Linux, My First.

Dad worked for the US Government.
We moved all over the US. I lettered in Texas, Class Ring from California and Diploma from New Jersey.

At that last stop all the Major Computer manufacturers of the day got together and offered the all High Schools in the area a deal. They would provide a written Master Course booklet and enough student manuals for a class and pay the Teachers to teach Computers. One catch, these classes had to attend at least 3 (I think it was) Saturdays at 3 different sponsors. At the time the Neighborhood Theaters were showing lots of "Computers take over humanity, world, etc..." type movies. The decision to introduce computer classes was meant to offset the fear being generated by those movies. A kind of "Snip it in the Bud" motive. My Teacher took us to virtually every sponsor. The Sponsor would provide the Chief Hardware Designer and the Chief OS Designer for the system sitting right in front of us and each session was a total free for all. We were encouraged to play with it. NO FORBIDDEN QUESTIONS. ALL QUESTIONS WERE ANSWERED, as best as possible. For some questions the answers did not yet exist. Yes, those Chiefs had questions for us too. Give and take. At the time it was just "fun stuff". In retrospect - WOW! What an experience!

Time goes bye. I become a Land Surveyor, then a Photogrametrist (Map Maker). Both use lots of math. Pocket sized calculators don't yet exist. Then Digital Research brings desktop computers running CP/M to market. A friend brings his over for me to fix. I do. He tells two friends, I fix theirs, they each tell two and the next thing I know I'm doing computer things for whole companies which puts me in the computer business. Divorce arrives and my Company departs. A friend from Mapping days tells me the State of California needs someone that speaks Computer and Mapping. I get hired on. Initial problem was fixed in short order. In the adjoining room they are trying to do something called GIS. Would I help?

They have card fed minis (almost main frame), VAXes, desktops and other goodies. Things get underway in a good way but the programs are slow and the costly machines are used in a "timeshare" way. I tried Window$ but it wouldn't stay up overnight. Weekend runs on Window$ was out of the question. As of last effort, made not long ago, - they still are. The "New" hardware arrived. 16MHz CPUs. I latched onto an old 4MHz and found a copy of Yggdrasil and tried my hand at Linux. Found it not quite up to my needs but I saw the potential so I bought a copy of Slackware. 1993. One, if not THE first, of the bootable Slackware CD packages. OK- su stands for?? Why not just say root? Sooo - First install also took me 3 times. The 4MHz Linux outran 16MHz Window$ 2 to 1. Linux stayed up all night. Linux stayed up all weekend, even the 4 day weekends. When the 16MHzes were replaced I got one of those and an updated CD from Slackware and was out computing the DEC Workstation 4 to 1!!. No joke! The P90 running Slackware was also out preforming the SparkStation. The multi-Gig-a-Hertz Dual-Core CPUs flat scream under Slackware!

I'm retired. My laptop runs MSDOS 6.22, Window$ XP PRO, Slackware proven and a new release for testing. LILO controls the 4 OSes for native runs. I also have software that runs under Slackware that allows me to run the MSDOS programs and the Window$ XP programs in Linux. Dosbox and Wine. DOS programs include dBASE III+, WordStar 4.5 and AutoCAD 12 for DOS. Window$ programs include Global Mapper, iview (Nikon RAW .nef format view/modify/convert), GRASS (Open Source GIS), Tatuk (GIS viewer), MathCad. Since Slackware can run multiple copies of Dosbox and Wine, both MSDOS and Window$ can be doing multiple programs each. What used to take weeks can be done in hours. My laptop is Dual-Core, 2.1GHz, rotatable touchscreen. I have no real personal use for Window$. I would add - nor do I have any use for any Linux that is a Window$ "wanna-be" because "I'm not allowed to do what?". wanna-be -- Get Out of My Face. It's simple enough in Slackware.

Norseman01

OOPS!!!
Norseman01 here. I put GRASS in the Window$ section. Big Mistake! It runs in Linux.
My typing doesn't keep up with my thoughts.
Sorry

My first distro... Slackware 3...

I was doing my masters in applied information technology and needed write and compile in C / C++...

Those were the days when you had to manually partition your disk by hand using fdisk and manually defining cylinder start - end... etc...

Getting graphics to work was a handsome challenge as you had to know if your card / monitor would work... but it was fun...

I have the same problem with typing (and fumble-fingering). Gettin' old, gettin' old.

Anyway, I had Unix boxes back in the 80's and got Doug McIlroy's map program from the AT&T Software Toolchest at Bell Labs. It came with World Data Bank I, but would handle World Data Bank II so I ordered that from the CIA (still have the box of 9-track tapes it came on). Actually, still use WDB-II data (Cold War country boundaries, handy for doing historic maps of Europe every so often). Had a lot of fun with that program (he still makes it available at his web site, complies and runs in Linux). Even did a port to a Cray (buddy of mine at Ford fiddlin' around); wow-zowie.

Moved on to GMT (Generic Mapping Tools), got every data set I can find, ported WBD-II data for use with GMT, do some pretty slick maps with that. Does topographic nicely.

Tried GRASS, didn't quite fit my needs -- darned nice but just not quite for me -- and probably going to get back to it in the next couple of months.

Going from 68040 Unix SVR4 with 2- 4M of RAM and a 50M disk drive (where a map map took a couple of minutes to render (and a half-hour to print or plot) to GMT where a Cold War map of Europe takes about 10 seconds (Intel Core 2 at 3.06GHz, 8G RAM) with full color topographic, place names, boundaries, rivers, all the stuff. About 30 seconds to print, maybe a couple of minutes on an E-size plotter.

Basically, Slackware 64-bit rips through the math in no time flat. Great system.

Mobile phone of Android, Apple's Mac system, are based on the LIUNX kernel, so want to learn

Mac OS X is based on FreeBSD kernel and mach. I downloaded many articles on mach system.

Tizen and Meego are based on Linux

The answers are interesting.

in 77 took a computer class on a wang with 10k memory including cassette & paper tape readers

I worked on industrial equipment & always dealt with the electrical bits, which were analog function generators...

later moved into plants with NC driven machining centers, just keeping it all running, no programming
in the 90's I worked for a food plant [7 million tortillas a day] with Allen Bradley plc's on a network, mostly repair or replace, occasionally download the program. For a couple of years we didn't have a license, when the touch screen operator terminal would go bad, we would gut a brand new unit & hope the cpu was good. AB updated their firmware every year to make sure you paid for a license fee for every location.

finally in 05 I broke down & bought a p4 hp running xp, my 1st mission was to convert LP's to MP3
I had already blew through my budget on hardware
I was already well aware of what is a primary equation when it comes to doing things

do you have more of?
time
or
money

I had some time I could spend sorting out which freeware was gonna work
the path
turntable>amp>hp>Audacity>Mp3Directcut>Id3renamer>Itunes
for a couple of years I would restore xp back to as delivered every few months after whatever crud built up as win machines will do.

in 08 my everyday machine was a gateway laptop, with a failing hdd. I banged around until I got Ubuntu 8.04 going & installed, bought a new hdd did it all over with 9.10
I lost the Ubun thread when Unity came to town
I was distro hopping, looking for a more community based approach, with a fairly user friendly approach
after seeing some of the commercially backed FOSS projects, go through upheavals when the deep pockets "changed directions"
I haven't found anything userfriendly Debian based, that wasn't downstream of Ubun
that lead me to the Redhat side of the kernal
Pclos is close, I'm not comfortable with how much of a one man show it is
I'm on Mageia, which rolls along nicely, continuity back to Mandrake for some users, large enough community to be helpful/useful/fun

I had a supply of HP p4 dc5000's, I finally ended up on my last IDE hdd, I would just try to keep all my content backed up in a couple of places. just build a new one
I settled on XCFE on these.

I just bought a decent desktop machine, I borked the dualboot with w8 within the 1st week
a clean install works better in the linux world too....

at some point I'm sure I'll install something else on my wife's android tablet

in 77 took a computer class on a wang with 10k memory including cassette & paper tape readers

I worked on industrial equipment & always dealt with the electrical bits, which were analog function generators...

later moved into plants with NC driven machining centers, just keeping it all running, no programming
in the 90's I worked for a food plant [7 million tortillas a day] with Allen Bradley plc's on a network, mostly repair or replace, occasionally download the program. For a couple of years we didn't have a license, when the touch screen operator terminal would go bad, we would gut a brand new unit & hope the cpu was good. AB updated their firmware every year to make sure you paid for a license fee for every location.

finally in 05 I broke down & bought a p4 hp running xp, my 1st mission was to convert LP's to MP3
I had already blew through my budget on hardware
I was already well aware of what is a primary equation when it comes to doing things

do you have more of?
time
or
money

I had some time I could spend sorting out which freeware was gonna work
the path
turntable>amp>hp>Audacity>Mp3Directcut>Id3renamer>Itunes
for a couple of years I would restore xp back to as delivered every few months after whatever crud built up as win machines will do.

in 08 my everyday machine was a gateway laptop, with a failing hdd. I banged around until I got Ubuntu 8.04 going & installed, bought a new hdd did it all over with 9.10
I lost the Ubun thread when Unity came to town
I was distro hopping, looking for a more community based approach, with a fairly user friendly approach
after seeing some of the commercially backed FOSS projects, go through upheavals when the deep pockets "changed directions"
I haven't found anything userfriendly Debian based, that wasn't downstream of Ubun
that lead me to the Redhat side of the kernal
Pclos is close, I'm not comfortable with how much of a one man show it is
I'm on Mageia, which rolls along nicely, continuity back to Mandrake for some users, large enough community to be helpful/useful/fun
https://www.mageia.org/en/downloads/

I had a supply of HP p4 dc5000's, I finally ended up on my last IDE hdd, I would just try to keep all my content backed up in a couple of places. just build a new one
I settled on XCFE on these.

I just bought a decent desktop machine, I borked the dualboot with w8 within the 1st week
a clean install works better in the linux world too....

at some point I'm sure I'll install something else on my wife's android tablet

I had heard about before,but I install it until last year.And I am a student in software engineering.I believe it's usefull for my operating system studying

It was 2008 and I had being using some open source software such as Firefox, OpenOffice and Battle for Wesnoth for quite some time. I was not only I surprised with their quality, which matched or surpassed their commercial counterparts, but I also liked their philosophy. So the move to Linux didn't take much, I only had to wonder - if open source can produce things such as Firefox, than what about Linux? I tried some live cds, and soon I had chosen my distro and said good riddance to Windows.

I had hoped that Unix would have a greater impact on personel computing than it did. Actually I wanted Microsoft to have some competition, so when I heard of Linux I thought I'd give it a try. I did and like what I found. I have used it some in my work, but it lacks an important software that I use all the time. So my use of Linux has been off and on, and I have tried several distros, but debian is my favorite for some things, and Mint for other things.

Lubuntu was a distro that has worked on a legacy Dell Vostro 1400 for about a year. Lightweight, ran like a charm. Attempted a few other distros but came back to Lubuntu because of its minimalist features and speed.

Had a bunch of p*rated windows setups and the clients wanted to go legal, so I told them what the price was and apparently it was too high. I looked for alternatives, found Samba and been moving everyone off to Linux ever since.