This thread would actually be a few days late, as I've already been posting here and there for past few days.
For all intents and purposes, I am a "newbie." But Linux isn't exactly new to me. And I mean beyond the fact most of the people of the world use Android/linux or some other variant in devices here and there.
Wayyy back in second half of 1996, I got some exposure to UNIX (during the short time I was in Chambana). Learned a few commands here and there. The X w/Motif GUI was beautiful on those high (at the time) resolution screens. Very clean and crisp looking. Also thought it was cool that I could terminal into another workstation and others could do the same to the one I was physically at. Always wondered if I could "use" up all the terminals on a single workstation or even multiple workstations by daisy chain logging in from one terminal into another and then another, etc. And I'm definitely not admitting to having done it. hehe... wait, I mean
Of course, UNIX isn't the same as Linux.
Oh, in case anyone was curious about how I got into computers... my sister had passed onto me an 8088 clone that she had gotten from our uncle who worked as a consultant at the time. And the very first thing I did... thought to myself what does "format c:" do? And promptly typed it in on a very nicely personalized setup (it had a "startup screen" via start.bat of Bart Simpson!). Let's just say, that's one hell of a way to get started with learning about computers. D'oH!
Eventually, a few years later... 1998? I decided to get that "UNIX"-like experience back... of course, UNIX wasn't available for the public... but Linux was. And so... I ventured into the world of Linux.
I think I found a (old at the time?) copy of Slackware 96. Got it to install and learned to recompile the kernel and the oh-so-time consuming task of rebuilding the entire system again and again after making a mistake or figuring out another module (like getting the sound card to work, weeeeee), and eventually do a little C/C++ programming on it (for a class I had at the time). I mentioned this in the first post I made on this forum... for the life of me, I couldn't then, nor now, figure out how to use "vi" (effectively). Instead, I find "pico" much more comfortable and more than sufficient for my needs then and now (so far). Unfortunately, I yearned to play games, games and more games... and lets face it... in terms of sheer quantity of (professional? commercial?) games, Windows had Linux beat. And even with dual boot going, I had very little reason to suffer the time consuming task of shutting down Windows and booting into Linux when I could do everything I needed to do, in Windows. And so, my time with Linux came to an end.
Over the last decade or so, I did occasionally want to go back to Linux and did try out Unbuntu/Kubuntu for a bit. But of course, the games I wanted to play simply weren't available on them still.
That brings us to July 2014.
I'm thinking about going back into programming both for Linux/Android and possibly iOS (and if lucky, make a little money off of it). To that end, I added a few mSATA drives to my Sager NP8255-s w/Win8 laptop and popped in a "new/old" buddy...
Slackware. Of course, new being version 14.1. For now, it's just basically installed... still need to go through everything to make sure all the hardware is setup. Apparently, my old adversary, the "sound card" has returned. Well, KDE played some notes when I started X, but still got some tweaking to do to play my music collection. After that, proceed to get a programming environment going.
So, here I am. Let's see how far I go!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
)
Howdy
