a lot i decided to try it so i knew how it would be. i ran SuSE <someoldversion> first, and got sick of it because weird things i could not understand were happening. Then i tried Slackware and after many hours of trying i finally got X to work. After that, bit by bit i started understanding how Linux "Thinks" and where to look if problems occur, and all those weird things never happened with Slack - i guess it was a SuSE only problem.
Now once i tried Linux i never went back to Windows (except to play some games, but that doesnt count) and i forced myself to use Linux only, and now i realise the superiority of this OS when it comes to stability and customization. I mean did you ever ask yourself how much faster could windows go if you could recompile it's kernel
People who say recompiling kernels, editing config files etc.. is a big drawback to Linux are IMO very wrong, because this is the strength of Linux over Windows. It lets you customize it to your preferences and hardware and gives you total control of whats going on.
Take this simple example: Did it ever happen to you to get some error such as "Error at adress 3896575896x8969 in module fuckMS.vxd" in windows? I bet something like that happened to everyone and there was nothing you could check to fix that but to reinstall completely. Well since Linux gives you total control and because you have to learn it in order to use, you can also fix errors that occur and save hours by not having to reinstall, maybe it is enough to edit a couple of lines in some config file.

So IMO people who think Linux is too hard aren't for ready for Linux. If one wants to type out a document, surf the web and play games i see NO reason to install Linux, but if one is willing to try new things and LEARN then Linux/BSD is for him/her

Well, what do you know! I wrote an essay!!
Comments?

-NSKL
 
Old 09-09-2002, 11:12 AM   #4
trickykid
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moved: stories belong more in the General forum.
 
Old 09-09-2002, 11:41 AM   #5
wonderpun
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Well, I have a story for you all too. I first heard about Linux in a magazine called "Hacker" and the people there said it was the most powerfull OS, much better than winbloze, bla bla bla So I thought I'll try it out. I got Linux Mandrake on a CD with a magazine called "New Comunications". I installed Mandrake on the same partition as Winbloze because I was to afraid to make another partition for Linux (I was a complete Newbie ) When I started it I thought it all would be great but it wasn't. I didn't even know how to start X.
So I deleted it and then had to reinstall winbloze because I didn't know how to rewrite the MBR and Grub was still there. Then I read a lot about Linux and thought that I should give it another try. But I decided to wait until I buy a new PC. After a couple of months the new PC was standing on my table I had Red Hat 7.0 3 CD's in my hands. When I booted the installer I was so excited. But then an error occured. Linux couldn't find my hard drive. I took my PC to the company from which I had bought it but they said that it's not a problem and if Winbloze boots up then everything's fine. I understood what kind of profesionals were working there from a dialogue that sounded kind of like this:
- So what do you want?
- I want to get my hard drive fixed so that I could install Linux.
- But windows boots up so everything must be fine.
- But programs that work with the Hard Drive don't recognise the Hard Drive and the Linux installer doesn't too!
- Ooh, so you want us to delete windows and install Linux?
- No, I want to have them both!
- That's impossible! Only one OS can be installed on a PC!
- F*** you. You don't know the hell about computers. You &@%$^* &#($@ I think that you are **#*&$ you *#)&$!!!!

Maybe I was a little harsh but I finally said what I felt about that jerk.(I don't regret it either ) Then I couldn't install Linux for about half a year because of this problem. And a month ago I just booted the Linux installer just to see how it looks, with no hopes to install it ever. And ALELUA!!!! Everything worked just fine! I didn't know why this happend because I didn't do anything with my hard disk (well except partition it with Partition Magic 7.0) And man was it great. I worked only for about a week with Red Hat 7.2 (which I had borrowed from my friend) and then downloaded and installed Slackware 8.1. And I don't regret it! Although it was a little bit harder than Red Hat 7.2 (I think MasterC remembers my questions here ) I now think that I had lerned very much thanks to Slackware 8.1 and I think that I will always bewith Slackware! (Well I think I'll have it on fourple(don't know how to say ) boot with WindowsXP, Gentoo, LFS) Well that's my story. Hope that more people would tell their stories because well it's quite interesting.
 
Old 09-09-2002, 12:58 PM   #6
MasterC
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Well then, good stories. The first guy up there has some real issues doesn't he A real sadist!

I didn't know JACK about computers in 1999. I decided to get my first computer, mainly just to surf around with and send some emails. I use to be one of those guys who says stuff like "So your hard drive is 46 kilohertz then, cool." I didn't know anything at all. Then as I got a little more involved on my computer, I decided I should probably learn a thing or 2. At the time I was running crashware 98. So I started learning about the basics, and trying to figure out what a "Gigabyte" and things were. Eventually I got it all sorted out, and decided to upgrade my RAM. A little while went by, and I was content, but then I really started noticing how slow the box was. I was running a 366mhz Celeron with 192MB RAM at the time. Around that time I found out about Linux a bit. So I tried installing it on my computer (Mandrake 7.2) and it all went rather well. After the install I got to a login prompt, and typed my name and pass, no problem there. Then that was it. I guess Mandy 7.2 didn't ship starting out in run level 5, and I had no idea what to do beyond that. I didn't know basic commands, nothing. I typed "help" and got a list of, what to me was, garble. So I poked around the sites, and finally figured out 'startx'. So things were going ok, but I had no sound, it was an itegrated POS board, and the sound was Aureal. So eventually I got to the point that I wanted a faster PC, and I wanted one that could run Linux better. I was still only doddling with Linux, if at all. So I built my first PC (still the one I use ) and got rid of the Celeron junk. It was blindingly faster! So at this point, I decided to take on Linux as a real contender. I was running crashware ME, and was very displeased. I didn't feel like sportin the cash for another crashware OS so Linux was my next choice. I put Mandrake back on the new computer, doddled a bit, and then decided to get the latest version, and give it a try. So I d/l 8.0. Not bad, but still wasn't "user friendly" and that was really something I truly needed (I didn't know about this site, and knew NO ONE who used Linux), so I started reading around a bit, and decided to give SuSE a try. 7.2? I think it was, but in about as fast as I installed it, I removed it. I decided I was comfortable enough with Mandy to learn with it. Since then I joined this site, asked an amazing amount of lame questions, and still have no idea what I am doing

Cool
 
Old 09-09-2002, 04:27 PM   #7
Mara
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My story is absolutely different. I even don't remember which year it was when I installed Linux for the first time. Between 1995 and 1998. I remember it was a text install, not very hard for me (it wasn't the first OS I installed). After I installed it (cdrom not working, I had to install from cd, no sound, no network), I logged in and tried to run Midnight Commander (I'd seen it before). Nothing. No mc.
I decided to reinstall. This time I found mc package and installed it. Logged it, mc. And it was very interesting. Something different... I looked everywhere (I spent much time browsing /dev) and decided that I like it. I had no X installed at that time.
After some time (I don't remember if it was a month or a year) I installed X. I had no Internet connection, only an old set of HOWTOs and man pages. I was learning...
I switched completely to Linux in 1999 or 2000. I remember that I installed MDK 7.2 on one machine (still running) and the same on another (now a system based on MDK 8.0). People were laughing (Linux for desktop, ha ha ha), but I don't regret. And people don't laugh ...
 
Old 09-09-2002, 05:58 PM   #8
finegan
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Registered: Aug 2001
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I got a Pentium 1, a Gateway from my parents back in '96. It was smokin' at the time: 200Mhz, 32MB of RAM. That was more or less my first computer. In March of 2001 I figured it was time to figure out what all this Linux hype was about... yeah, that was 18 months ago: RedHat 7.0, then Slack 7.1, then Slack 8.0, then etc... man pages, a few O'Reilly books, a lot of LQ, and too much coffee and my Linux knowledge is now as spotty and anarchic as they come.

Cheers,

Finegan
 
Old 09-10-2002, 04:43 AM   #9
GT I.N.C
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these are very interesting stories, i like to say more stuff , i think my first computer was a pretty crap one but it was around late 1999 i was around 11 or 12 my grandparents bought it for me cause they thought it would be good for me for school and such...if i remember it was a cyrix 233mhz 32mb ram 1.9gb h/d etc. etc. i had winbloze 98 on it......i was, hardly knew about computers...used one couple times at school, but didn't think they were special....after couple weeks of playing around, i decided to make my own website, and everyone said i was smart for an 11yr old, not only in computers, but at school n general (now now i am no 'geek' i have a very large social life with my friends, and they respect me for being a so called 'nerd') now in high school in yr 9, i am known to fix nearly all computer problems wheather it be a mac or windows, now i'm learning Linux, you could say i'm a geek or a nerd, but hey, I LOVE IT....at least i got my social life aswell, i think my story has gone over board....but yeh sorry
 
Old 09-11-2002, 06:26 PM   #10
Thymox
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My first venture into Linuxland was actually quite painless. I was having problems with my CD burner and thought that it might have been a software issue (I couldn't get the burner working, so I couldn't burn any backups, so I couldn't blank and reinstall Windows to sort out software issues... bit of a nasty situation). I bought Linux Magazine and it had Mandrake 7.1 on the cover CD. I installed it and... found that I couldn't get the CD burner working, and couldn't get the sound card working. However, I did a little googling and found some help sites. I think I found this site within about 3 or 4 minutes. It was the most helpful one I'd found, so I stayed here (if you take a look at the members list on a good few other Linux help sites, you will see a Thymox). I finally got my sound card to work, but alas, not my CD burner... turns out it was actually a hardware problem. However, I learned a hell of a lot, and found that I could actually start answering other's questions. It became addictive (hence the title). Now I actually install Linux before I put Windows on there... I find that it's easier to determine what hardware you have under Linux than it is under Windows... so you can then go and hunt for the Windows drivers should you so wish!
 
Old 09-11-2002, 08:11 PM   #11
sharper
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A little over a year ago my copy of acrobat reader got munged and I had lost the install file. Adobe no longer had a version that would work with Win95a, Win98 was what, about $100 for the upgrade. And any other Win would have been the full license. Did some checking and ended up ordering the Slackware discs and have been using that ever since. Installed just fine on the first try and only problem is I've never gotten around to getting the sound to work.
 
Old 09-11-2002, 09:31 PM   #12
JimKyle
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Interesting accounts!

My story is a bit different in some respects, but much the same in others. I began dealing with computers in the very early days, doing assembly language on mainframes and learning system programming at the same time. This was 35 years ago! One of the systems I worked on was MULTICS, which spawned an illegitimate offspring called Unix, but I lost contact with the MULTICS system before 1980. One thing I did learn while working with MULTICS was that it was absolutely essential to know the innards of the operating system, in order to know what your program was really doing.

When I migrated from mainframes to the PC in 1981, I stayed with the Radio Shack TRS-80 line as long as I could but finally took the 5-year leap backward and moved to the IBM PC and MS-DOS. Since I delved deeply into the innards of MS-DOS, I was asked in 1990 to join a team of writers in preparing a book that wound up as "Undocumented DOS" and went through two editions. That, in turn, led me to join a commercial software house, and that forced me to deal with Windows (which was at version 3.0 at the time). Again, I spelunked the system, and became a columnist for Windows Tech Journal...

Along the way I became increasingly dissatisfied with Microsoft's treatment of its customers, its competitors, and the entire industry, so I picked up a copy of Slackware 96 and installed it as part of a triple-boot system. However I didn't do much of anything with it, and when WinNT4 crashed the triple-boot machine a year or so later, I didn't bother to put it back...

But more and more I learned to love Microsoft less and less, and I finally vowed to not install more MS upgrades of anything. At that point I was running a 5-station network with Win95 and Win98, to support my data recovery service for Btrieve databases. I also declared publicly that when the day came that I could no longer support my customers with those systems, I'd re-format everything and go to Linux.

Last November I decided that it was time to start making the move, so I added Mandrake 8.1 as a dual-boot to my router/firewall machine (which was running Win95B at that point). A small mistake in configuring Samba left the system open to the world for about an hour, and in that time a script kiddie planted a zombie plus the Chernobyl virus on the system! Fortunately my outgoing firewall alerted me when the zombie tried to call home, so I was able to disinfect things before all five systems were toast. However I did lose the two Win95 boxes; fortunately I was able to get all the data off of them before reformatting. I put Win98 back on one of the two, since it's still necessary for my business, but the router/firewall box has been pure Mandrake 8.1 ever since -- and it's working better than I ever expected. I'm now seriously considering converting one of the four Win98 boxes over (and have installed Cygwin on one of them) in order to experiment with porting my recovery techniques (mostly programmed in VB but easily convertible to Delphi/Kylix)...

I've found that my experience with MULTICS has made it extremely easy to grok the Linux way of doing things. The biggest problem I run into is a tendency to use the wrong-handed slash (backslash for directory separator in Linux, which doesn't work, or forward in Windows, which also doesn't work). And I agree that this forum is the best I've seen for getting help...
 
Old 09-12-2002, 10:49 AM   #13
NSKL
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JimKyle: 35 years with computers!! damn, im not half of that old yet! If you don't find it offensive (some people do) could you tell us how old are you?
*RESPECT*
-NSKL
 
Old 09-12-2002, 11:38 AM   #14
JimKyle
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Not at all offensive; I turned 71 last March. I don't make a major point of it, though, since I find that many folk seem put off by it. I'm still learning and plan to keep on doing so as long as I've got my mind and heartbeat, and sometimes describe my attitude as "71 going on 21" since this business keeps my outlook young.

For 15 years I ran a forum on CompuServe, sponsored first by Computer Language Magazine and later by its successor, Software Development Magazine. We found that the age distribution of the regular members was bimodal, with peaks at what would now be about 60 and 35 (at the time we discussed it, they were 50 and 25). But nobody could tell, from the discussion, who was in which group. We had a couple of members who were 10 years older than me, and my assistant SysOp was the same age as my youngest son...
 
Old 09-12-2002, 01:48 PM   #15
drjimstuckinwin
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First tried RH 6.2 from a cover disk on my laptop while I was living in Australia. Did the whole dual boot thing, even bought partition tragic to do the drive. Sadly I didn't defrag windoze98 first, so when I tried to start it up again, it was totally dead. Tried doing manual scandisk/file repair until I realised 1 directory had taken 6 hours with 300 or so to go! Reinstalled windoze and left it at that! Next adventure was with RH7 on my desktop, bought a new 48G HDD to do it in style, the machine is now a DSL firewall, and still has that HDD! Gone through multiple laptops/desktops and a huge pile of Sun kit with Linux on, got into Ebay etc. Only use Windoze because my bank won't let anything other than M$ or macs into the online banking
Now got a variety of RedHats, and a little mandy in the corner. Planning an LFS for the firewall so I can use/sell that big drive! Easy to start, but you can never stop Linuxing!

Oh I had a nice PC with a gig of RAM, ABIT KT7a Raid mobo etc, found that galeon/mozilla kept crashing. Then it killed gnome, Konqueror wouldn't even start. Segfault city. Decided to split the RAIDed drives and RAM into another machine sold at a profit (small, but anyway!). Then played at installing windows on the machine that had some browser stability problems. Bear in mind that the browser probs were after a week or so of continuous running, longest period between reboots was a month. Windoze 98 wouldn't even install (with 512Mb RAM). The mobo was secondhand, and I reckon defective, all parts work fine in the other machine.

So who has the best OS??

Jim

Last edited by drjimstuckinwin; 09-12-2002 at 01:59 PM.
 
  


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