Colin and Linux ®

I still had some money left from my past internship with my current employer, and was also planning to go visit my family who lived in various places all over the US. During that time, I wanted connectivity, as I'm an e-mail addict. So, bought me a Dell laptop, which I still use now as my Windows machine. It still serves me quite well, though on Windows Millennium, it crashes more often than I'd like it to. I'll take a weekend and upgrade it to XP in the future.

However, during college, especially as I waded through Computer Architecture and Operating Systems class with C (our Programming classes taught C++), I had installed RedHat 6.1 on a whim (I still don't remember why!) and, though stable, it didn't have any good word processing packages to compete with Word, which I had to use to type up papers for almost every class I took. Hello, dual-boot world (that forced me to do lots of stuff with LILO ... cool stuff that I forgot very quickly).

Still, it came with gcc, which we "grew up" with in Programming II. Not having money to spend on Visual C++ or even Borland C++ Builder, this was a very cool solution for turning in Operating Systems assignments. The class itself (based out of nearby CAU) was UNIX-centric.

Now I like to program. If I weren't so lazy I'd be doing some super-huge perl project on the side. Been programming since I was 8. I slowly progressed from BASIC (even used it at IOI'95 ... and placed horribly because I suck of it...) to Pascal to HyperTalk to C++ to Java .... back to BASIC. </anti-climax> Visual BASIC, if it counts. Then I took a detour into Perl; learned that when I took pre-job training in London. Ah London ...

I also got tired of this along the way:

(The virus thing doesn't bother me; I use unpopular e-mail clients which don't render HTML well or at all, and the last time I caught a virus was back in 1998. In Windows 98. Heh.)

I saw myself installing lots of stuff in the future (out of curiosity, necessity, foresight or just plain boredom -- mostly the first and the last) and thought this wasn't the way to go. Besides, couldn't you install lots of cool stuff (including servers) on Linux?? So one day, with $40 in my hand and a dream in my head, I took the train to the closest CompUSA ("This guy wants this software package called Linus or something...") and the rest is .....

install ...

sound card is on-board audio .... modem is win modem ... they don't work with linux... arrggh

tweak ...

oops, install error, partitions hopelessly screwed up ...

reinstall ...

As I didn't build this computer up like I did the one in college, I didn't have all that much knowledge of what was inside. Still, SuSE's graphical install came a looooong way from RedHat's text-based install back then. It also helped that my HD, CD-ROM and modem are.... no, were cheap and generic.

$198.35 later ...

I have some good quality stuff, and everything works with linux now. Yay!

Since I have the laptop, I haven't booted this box into Windows since January (w-ell, once, just to install Word so I could run it via Wine).

If you've read this far, great! You now know more about me than meets the eye (looking at just the pics alone, what did you see?).