On 12/31 06:24 , r j wrote: > I am collecting stories about how people got started using Linux. > Please share yours. if you send it to TClug I would like your permission to > use it on my blog. > http://www.ron-l-j.com/blog/ I first learned about Linux when I was riding the bus at the University I went to; and one of the foreign exchange students had a thick green book with (I think) a picture of God and Adam holding network cables out to each other. I asked him "What's that?" He said "that's Linux." I said "what's Linux?" I wasn't ready to trust my one and only computer to a dual-boot configuration; so I put off trying Linux until I had my first real job after college. About November 1998 I convinced the company to buy a copy of Red Hat 5.1. The secretary brought the box back to my area and said "did you order some red hats?" I immediately fell in love with it for two reasons: Red Hat 5 introduced language localizations, and Donnie Barnes at Red Hat translated the Linux installer into 'redneck'. So it asked questions like "wud yoo like to floormat yer hard drive?", "Whut kind of CD-ROM do you have? [x] SCSI CD-ROM [ ] Crappy CD-ROM", and "Congradupations yew is dun!" I loved an OS that could laugh at itself. I also loved the fact that I could talk to it in complete sentences rather than use a point and grunt interface. I'd briefly used some Unix boxen back in college; but here was my first chance to really install software and set things up my way. 12 years later, I still feel like a n00b compared to the guys who were using it since the days when it fit on a 5.25" floppy. :) -- Carl Soderstrom Systems Administrator Real-Time Enterprises www.real-time.com