Hello,

My name is Foster. I'm 32 yr old male techie from Chicago (US). I just got back into Linux after taking many years off, but I first started using Linux nearly 10 years ago! My distro of choice is Slackware 12.0, which I could not have set up so nicely if not for this site!

Here is my *nix usage timeline:

1998-2001 RedHat 4-6.2
2001-2006 Solaris 2.x-10 (the dark ages!)
2007- (K)ubuntu 7.04, openSUSE 10.2, Debian 4.0r1, Slackware 12.0

After trying out a few of the modern distros to get back into the swing of things, I decided upon Slackware. I really, really liked openSUSE a lot (especially YaST), but ultimately decided to distance myself due to the recent Novell controversy.

I have two main goals with Linux, split by timeframe: First, I want to fill in the blanks of my knowledge about Linux, GNU tools, K, etc. and also set up a killer desktop/development config. Later on, I'd like to develop some web apps and tune up some test and deployment servers for it to run on. Because Slackware is one of the best systems to learn on AND also has a reputation of being rock solid, it is probably a good fit for the long haul.

Thanks for reading,

Foster

Welcome to LQ drunkenpaw

Welcome to LQ drunkenpaw, I'm new compared to your history. I'm twice as old and enjoying linux and the learning curve as I hope you do.

Thanks for being so welcoming!

I didn't know anyone was actually going to read this. I was just posting here to try to get rid of the "You haven't posted yet" notification--it was crowding my screen real estate!

I hope I didn't come off as too much of a Slackware zealot in the last post. I must give props to Debian, which many distros (and servers) wisely base themselves upon. Among those spinoffs, there is the very user-friendly Ubuntu--our current best bet for claiming desktop share away from Redmond. Oh, and I forgot to mention that I loaded Gentoo as well--perhaps I'll revisit that when I know more of what I'm doing...

This is a really great community. Maybe I'm still too new here, but I haven't seen any pretentiousness here--just helpful answers. Excellent!

f