Friend told me about it
 

I used to be for Microsoft everything, but it was a Bible study friend from many years ago who just happened to have a 4-monitor Slackware setup, and he showed me just how flexible Linux is as compared to Windows. One of the classes I took to get my Associate's degree in IT was a basic UNIX class, and it gave me the basic command-line knowledge. Mind you, I used to prefer DOS over Windows 95 - so I was no stranger to the terminal (knew it as "command line"). It wasn't until 2005 or so when I lost 3 copies of Windows XP Home to malware and viruses that I decided to look at my options. Debian 3.0 didn't work out for me, so I did some research. I'm a multimedia person, not a developer. Ubuntu came quite naturally. Over time, I learned how Debian worked, and I even installed it on a couple business clients' computers since they couldn't afford a copy of Windows and Office. I'm still disappointed that WPS Office is in its youth. It needs more language support.

Red Hat in the early days
 

Was made aware of several variants many years ago. Red Hat and Fedora were evolving and would run on basic PC's.

Firewall admin
 

While I was working with the United Nations in Iraq back in 1997, I was asked by my colleague, who installed RH-5 (IIRC) on an olde PC to serve as a Firewall for our then infant LAN; a LAN that was made up of thicknet and thinnet coax. Ah, those were the days.

That intro to Linux fuelled my curiosity. I had some background in BSD Unix, which was only useable in a corporate environment. Linux, as Linus intended, allowed access to a *nix type environment right there on my desktop PC.

It was right there on my desktop alright; but I had some work to do to get it to do what I wanted it to do. I had lots of fun learning though.

Over the last 19 years, I've tried several distros, but I suppose after learning the RH method, I tend to use Centos mostly. I use Ubuntu on a few servers too.

I love the stability, security, resilience, and most importantly the openness of Linux.

In no small way, Linux has made the Internet available to lots of peeps.


cheers

New Year's 2009
 

I first became aware of Linux when I read about it in a magazine—I want to say it was Rolling Stone—over Labor Day weekend in 1998. While I remained 'Linux curious' after reading that article, it would be more than a decade before I would actually lay my hands on a Linux laptop over New Year's weekend 2009. I was visiting friends in the mountains of North Carolina and one of the other house guests was a software engineer for SAS Institute. Our host said he had a five-year-old Gateway laptop that wasn't running very well and the engineer suggested that since our host didn't have any recovery discs, the most viable alternative would be to replace the aging Windows XP installation with a fresh install of Ubuntu Linux. We downloaded a live disc image, burned it to a CD, and ran it on the laptop in question to test it out. After several of us played with it for the better part of a day, I asked our host if he was ready to install it on the hard drive and he said to go ahead and do a clean install as there were no files on the computer he needed to keep. Then he asked me to do the honors. So not only was it the first time I had ever played with a computer running Linux, I actually installed it on on the laptop with a sum total of maybe a couple hours' Linux experience under my belt. It was just that easy. Within a half hour, the machine was booting into Ubuntu from its internal hard drive, although the WiFi and printer drivers still needed to be configured manually, which was the point at which I passed the machine over to the software engineer.

I was impressed enough by that experience that when I got home from that trip, I immediately started looking on eBay for a cheap, used laptop on which I could install Linux for myself. I was also writing freelance at the time for a computer magazine called PC Solutions and suggested to the editor that I do an article on the experience of installing Linux on a computer as a total novice. He agreed, I bought a laptop, installed OpenSUSE on it and used it to write the article, which appeared in the spring 2009 issue. I've been a Linux dabbler ever since and wrote several other articles on Linux before PC Solutions closed down with the fall 2013 issue. I left OpenSUSE behind after a couple of years when that first Linux laptop died and then I began experimenting with other distros on the machine that replaced it. I tried Fedora, then Ubuntu (didn't like the Unity interface) and subsequently settled on Xubuntu for several years. These days, that machine is running Linux Mint with xfce. I say I'm a dabbler because I mainly use a Mac at home and I'm forced to use Windows at work.

Why so many wrong user-agent's ? LOL... :scratch:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...er-4175585997/ ;)

How did I discover Linux?
I had been using WebTV and sort of found out what being "online" meant. I bought a PC with Windows 98 and was learning how to work with it. I ran into something when I would try to use the "web" to search for issues, interesting stuff that worked on Linux but not Windows. So what is Linux really? The more I looked into it it seemed to be pretty similar to Windows. In the GUI you clicked on icons to make stuff work and in the CLI you had other programs. I was finding that my OEM Windows 98 did not allow me to have two versions (one stable and one experimental) about the same time I successfully installed my first fully working Linux distribution, Suse 6.4. I have to laugh a bit about the "year of the Linux Desktop" thing because Linux was a perfectly fine desktop c. 2000 when I installed Suse. Now I am a grumpy old guy that wonders about the rise of the totalitarian operating systems (Windows 10 and systemd Linux, my way or the highway crap.)

From a computer magazine, don't know which one. It was to long ago. I tried a couple of Suse Linux distro's but couldn't get it to work properly.
Then I discovered Ubuntu and they send me the CD. That worked a lot better, but still not 100%, had to wait for Linux Mint for my first working distro.

I don't even remember clearly the why and how. I think I heard about it a lot in a forum (http://www.heise.de/newsticker). Yes, that started it. Must have been around SuSE 6.3 (1999?). That was the time I got my first own PC, having used Atari ST before that. Since at work we had NT 4.0 I bought that for my home use too. The PC had two disks from the start, one for windows one for Linux. I was very carefully stepping over to linux because I feared data loss and had no clue whatsoever about linux. I did dual boot then using the windows boot loader and SuSE.

SuSE then came with magnificent documentation: three solid books each with many hundred pages (most of which just went right over my head), it cost me about 60 Deutsche Marks and I felt that price well worth for what I got. Having only modem access I bought some later versions too. And I gradually moved away from windows at some time using GRUB for booting until I kicked out the old NT 4.0 (never bought a newer version). I'm still with ole SuSE since I like a good KDE installation.

Funny aside: my machine runs again windows (7) of my son from a truly ancient spare disk (SATA!) when my son is gaming :D. No windows on my serious system, though. The rest is Leap 42.1, Tumbleweed, Mint 17.3 and a residual openSUSE 13.2.

When starting my PhD in 1993 we were crunching numbers with a 5 CPU Interactive Unix box. I got a new PC workstation with OS/2 Warp but it sucked too much, so I installed Solarix-x86 which sucked just a bit less. At about the same I bought my first home PC which had Windows 3.11 pre-installed. When my colleague tired of my complaining about how much it sucked, he told me to install Slackware - which I did - and it didn't suck! A while later I realized that structural physics really wasn't my thing and got a job as a Unix/Linux consultant - I have never looked back and am still working for the same company - now as a Linux/Unix consultant.

First saw Linux at trade shows in the late nineties, and was an instant fan, since I already knew Unix. Started converting all my own stuff to it in 2006 when I retired (so no more Windows compatibility needed), and full distros such as Ubuntu had become available.

It was a long time ago, I was a Unix support engineer at the time. As far as I can remember it was due to articles in Computer Weekly. We employed a contractor to do some upgrades, he had Red Hat on his home computer and brought in a copy so we could try it out.

Around 2003 the company bought a Dell PC with Linux pre-loaded for evaluation but continued to use Unix on their main development systems.

um. that would have been a 386. Linux never ran on a 286 - though Coherent would.

Back in college, the teacher brought in a live Knoppix CD.

I downloaded linux Slackware, perhaps?? Any how, it was way back when the kernel was still 0.99. Managed to get it running on a IBM thinkpad.

Don't remember, "somewhere on the interent" probably newsgroup posts. Started seeing things about a free operating system with free tools and it sounded attractive. I have had dual boot boxes which could run linux since the 2.0 kernel series in 1996. Typically used Red Hat or Slackware distributions.