My Story

It was christmas eve 2004. I had heard alot about Linux from Mr. Smart in my Networking class at Alexander High. And had even gotten to use Knoppix on several occasions. I had heard all the (in theory) you can do *everything* on linux that you can on windows.

And all the cool stuff about how the desktops were completely customizable, and if you wanted to do something you could do it. What really intrigued me was that the source code was completely available, and that you could make changes and adjustments to any program of your wish and even the Kernel itself! And to top it off it was written in C!

C .... A language I was familiar with, I had used it as a huge hobby that took much of my free times of writing windows programs with the win32 api. aka And though I had very little success in writing crap for it, I did learn the structure of the language quite well.

So there I was Christmas Eve. Finally got all My iso's burned to the disks with fc3. even the srpms, didn't even know what they were for, but I had them. So anyways, it was getting close to bed time, by the time I got home from the most amazing church service. I had a blast. Pastor Dave even read us the childrens book he always read to his kids on christmas eve.

Anyways, I began the install, and finished installing just before bed time, If i remember correctly, I even took it to bed to see what all new stuff I got. Problem was I didn't create a user account, and I didn't know anything about root, so I ended up reformatting later on that day, as we opened gifts and this time making sure to create a username for myself. It wasn't untill maybe 3 days later that I learned of root from cloudyone(irc friend i have had for a long time)

But during that Christmas break, the most I got done was to get ndiswrapper working with my wireless lan, and to learn the smallest bit of information about shell scripting, and making things work on linux.

I learned the most when My friend and I installed FC2(came with Sams FC2 unleashed book) on 2 computers in Mr. Smarts Class. There I learned a small dosage about dealing with RPMS' and compiling from source tar balls. Wine was a good learning point too about how theory and reality are two different things. Almost nothing ran the way it should.

In the end, I got almost no work done in that class except for linux. Oh, and My exploration with cups was simply hillarious. Through a well known exploit throughout the school, we could view information on the tech drive (forbidden) and I found an Excel spreadsheet containing 1. Printer Type 2. IP address & 3. Room number
I had with my friends on that one. We had many ghost printer attacks to the library, at one point we even freaked out the librarian to where she started looking everywhere around the room.

I'll save why I got rid of linux on my laptop for another day.