A cuddly penguin
All the way back in High School my senior year ('93-94) I remember someone making a comment about something called Linux. It was not until many years later in college would I really learn what it was. I had heard a few things about it over the years, and on a whim while walking through the nearly baron Egghead Software store I grabbed a Linux distribution. Only later on would I realize the bane of Linux industry that this company would become. The distribution was Caldera OpenLinux 1.1, err maybe 1.2. Anyways. This company purchased part of SCO. Rename themselves The SCO Group and sued IBM. Anyways, back to my Linux story.
My initial install and attempt at Linux was a failed attempt. This was around winter of '97/98 or so. The video driver for my chipset wasn't that good. Rather than purhcase a new, and better, video card I let Windows 95 have the rest of the sytsem.
Then one Sunday evening in April of '99 disaster struck. I was running a disk compression system and it failed, taking the entire system, software wise, with it. Completely upset and angered about this, I knew what my answer would be. Linux! I had learned more things in the interevening time and sought out a RedHat book. The local Borders had a copy of a RedHat 5.1 book. I still have it, but not sure the name of it. Thus, my Linux journey begins.
I followed RedHat through various upgrades through the years. Starting with that 5.1 book, boxed retail sets of 5.2, 6.2 and 7.2. Might be even an 8 in there as well. It used to be a common things for people to purchase or only deploy the .2 releases as they were usually the most stable. I then transitioned to the Fedora Core line with FC1 and FC3.
Changing Times and Distributions
In the spring of 2006, having several members of the Fresno Open Source Users Group (FOSUG) tought the advantages and wonders of the Gentoo distribution, I made the move. My latest FC3 install (nearly a year behind the times) was getting to be hard to maintain because of my use of some conflicting 3rd party packages and the "treatment" that RedHat applies to KDE.
I have definately learned a lot using Gentoo. Though my skills in working with it are not where they are with RedHat-based distros I'm learning more every day. So far at home my server and desktop are running Gentoo. I just recently moved the server at work to CentOS 4.3 (from RH 7.1). We needed a new disk sub-system so I took the time to completely reinstall with a modern distribution.