On 06/28 10:20 , Steve Cayford wrote: > I started on Redhat 6.2, followed Redhat for a while, but didn't like > working with RPM so much. Tried some minimal distros on old laptops, > switched to Slackware, then discovered Debian and have been on Debian > and Ubuntu ever since. I talked to someone on the bus in college who had a thick book which I now recognize as a Slackware manual... about 1995-96. Me: What's that? Him: It's Linux. Me: What's linux? I heard about it off and on for a few more years but didn't have a spare machine to dedicate to it until I got a paying job and got the boss to buy a copy of the Red Hat 5.2 boxed set (with a real dead-trees manual and all). I fell in love with it because: - The installer had a 'redneck' language option, with phrases like "Would you like to floormat yer hard drive?", "Wut kind of CD-ROM do yew have? [ ] SCSI CD-ROM [ ] Crappy CD-ROM" and "Congratupations yew is done!". I loved an OS that could laugh at itself. - I could speak to my computer in complete sentences rather than use a point-and-grunt interface. After using RH5.2 and RH6; I tried Debian because all the geeks in TCLUG (those of you still around know whom you are) were saying how great apt was. The main thing I saw in Debian was that it was a distributed volunteer effort; so they tended to build tools to ease the workload and distribute control as much as possible, rather than have a centralized 'authority' like Red Hat needed for its corporate strategy. (Some interesting parallels could probably be drawn between the centralization/distribution degrees of various Linux distros and the political statism/anarchism spectrum). I've stuck with Debian ever since. I still can't get over the silly sound of 'Ubuntu' even if the development seems to be much more active than Debian. -- Carl Soderstrom Systems Administrator Real-Time Enterprises www.real-time.com