A Linux Fetish

Oh come on! Once the title popped into my head I had to. Plus, I absolutely adore the word fetish. It's one of those good* words.

Warning: There are somewhat technical terms used in this post, though I did my best to keep them to a minimum. But do try to trudge on. For Mandrake's sake.

Three years ago or so, I remember James mentioning how he wanted to try out Linux on his computer. At that time, honestly, I had only the faintest idea of what he was talking about (that Gabe knew little about computers). Hence, I did what any curious high schooler would do: I googled it.

I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

Fast forward a month and some change and I had my first Linux distribution--distro for short--burned onto a CD, ready to install. What distro? Mandriva Linux (formerly Mandrake, not to be confused with Mandrake the Magician). The reason for my pick was that it was supposedly the most "newbie friendly" distro** and it was also one of the largest. So I hoped that things wouldn't be too bad.

And I could not have been more wrong. Must have spent a good eight hours one weekend racking my brain and stalking for answers in forums before giving up. I could not get the graphics working so all I had was a beautiful--although admittedly bland--black screen with grey-ish text. From that interface I had no way of accessing the internet (okay, so I didn't hear about Links or Lynx 'til just last year) and was constantly switching between Mandriva and Windows XP. At that point, having no real clue as how to fix my issues, I scrambled around the intarwebs looking for a way to "uninstall" Linux. *sighs* Oh how little I knew.

That was on the family computer, the one my dad and I had built together. To put it lightly, my first venture into the world of non-Microsoft operating systems had ended in failure (unlightly would involve painful acts which I shall save our younger readers from hearing). Anyway, after this defeat I decided to stick to the familiar.

Freshman year of college was when I really got back on the saddle (I'd dabbled a few times before). More experienced. More dedicated. This time, I got openSUSE running with relative ease. But, I barely used it. Didn't really have a reason to. Though the idea of SSH did tickle my fancy..

Enter Arch. Once more this was James's fault. He randomly brought it up in conversation and all of a sudden I just had to try it. Ignoring the fact that this distro was for "experienced" Linux users and that James hadn't downloaded let alone tried it himself. *shrug* Oh well. So I dove right in, downloading, burning, installing. And immediately hit a huge roadblock. This was even worse than the stab I took at Mandriva. See, Arch Linux goes by the KISS (also not to be confused, but with a band this time) principle. As a result, you get the base system and then install whatever you want on top. Something I was most definitely not ready for.

Fast forward--good phrase--again a month and I had me a working desktop. I loved it. From that point on my only reason to use Windows was primarily scholastic, as we were forced to use software not available on Linux. However, I did so with much chagrin, for I had one of the greatest toys on another partition.

Eventually this led me to dual-booting multiple Linuxes and even triple-booting. Though, quite honestly, that's a whole 'nother matter.


*When I first found this thread it did not require you to register to read. But you really should as Koala Wallop is an excellent forum. Or at least to read the thread, trust me, it's worth it.

**No Ubuntu back then, you lucky kids. And my xorg.conf actually had to be edited, and it required twice the settings it does today!
...*rambles*..uphill both ways...