Walking with Linus

Saturday, December 23, 2006

In 1991, Linus Torvalds would begin working on a kernel that would change the world as we know it. Not only would Linus go on to receive two honorary doctorates from Stockholm and Helsinki, but variants of Linus' kernel would become home to 25% of Internet servers and 2.8% of desktop computers. This phenomenon of course is Linux. Join me in this wonderful world, share my frustrations, delights and honest opinions in this simple blog... Walking with Linus.

Brief History

Sunday, December 24, 2006

As this entry is entitled Walking with Linus, I think I had better start with my computing history in general, and how Linux came to be for me. This is my story.

Many years ago during my childhood, a family friend gave me an old Olivetti computer. This computer, running only MS-DOS at that stage, would be the foundation for my life in IT.

Working for so many years with Dos really shaped my understanding of control, flexibility and ultimately power. Sometimes yes, there was the feeling that you might be one or two keystrokes away from a reinstall, but once you knew how to reinstall, you were empowered... you were in control. Dos was certainly expert friendly, just not user friendly... a great deal learning and trial/error was invariable involved.

Over the coming years, I would explore and migrate through various versions of MS-DOS, through Windows 3.1x, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 I was truly Windows Compatible. Indeed I would later become an expert in Microsoft products through Microsoft certification programs.

It was my work with the server family of Microsoft products that would actually provide my first real understanding and thinking on Linux. The realization that 60-75% of Internet servers were actually Apache (used mainly on Unix based systems and Novell NetWare), would finally make me stop and ask the big question: Is Microsoft really the only game in town?

Dissatisfaction and lack of user control were other contributing factors, but news of the latest addition to the Windows family, Windows Vista, would be the final insult. Windows Vista would take everything I disliked about our new user friendly culture and amalgamate them into one bulk of a monster. Call it bulkware, bloatware, junkware... I called it Vista. Requiring at a minimum 512mb RAM and 15GB of free drive space, Vista promised to be a glorified entertainment center, and very little else.

So for me, something had to be done. I needed an alternative, and the very real question of Linux would prove to hold the answer. Late 2005, I decided to make the switch, and officially migrated from Windows XP to Fedora Core, a Red Hat based distribution. Why Fedora? At the time, Red Hat was about the only distribution I had actually heard of, so logically it was the only choice.

Christmas 2005 turned out to be a little problematic with a myriad of driver, compatibility and general usage issues. In early 2006, I decided that Linux simply was not "ready for me".

Six months later, mid 2006, with the impending doom of Vista, I decided once and for all to migrate... whatever the cost. Again I sought Red Hat as my steer, and after some weeks of troubleshooting Fedora met the criteria. The criteria was simple enough at the time... the distribution just had to meet the functionality of Windows. This criteria would change of course, because I would have to start doing something again that I blame Windows for loosing; thinking outside the box.

Although Fedora had met this level, speed was a constant issue. Still to this day I'm not sure why, but I presume it was an innate hardware incompatibility. Somewhat disheartened, I decided to seek out new life and new civilization... and locate another distribution. After many hours of research and some excellent comparison sites such as DistroWatch.com, I decided on Novell's openSUSE. This would be the start of a beautiful friendship.