Howdy all,

First time poster (was told I could not post a link, so...).

Been using linux for about 4 or 5 years now. Debian and Ubuntu. Slow start, getting more interested in improving coding and in supporting hardware.

Short summary:

Hated computers at university, no interest. Green screens, clickety-click keyboards, stinky geeks, yuck! Much preferred aikido practice in lunch breaks :-)

My undergrad thesis was typed in MSWord. I'll never forgive the guy that spread the "word" and made me change from Wordperfect LOL That was around 1993.

1996 completed MSc. in remote sensing, during which time I learnt to use Scientific Word. Worked on Windows machines, programming in C. To use the internet used the then-new Mozaic, and tn for Usenet on some fancy Solaris SPARC machines in the signal-processing lab, which were great but way to complex for me to understand. Yeah, I kid you not. At the time, a colleague was installing laboriously initial versions of RedHat linux on some PCs. Night after night, copious notes, CDs all over the place, cables and devices lying around. A nightmare. No way I was doing anything like that!

Spent 2 years working as a systems engineer, basically attending meetings, typing Word documents, and watching management enjoy their lives. Hweeooo, I wanted out before I died...

Japan. 2003, completed Ph.D. in atmospheric science, using Solaris SPARC entirely, programming in Fortran, C, and scripting in shell, IDL and Matlab. My first serious attempts to understand unix, emacs, vi, printing filters, mail setups and GUIs. Fell in love with emacs, gnus and the command line. Solaris 6 couldn't do stuff I wanted (support, what support?) so I asked for a machine with Solaris 8 on it, upgraded the USB system to 2.0 state, and got sound, movies and internet radio working. Hooray!

Around the same time... Fiddling with my home machine with a PII 400MHz came next. Fed up with Windows 98 and 2000 after hardware vendors refused to make drivers for a scanner that I had (Sharp, for anyone that cares) which did not work under Windows 2000... decided to try linux.

First CDs bought via magazines, RedHat linux 8. Install was fine, PPPoE worked and I had ISDN access at the dorm. Faster that windows, but I found it hard to move address books, bookmarks, and documents across partitions (total noob!) and MS document reading was a pain. I used dual-boot, did mail in Windows, and other internet access in linux. Not a happy setup!

Eventually tried RedHat 9, more of the same. What irritated me was the new install. What about my existing stuff huh? (noob!) So I checked out the alternatives, and found out abut Debian. Start of love.

On desktop installed GNU/linux Debian fairly easily with defaults from bought CDs. PPPoE was a real pain for me, took weeks of work at night and reading up on a connected machine at work during the day. Sweat and blood. Then nvidia setup. Maybe two month work (kernel 2.4.27) with kernel recompilation. Scanner, oh god. Fiddling with hotplug scripts. No printer so saved a hassle there :-) All in all, after 1 year I had everything working more or less as I wanted it. I have to admit to screwing up once or twice with partitioning when I tried to make the system dual-boot, with Windows 2000. I was not ready (no, linux was not ready, with distinct problems with Japanese text support) to do away with MS just yet.

After one year, I decided to install Debian on the Dell Inspiron 1100 I was borrowing from the university. It had no floppy and only a CD-R, and ran Windows XP. I decided to do a dual-boot system, risky as the drive was only 40GB and I needed 20GB for the existing XP installation. Pain pain pain: the network card (Broadcom) was not supported, so I burnt 14 Sarge CDs and began. Luckily intel 945 graphics card was perfectly supported, but it took me more than a week to get the Broadcom drivers and network card working.

In the last four or five years I have been using various versions of Debian GNU/linux, currently using unstable only. When I upgraded my Asus P2B MB to a P3V4X no complaints from linux, but Win2000 stopped booting. I still accessed some files from there but don't use it anymore.

It has been only in the last six months that Debian has matured enough to make it a complete replacement (for me) for Windows. Since about June 2006 Japanese input (UIM, Anthy) has been perfect, also in OpenOffice, and latex CJK has become stable with UTF-8 encoding.

Plus a severe (3 year) problem with handing X and crashed sessions was solved by putting in news RAM (thanks for the tip on the UIM mailing list): my number one SDRAM had a 0.3MB section of bad RAM (found by memtest) which apparently only rarely got used. Now I run 2GB of RAM on the P3V4X with a 850MHz PIII Slot1 CPU, 3 HDDs and a DVD multidrive, an nVidia card with 128MB of ram and a GeForce 6200 chipset, an old but trusty Creative audio card unofficially supported by ALSA, and a scanner and external USB drives as needed. An Eizo/Nanao L360 15" LCD monitor which is also 8 years old now, the system working perfectly, as fast if not faster than the latest Windows XP and Vista machines that my lab colleagues use. Of course, doing multimedia stuff would require faster processor capable of better stuff, and I only have AGP4x speed support. Upgrade costs were laughable. When I find a Slot1 adapter I will add a 1133MHz PIII and get the absolute most out of my board. Life is good.

My aim is to support several TV cards that are common here in Japan, and am hacking these slowly but surely, using a (legal) Windows XP installation on one partition to examine the drivers. Good fun, and hopefully will become some contribution back to the community.

There, can I now post a link please? :-)
Cheers, Gernot

Wow... nice intro.

Welcome to LinuxQuestions! I hope you'll find this a productive community to be a part of. Enjoy your time!

David