Hello everyone

Tue Apr 12 03:33:15 UTC 2005

On Mon, Apr 11, 2005 at 03:33:40PM -0400, Sy wrote
> Hi guys.. I thought I'd write a story to say hello.
> 
> 
> In the beginning, I fell in love with DOS (mostly thanks to 4DOS).  I
> BBSed on a 300 baud acoustically-coupled modem on a 286 when people
> were debating over the speed differences of a 486 vs the new pentium
> 60s.  14.4 modems were out back then.  I didn't care.. I didn't even
> understand the fashion of colour monitors.

  Here's my story.  I started out in 1983 on an Apple ][+ clone, and
BBS's and Compuserve.  I did OK in CP/M.  My first PC was a 10mhz AT
clone.  I liked the DOS command line.  As Windows gradually replaced
DOS, I found that I disliked email and usenet news in a GUI.  Back then,
good video cards were expensive, and I *HATED* "black" text on a white
background, because I could see the shimmer on the screen.  It was
murder on my eyes.  I tried to do as much as possible in DOS boxes.

  Approx 1997, spam was starting to become a nuisance.  The ISP I was
with, Interlog, had a menu-driven procmail filter.  They also had shell
accounts.  I joined the procmail mailing list and dug deeper into
procmail, and did quite a bit of testing and general screwing around at
the unix command prompt.  I got basic familiarity with the unix
commandline and I fell in love with it.  Sort of my beloved DOS
commandline, but on steroids.  The only problem was that this testing
was eating into my monthly quota of dialup hours.

  I got a new computer with Win98SE in Sept 99.  This left me with the
old Win95 machine kicking around.  I had read on the procmail list that
people were running procmail on linux.  So I went out and bought an
intro to linux with Redhat CDs (version 5.2, I think).  I installed on
the older PC without incident and started playing around with procmail.
This solved the ISP-hours problem.  I was testing offline on the old
machine, rather than online.  To get the exact filtering I wanted, I'd
download my email, unfiltered, to the Windows machine, and then copied
it via floppy to the linux machine for procmail filtering.  After that,
I'd copy the filtered email via floppy back to the Windows machine.

  Reading through the linux intro, I realized that linux wasn't just a
server OS.  It had email and usenet news clients.  And they were in good
ole textmode.  Plus I could save myself the clunky back-and-forth email
copying, if I dialed up via the linux machine, instead of the Windows
machine.  Netscape 4.x worked OK, but the office apps were quite
primitive back then.  So I kept Win98SE with the Office 97 I had bought
for the Win95 machine.

  Fast-forward to Redhat 7.3.  That was *THE* best consumer version
Redhat ever put out.  But then they developed the Microsoft disease and
put out fat bloated RH8.0 and 9.0.  By that time I was running strictly
linux on two machines.  I tried 8.0 and 9.0 on my test machine, and soon
re-formatted, and re-installed 7.3.  Redhat announced the end of RH7.3
support would occur Dec 31, 2003.  I switched over to Debian approx Sept
2003.  That worked OK until summer of 2004.  Debian Stable was still the
same version, and the latest Firefox and RealPlayer refused to install
because the Debian GTK and glibc were really old versions.

  I switched over to CRUX linux (which I had tried previously), just to
be able to run the latest Firefox and RealPlayer.  It's sort of a halfway
to Gentoo distro, with everything compiled "-O2 -march=i686".
Dependancy management was better than Redhat, but still not good enough
for me.  When I asked about more optimization to my machine, people told
me that I was really looking for Gentoo.

  I installed it on a beat-up old test machine.  Just for kicks, I put
it through the "dependancy torture test".  I compiled a basic Gentoo
with text-console only, no X Window gui at all.  Then I asked it to
install GIMP.  Redhat linux would've told me to get lost.  Gentoo
downloaded and built X, along with the necessary support libraries, plus
GNOME and other necessary libraries, then it built GIMP.  The following
morning, I had a working X and a working GIMP.  That blew my mind.  So
I'm running Gentoo right now.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org>
An infinite number of monkeys pounding away on keyboards will
eventually produce a report showing that Windows is more secure,
and has a lower TCO, than linux.
--
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