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My first Linux distribution was Slackware 2.2.0 and kernel 1.2.1. Linux was a daunting adventure in those days. Xfree86 didn't support my diamond video card, and I had to settle for life without X11. Sound was rather easy to configure, though. All you had to do was pick a precompiled kernel for your soundcard and cdrom, and away you went. But, I had no idea what I was doing then, so I still used OS/2 quite a bit.
Then someone told me about a new distribution called Red Hat. They said it was really easy to use and that it included a different X Server that supported oddball video cards like mine. I had dreamed of running X Windows, so I ordered a copy online, and within an hour of my having received the CD-ROM in the mail, I was viewing my first X Window display. Very humble fvwm 1.x, but it was X, by golly. I didn't care how ugly it was, I was in business now!
Now, thanks to Metro-X, which was included for free in Red Hat at that time, I had a display that I could stand to look at for hours at a time, and Linux began to be my exclusive operating system of choice. Pretty soon, my display didn't look so plain and ugly anymore, as I experimented with new window manager configurations under fvwm and later under AfterStep, which was called Bowman in those days. Also, Open Look was still popular then, and I liked the looks of that.
I kept upgrading and pretty soon, years later, I'm now running 2.0.36 on some machines, and I now run Linux on everything except my daughter's edu-tainment machine (she's 2 years old), and my wife's PC (she insists on running certain Windoze-only software). Debian and Redhat are my distributions of choice, though I have tried Caldera, SuSe, and Slackware too. Basically, I feel Linux is Linux, and it doesn't matter a darn what distribution you use.
There's nothing very impressive about my hardware: I have an old 133Mhz Pentium, a 200Mhz Pentium, a 166Mhz Pentium, an old DX-2 486, and a 75Mhz 486 (my laptop). They all run Linux, except the 200 Mhz Pentium, which serves as my daughters edutainment machine. My wife's machine dual boots, but mostly it stays in Windoze.
I recently have taken a shine to Window Maker. I think I like it even better than AfterStep, for the most part. It's taken some time to get used to not using the desktop pager, since Window Maker uses something different called the "clip". But I think I'm just as productive with it as I ever was with AfterStep. Here's a current screenshot. Here are some theme goodies I've put together for my Window Maker setup.
You'll notice in the above screenshot that I'm using a "nature theme" of my own devising. Actually, I swiped the wallpaper from Digital Blasphemy, and I picked up the tiles from Themes.org. When you design your own themes, these are great places to get ideas from. I grabbed some sounds from an old Windoze box and converted them from the proprietary WAV format into a more standard WAV format using Sox. As usual, Microsoft tries to make up their own screwed up standard instead of following pre-existing functional standards.
Window Maker makes creating themes quite easy. It's much easier under Window Maker than it was under AfterStep, IMHO. There's built-in support for themes, both adding them and creating new ones from scratch. I miss the collapsing Warf bar that AfterStep had, but there are many tricks you can do with the "Clip" that I haven't tried out yet. And the Window Maker dockable applets are really cool (they work under AfterStep, too).
Well, I'm a technical writer by trade. I've published Special Edition, Using SGML from QUE together with Martin Colby. And I share a Linux-related column in ComputorEdge Magazine called I Don't Do Windows. The rest of the time I raise my 2-year-old daughter, Ginny. I'm a stay-at-home dad. My wife goes out and earns the big bucks, and I get to play house with Ginny. It's a lot of fun.
The one thing I wish Linux handled better was edutainment games. I would guestimate that most of the Linux developers in the world are single males and don't yet have families. Consequently, they don't think much about developing edutainment games for young children. So I have to resort to commercial solutions for Windoze, since this is one niche that I haven't found support for yet. But the people at Creative Wonders appear to make some pretty good stuff that Ginny has really been enjoying. When games like this are available for Linux, I'll be able to wipe that Windows 95 partition off for good. Unless I decide to do some more development with the CygWin libraries, which I've been starting to use a little bit. At least they make porting Unix apps to Windoze much easier.
My current project is a little book called Linux Killer Apps. It's hardly underway yet, so I probably shouldn't talk much about it until I get further a long. But unlike my last book, I'll write this one and get a solid technical review as I go. Quality, not speed, will be my priority. I also continue to write for ComputorEdge. My archived articles are here.
I've also been trying to teach myself programming. I've been learning the bash shell, Perl, and C. I had taken Pascal and school, but that was in 1984, before I even had a worthy PC that was all my own. So, I continue to write little programs, mainly for self-instruction, and perhaps I might make some of them available.
It rocks because it's robust, fast, scalable, and very flexible. You can do just about anything with Linux, from powering your Palmtop computer to your Beowulf cluster. You can run servers galore or you can run your home office on it.
It's one of the few things in the last few years that's made me want to advocate something. There aren't many things around that excite me like this. Imagine, free software that is better than commercial! You don't have to live with Microsoft's Bullshit! There are better alternatives! To me, this is big news. And it's news I'm very grateful to hear. So, now, back to your regularly scheduled programming!
