Re: [Hampshire] How long have you been using Linux?

john lewis wrote:
> Whilst looking for something else I found an invoice dated 1 Nov 1994
> for a copy of 'DR Linux' and another invoice dated 27 Nov 1994 for a
> subscription to 'Linux Journal'

I found some old articles that I had kept from popular PC magazines
around the era of 286's, but I was not enough into IT to do anything
about linux then. I kept a distant watching brief for years, until a
SCLUG install fest in 2002 I think, when I had an old mandrake
installed on a (then) old pentium PC. Obviously I was on the SCLUG
list at that time, lurking.

I was a little daunted by the apparent specialist know how they used
to install the graphics driver, but it worked, and for me that was
real credibility. The old machine was slow and the gui was not good
for a windows arm chair user, as I was. I was very impressed though,
that I could unplug the mouse connection and re-insert it and the OS
did not crash - something definitely different to windows 98 (although
I now do not make a habit of this....)

It was two years later before I seriously looked again at linux, the
pressure in my soul to find an alternative to ms was too much. I was
spending all my life apparently making a number of skip-recovered PCs
secure, and I was still not confindent about them!

I was retired, so all my time meant I needed to 'get a life'.

Around April 2004 I downloaded suse 9.0, then purchased 9.1 in May,
retail from Amazon. Unfortunately 9.1 was not a good version overall,
but I was totally bowled over by the ease of installation and the
sheer sophistication of the gui that appeared.

The first shock was finding that the junk HD that I had first used for
install, (all defaults) while I made some tea, had faithfully
preserved a pre-existing win95 junk system I had expected to be wiped
in true MS fashion! So I immediately had a dual boot . It was a real
shock to my system, and an omen for the future. I soon then could not
believe, and still cannot believe, how good linux is, and why more
people are not using it.

What I find interesting about the timescale is that as a non IT person
who was into PCs it took a full 2 years after the install credibility,
to begin using linux seriously. I also took easily a full year of
concentrated 'finding out stuff ' to feel confident enough to move
everything away from the windows machine/s. And I still have a lot to
learn.
--
alan cocks
Linux registered user #360648