Hello,

I've been a member for some 4 years or so, but never posted as I never needed to, I was always able to find an answer to my problem using search here, and elsewhere, without needing to post here.

Let us see, a little about myself, regarding Linux that is.

I got my first computer in '88, no HDD, just two 5 1/4 floppies with CPM, which I still reckon is one of the best small computer OS's there was. The machine had been manufactured, using Motorola chipsets, at an electronic shop in Adelaide ... Jees, nearly forgot, I'm in my fifties, caucasian, male and Australian.

Then, in around '92 or so, where I worked, and just every where else, changed to PC's (IBM of course) with MS DOS and the crappiest gui I have ever seen, Windows. This was just before 3.1/3.11 came out. Funny now, but we all thought those machines were blisteringly fast ... 286's with maths co-pro, then on to 486-DX 66.

I am registered as Linux User # 271598 at the Linux Counter, but that was after having used Linux for years.

I first started with RH on floppy, that would have been about '94/'95(yeah, that long ago), and when Windows 95 was released, switched completely to Linux still using RedHat.

I stayed with RH until Fedora Core, but I found myself wanting to be more involved in my machines setup, one of the reasons I had left MS when Win95 came out.

So I looked around at other distros, tried about 10 or so, and settled on Slack for about a year.

Then in 2002, I tried to create my own setup using Linux From Scratch. After much hair pulling and ulcers, I eventually got it going to my tastes, but I found a thing called "dependency hell". Somebody said I should look at Gentoo Stage-1 install as that was pretty close to LFS, however with a pretty powerful package manager, thus circumventing the dependency problems I had with LFS.

I have kept Gentoo as my main distro on all the machines I control, except for a virtual which I keep for trying other things on, be it Compiz, some other new 'thing' or distro, or even other OS's.

That was all in around 2003, then I joined the Linux Newbies (that is here) in 2004 and joined the Gentoo community in 2005.

I am strictly an end user, not sure about it, but some have called me a power user as well, heck, I even had a job as a Systems Overlord for a small firm, but am now not working due to a permanent disability.

Just one other thing, I couldn't code if my life depended on it, coding is like a language, and as I suck at learning languages, I was never able to pick up anymore than a smattering of Basic and some very basic Pascal. In my Windows days I even sucked at batch files, I know, hard to do, but I managed somehow.

OK, that's my sorry tail of introduction, I'll 'see' you around.

Regards, Robert.

- wow, so long ago - very cool!

You reminded me of one other reason I changed from MS in '95, they didn't have a TCP/IP stack, RH did! MS was still thinking in the area of having something similar to AOL of that time, like a huge BB, but with private links within. The Net was already quite big, MS just didn't know it, even though the rest of the world did.

My RH distro came on 2 floppies, downloaded from the net with my crusty old modem (96 baud? .. too long ago) which took nearly 2 hours to get. The whole thing came as a single zip image to be unzipped to floppy. I still wince at the memory of sitting in my very cold office with a couple of mates all night getting the X server to work (that was on another floppy from a third party, HP I think, or was Xfree86 already going then?)

One of the problems with the medication I take is it's killing off, or the least, making very fuzzy, some of my long term memories, damn.

As other old-timers on this forum will tell you, things are very much improved now, with high speeds, improved software and Moores Law hardware. Thank God for RMS and the FSF, otherwise it would be a very different picture.