Since the release of Vista, it reminded me how much I really love Linux. Not just linux, but Gentoo and Gnome. So I’ve been dying to tell my tale of switching to the dark side of computing.

I was a freshman in college and I was getting frustrated with all of the problems of Windows. I was tired of Windows 2000 thinking it knew how to run itself better than I did. I wanted more control over the system. I wanted a more stable system. After so many blue-screens-of-death, you start to yearn for something that doesn’t need to be rebooted everyday. Unfortunately, I didn’t know enough about the computer world to know that I had options.

A friend of mine mentioned Linux in passing while talking over ICQ. Mind you, this was back in 2000 and ICQ hadn’t quite gone the way of the Dodo just yet at that point. I believe it was a week or two, but someone gave a presentation at the end of my Introduction to CS class about a ACM meeting. I decided to attend. I focused mostly on listening to what the older students were keen on. I wanted to be more in tune with the industry than I currently was so this seemed like the perfect opportunity. Alas, it didn’t seem as interesting as I had hoped.

At this time as well, I used to play too much Quake3 Rocket-Arena. There was a crew of guys that I met regularly on the Texas Thunderdome servers, the Packet Kids. They were San Antonio area gamers who worked in the technology industry. I came to know these guys and eventually agreed to a mini-LAN party with them. They seemed to be relatively wise in their fields. The guy who introduced me to the group seemed the best at what he did.

Eventually, I expressed my desire to leave the Windows platform and move on to something that will better cater to my needs. They mentioned Linux. I had heard of it before, but only in a mocking manner with respect to XFree86. I remember thinking that the most hardcore thing I had ever heard of was compiling your OS, or “kernel.” I had never heard the term before, but it sounded frightful to want to compile anything like that myself. This group of guys installed RedHat 6.0 onto my machine. It was okay; did a lot of things I didn’t understand and seemed a bit flakier than Windows. After playing with it some, it was clear this Linux thing was what would teach me everything about computers that I’d want to know.

Installing RedHat 6.0 was like removing the veil from my eyes, as if I was blind before. Suddenly, my computer would do what I wanted even though I wasn’t sure what I wanted yet. It seemed like I had more direct interaction with the basic operating system than Windows. I eventually learned the difference between a shell and XFree86. I learned that ALSA was this project that provided mediocre sound drivers. I learned that Gnome was a window environment (still couldn’t tell window managers from XFree86, etc.) that had more polish and simplicity than its rival KDE which seemed to cater towards those wanting a Windows-like experience. I even learned that this “kernel” idea was all about.

Eventually, I grew tired with the limitations of RedHat and decided to try other distributions, such as Stormix, SUSE, Caldera, Trustix, Debian, Mandrake, OpenBSD, and eventually settled on Slackware. At the time, I was told that Slackware was Linux for the purists. That got my blood boiling because I wanted the hardest experience possible. I wanted my distribution to do the least amount of things for me. I spent about a year or so using and loving Slackware. I bounced over to one of the other distributions from time to time, but always came back to the Slack.

I grew tired of manually compiling and resolving every tiny issue with Slackware. I tried Dropline Gnome, but it broke my Gnome install on more than one occasion. Then a friend gave me a Gentoo 1.0pre LiveCD. I had never heard of LiveCDs, the concept of running an entire OS from a CD, especially a mini-CD, seemed alien and amazing to me. I rescued my Slackware install only to find out I wanted to try this thing called Gentoo. This friend told me about how you could turn on system-wide features for things, everything was compiled from scratch, and you could compile your system for the hardware it ran on. This was extremely appealing to me as it would give me unprecedented control over my computer.

One day I installed a Stage 1 Gentoo install and I remember thinking to myself, “wow, I must have been blind to use RedHat.” Ironic, but the first time I installed the OS from the command-line gave me a huge sense of power and control. It was as if I was commanding an army to cater to my every whim. After setting up the networking the hardware, downloading the portage snapsnot (still didn’t know what this was), and bootstrapping the system, I resigned that I would never again try a different distribution. Of coarse I was lying to myself, but I never left the Gentoo camp.

So in the course of one evening, the Packet Kids gave me the perfect nudge I needed into knowing everything about software, computers, and Linux that I could ever hope to garner from college. I became obsessed with learning. I would install distributions just for the hell of it. I even did a Linux From Scratch install once, back when it really was from scratch. I learned to compile my own kernels (still do on a fairly regular basis), I learned how to use the popular package management systems (rpm, deb, ebuild, tgz, ark), and I learned to read open source software and use it as a teaching tool. My life was forever changed with the install of RedHat and I cannot offer enough thanks to those responsible for enlightening my path to self-discovering.