lets share hw our love affair wf Linux started

colinquek

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My stint with Linux (RedHat) began almost 14 yrs ago in a class lab. The installation was totally harrowing and in the end i think the distro we got gave us some UI but main things are doing in terminal.

Sometime last yr tot to give Ubuntu a shot so installed into VirtualBox and try. Looks ok. Reason why i was looking @ Linux was becos my new desktop came with Vista and well u know the rest.

This yr had to take a course in my degree on OpenSource and again Linux came into the picture. However this time round i decided to install Ubuntu into a secondary harddisk and boy ive never installed any OS so smoothly before.

(side note: i literally plugged in my printer and voila, Ubuntu detected it correctly and im off and running, no need to pop cd for installation)

Currently exploring how to tweak the installation, thats how i learn, basically i spend like 3 hrs every night playing ard with it and I AM IMPRESSED. The way things are done in Linux.

Im still a noob @ this though. Hence im prepared to crash the install and start over, till now have not come to tt... maybe when i start to tweak some special conf files or play ard w the Kernels. :D

Im sticking w Linux for now to run my home pc, the Vista harddisk is still ard though, for my siblings, but eventually will migrate them over.
 

tech_specialist

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hey guys ...

i'm a new member of this forum .. and as i read this thread , i noticed very interesting thing ... by the way this thread was published 4 years ago ... and as i'm speaking right now ... Open Source Developing is moving forward in an "obviouse Way" ...

as szeli mentioned in his first post of this thread ...

l see this Opensource community is gettin quite alot of ppl interested in Linux n Opensource. so y not we start a thread to share hw we got into it and hw it has/had/will play a part in our careers/lives?

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1st heard of Opensource in poly (96-99) SP batch bt was too blindly downloadin freeware =:p n coping wf projects to actualli research more. was nonetheless intrigued by e power of e Opensource movement n community..

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fast4ward2 2002, finally ORD frm NS, havin a helluva time tryin to gt a proper job..
1 day gt a call from a BMT buddy.. started chatting bout hw2 b more employable. he pushed e idea - y nt pick up Opensource n Linux, sure will take off sooner or later so he had bought this 'PC World Linux Minibook' complete wf Redhat 7.1 n Mandrake 8 from Borders a few days back.. Needless2 say, i expressed my interest n my good fren gladly made me a copy of everything!

-----------

omg , i can feel life is going to show us a very interesting future ... without greedy companies , that bury talents for their own profits ...

Andy
 

anivisual

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love affair? Not really XD

Just that when using free software, there was usually a .tar.gz download available too, and I wondered about installing Linux. Problem was, there was no free disk space available. Then I got a new laptop,and the first thing I did was to resize the Windows partition and install Ubuntu. I was afraid of the command line, but I learned. On the way, I learned to compile files NOT from an IDE, use Makefiles, perform rudimentary system administration, learned a little shell scripting, learned Perl and Python...

And that was one and a half years ago.

I have the man-pages and the wonderful documentation to thank.
 

vcrpex

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Hi noob here.

Hi Everyone,
just migrated both my desktop and laptop to ubuntu 9.04 recently. Thanks to a trojan that hit my wife's desktop. I was looking around for an antivirus then and hoping to rebuild a new CPU and buy Windows 7 when it is launch. After looking at the price of Windows 7, I decided to ditch Windows for good. Refused to pay for the license of the OS and antivirus that cloaked the system.

As for my background, came from DOS background in my initial years to the PC. To be fair, it is really for only playing games then. But to play games then, probably some of you guys would remember that we have to configure autoexec.bat and config.sys. Then progress to Windows 98. My first linux is Redhat 5.0, bought the box set then. It was not bad, but i couldnt really play any games then. jumped back to windows. tried Suse 7.0, debian and Redhat 8.0. Use Redhat 8.0 for my uni final project of a honeypot, in the end they do not really understand what i was doing, though i learn quite alot of linux. But i was still using XP as my staple then. I was trained in IT using only Windows based platform. But Linux and its networking tools is simply superb(the command lines), fast and efficient. Those were the days when i was still a hacker-wannabe.

Now I only use Ubuntu for work and normal use. Past the days of trying to make everything as lean as possible. Perhaps age and getting lazy. Just want it to be much less prone to trojan and virus, also without hanging.
 

CarteBlanche

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Just could not stand how bloated MS windows was and switched to linux. Its quick and stable. Using it since early mid 2000. Never looked back
 

intj_rational

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Well, I think I heard of the word "Linux" back in secondary sch with a friend who did some programming in his spare time. Back then, the most well known distribution is Red Hat, so I downloaded and tried it. Well, I was still very young back then.. so didnt really appreciate it much. Didnt do much on it.


But now, it's a different thing. I'm still relatively noob at it, but over these ... 6 years or so that I didnt use Linux, the open source community and technology in general improved quite a lot. I decided to do some programming again and naturally, my previous experience on Linux just made me realize that it's the ONLY RIGHT WAY to do it. And because of my rustiness, I chose Ubuntu as a starting point. Moved on to Arch and Fedora after a few months.


Linux is just so much simpler, just not as user friendly for some distributions and when it comes to obscure hardware, eg. wireless devices, but it's getting better and better, especially with the Internet's explosive growth. Emacs, vi, gcc, with perl, python automatically installed. Powerful package management systems and frontends (apt, yum, pacman, etc) to resolve dependencies and make installing software as easy as typing a few commands. And some of the best software you can get!


For some reason, I think it's a love / hate relationship. If someone has really experienced the power of Linux, he'll probably be stuck with it forever. Open source simply empowers people. The guru can customize all that he wants, beginners can use a more friendly distribution while building up their knowledge. Suitable abstractions to mask complexity (package managers, guis, etc), while giving one the power to go under the hood (it's open source).
 

genie47

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My father is 70 this year and I helped him install Win7. After a few days the OS screwed up everything. He got mad and saw I was using Linux Mint 8. Was very interested. He did videos and music for church so I installed Ubuntu Studio.

Now he likes his US system. I don't know about those who don't want to switch. But I think it comes if you have an attitude to progress and improve. Even at 70 and if there is a new open source OS out there, even you can make the switch.

Now I dunno if he will return me the OEM Win7 installation DVD. I can sell it for some money.
 

hawthorne

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we used linux for our servers in office. hence forced to use Linux. slowly all my PCs at home installed with Linux. more stable and must faster than windows
 

wackykid

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for me... i heard all the good stuff about ubuntu... how fast it is and easy to use too... plus i was getting sick of vista... couldn't downgrade to winxp... but didn't wanted to spend $$$ to buy win7... so decided to try out ubuntu by burning bootable CD... was so impressed how (fast) it booted from CD... that i decided to install it to try... since it's likely to be even faster...

started off installing ubuntu on 2GB thumbdrive... because (1) i wanted to try it out w/o affecting my existing vista partitions and (2) i have too much junk and couldn't free up partition space for ubuntu... and (3) i had an unused 2GB thumbdrive... which is kinda useless since i have larger thumbdrive already for ordinary use... that time ubuntu 9.10 was the latest... tried installing but hitting problems fitting on 2GB thumbdrive... later tried xubuntu 9.10 and had no problems fitting on the thumbdrive... liked it alot... with the speed... and it meets most of my needs...

when ubuntu 10.04 LTS released... found that xubuntu 10.04 couldn't fit on my 2GB thumbdrive either... but the installer clearly can fit on a single CD!! so i thought there MUST be a way to fit on 2GB thumbdrive... went internet search and found my answer... squashfs and unionfs... and by installing on 8GB thumbdrive first... after squashfs and unionfs to reduce disk usage to less than 2GB... use resize2fs to reduce partition size to 2GB and dd to transport it to the 2GB thumbdrive... and after that i found that ubuntu 10.04 works better than xubuntu - which i experienced some weird bugs that i couldn't find a solution.. and it became my default bootup mode for months...

having my ubuntu on 2GB thumbdrive has another advantage too.. i could easily backup the entire USB image and experiment witih tweaking the OS... if i break anything... all i need to do is to restore entire image...

then one day i decided to clean up garbage on my hard disk to clear up partition space for ubuntu... because i'm so hooked to ubuntu that i wanted to install several things like wine and vmware but i just don't have space on 2GB thumbdrive even with squashfs... so i did it and now i'm using ubuntu 10.04 off my HDD... :D


regards,
wacky
 
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decker23

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one word. "Work"

strangely i dont use linux at home. instead switched to OSX. haha

Windows is still needed for the games la thou.
 

digitalkapre

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my love affair with linux started in college, circa year 2000. It was still very manual back then, since we are installing it on underpowered servers. It was all a commandline affair, from installation, to configuration, to installing PostgreSQL and Apache + PHP. I loved linux as a server OS, but never as a desktop. Back then, I felt I am more productive in an NT machine than in a linux one.

Fast forward to 2006, after 2 years in MacOS X and the rest of my days in XP, I landed a job with a company that was so very much into open source. We were encouraged to use Linux although we also had Windows XP licenses for those who can't live without it. I decided to continue my love affair with linux, but this time, on
the desktop. Glad to say I am now more productive in a linux machine than with Mac OS X and any M$ operating systems. I guess it had something to do with knowing your tools intimately than in those other OS.

After my move to Singapore, I had to make do with the windows xp that our company currently installs in our machine. Can't do anything about it as our IT is
so M$ centric. All I can do is bitch and whine about it but at the end of the day, I had to learn to live with it.

<rant> ... windows XP is the house of pain for programmers ... </rant>

Or maybe for programmers who've tasted other development systems.

I cut my teeth in Linux so I'm used to programming tools that can be extended until it can blow up the world. And that is what I miss.

Oh well. No worries, I'm getting my Lenovo Thinkpad T420 next month, and the first priority is to install Linux into it. Ah, what sweet thought!!!!!!!!!
 

andrew_g

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Linux in the beginning is the internet's os, er, rather, it is the os that is developed on the internet spearheaded by Linus with perhaps 100s of other very talented (top notch: MIT, UCB etc) developers / builders chipping in, it keep growing until it finally become an ecosystem, today a mutant of that runs in every android (phones, tablets, devices) - if every phone is a system, probably a globally largest installed o/s. it seemed to be also the os which the fastest supercomputers runs on today :s13:

http://readwrite.com/2014/07/01/lin...olish-to-bet-against-open-source-communities/
 
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Asphodeli

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I got exposed to linux at the tender age of 10 via my dad's tinkering with his home PC...one fine day I found out I couldn't play any games on the computer. :( But I found it "cool", since it wasn't mainstream.

Fast forward to secondary school; played around with RedHat 4 on the school computers, and a bit of Fedora in poly. The early exposure to linux helped a lot for one of my poly modules where we had to telnet (this was before security concerns forced everyone to use ssh) into a school server (IIRC it was an old Sun server, not sure what model & OS exactly) to write a shell script as aschool assignment. Most of my poly friends did their assignment in school overnight because they had no idea you can dual-boot a nix-based OS on your school laptop and do the assignment at home (the Sun server was only accessible on-campus). So I was the only bright-eyed kid in school on submission day, when everyone else had eyebags. :D

After graduation, i started to get exposed to linux more and more, due to perhaps the nature of changing jobs quickly (and partially due to the rise of the iPhone).
 

addictzz

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Linux total newbie here and I am not trying to be low-profile. I am very new to linux environment. Started to know about linux in university but never actually took any interest back then. When I started to work with servers and web development, I began to know about linux more and fell in love with it. Stability & security are 2 main things that make me fall in love with Linux. And...it's free!

The fact that I use mac at home helps me in getting familiar with the terminal command in Linux.

One more thing that makes me like Linux is the open-source nature. I would have less worry with licensing issue and there are much more support to the apps on the internet. Although, some of the paid apps from mac do look more beautiful.
 
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