I first heard about Linux in 1995 or so, when I saw a guy on the bus at college with what I now know to be a Slackware book in his hand. I asked him "What's that?" He said "It's Linux." I said "What's Linux?" It sounded really interesting, but I only owned one computer at the time and wasn't going to risk my data with a dual-install system. So it had to wait until I was out of college and at a job where I put together a system from leftover parts and installed Red Hat 5.2 on it. I immediately loved it because: * It didn't treat me like I was an idiot. * It didn't crash once a day or more! * I could talk to my computer in complete sentences (command line) instead of using a point-and-grunt interface. * The manual was good and helpful. (Yes, I got the company to buy the boxed set). * RH5.2 was the first version that supported different languages in the installer. Their test language was 'redneck'. So the installer would ask questions like: Whut kind of CD-ROM dew yew have? [ ] SCSI CD-ROM [X] Crappy CD-ROM Would you like to floormat yer hard drive? Congratupations yew are dun! So here was an OS that could laugh at itself! I loved it. At home I put Debian on a machine I'd built from parts bought at government auction. Not having a network card for it, I sneakerneted all the packages over to it on floppies. Learned a bit about tarballs and cat in the process. I still wasn't willing to switch to Linux, primarily because my preferred mail/newsreader was Agent, which wasn't available on Linux. However, eventually my Windows machine got loaded with viruses and installed Red Hat 6.0 on it. It was an old and slow machine tho (Cyrix 166/32MB RAM) and when I had the money I got a shiny new 1.1GHz machine and installed Debian on it. 9+ years later, I'm still using that same box for my home workstation. The disk drives have been replaced several times over tho. (Usually without too much data loss). The fundamental problem now is that the Web is so flash-heavy these days that a 1.1GHz single-core machine is just not up to the task. -- Carl Soderstrom Systems Administrator Real-Time Enterprises www.real-time.com