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My first contact with computers were my father's Commodore VC20 and Sharp PC1403 – small, simple machines by today's standards, but fascinating at the time… Needless to say, it didn't take long before I got my own computer: A C64! I had loads of fun with that machine for years – even got a monitor, a printer and a floppy drive after a while…
Despite all the fun with the C64, I wanted more at some point. When that time finally arrived, Amiga and Atari ST were still going strong but beyond their peak. The Macintosh was on the scene for a while already – and of course the IBM compatibles, i.e. what most people think of as "the PC" these days…
Macs fascinated me (we used them at the office of the student's association), but the prices were prohibitive… In the end, I went for a "PC": A 486/33 with 8MB, a whopping 170MB hard drive and a VGA card with 32768 colours. For 1991 not a bad PC. :-) Those were the days of MS DOS™ and MS Windows 3.1™ <shudder> – definitely no Macintosh, but at least within budget for me.
That PC stayed with me for many years. It got a new hard drive (540MB – wow!) and at some point a faster CPU (486DX2/66), but that was about it. With that hardware, I didn't even think about "upgrading" to Win 95. So, everything stayed the same until…
…in 1996/97, I was writing my Masters Thesis in Microelectronics. The research centre where I was working at the time was using Sun Unix(SunOS) workstations, so the preferred format for a thesis was LATEX. All fine and well, but near the end of the project came the time (as everybody who ever wrote a thesis or similar will know) when daytime wasn't good enough and I urgently needed to use my own PC at nighttime (when the centre was closed) as well. What to do? Using LATEX under MS Windows 3.1™ was possible, but extremely painful – starting from awkward usage over the notorious unreliability of Win 3.1 to the useless 8+3 filenames.
Hence, I was looking for a better solution. Enter Linux. Red Hat Linux 4.1, to be precise, as at that time that was the one most of my friends recommended. The installation was a nightmare, mainly due to the fact that – lacking a CD-ROM – I ended up downloading the complete distribution from the Internet "at work", saving it on a tape, carrying the tape plus drive home, making a backup of my HD (to tape…), repartition, copy the Linux distribution onto one partition and then running a HD install from there. The second problem was that my aging 486 only had 8MB RAM – which was a problem with RHL 4.1, as there was a bug in the installer…
Anyway, after about two, three days messing around I finally had the machine up and running. Not only that – I also had an almost perfect copy of the work environment I was using in the research centre: Same window manager (fvwm 2.0.45, if you need to know), LATEX, XEmacs – the works. All on a meagerly 486DX2/66, 8MB, with 300MB for Linux. I was happy and got to work, typing away at that thesis… ;-)
Now, I won't pretend that that machine was fast. In fact, it was downright slow, as I insisted on using X on it. But it worked and worked reliably – far better than what I was used to under Windows before. I was hooked…
Since then, Linux has completely replaced Windows for
me on my desktop machines. Over the years, I have dabbled with several
Linux distributions besides Red Hat (which is Fedora nowadays): Mandrake
Linux (now Mandriva Linux
– I think), SuSE Linux (which
belongs to Novell now…) and Aurora
Sparc Linux – which came from Red Hat and now belongs to Fedora
again.
Recently, most of my PCs run Ubuntu,
Kubuntu, Xubuntu or Ubuntu Studio. I also have two
"audio player" machines that run Debian Linux.
On my firewall/home server, however, I trust
OpenBSD most. It has served me
well and reliably – an excellent choice for this purpose. I also
use it on some of the more exotic hardware I own (e.g. Sparc or Alpha)
My affection for Sun Sparc machines has also brought me into contact
with Solaris which can be found on
some of my Sparcs. Unfortunately, these days, Oracle owns Solaris and
the new terms make it basically unusable for hobbyists (license was
unclear for a long time, no security updates without support contract
- Oracle really does not want home users and hobbyists to use
Solaris). Further, I also made my first experiences with Irix, as I have
acquired several SGI machines over the past months.
Other than that, I now also have a second generation iMac, which lets
me play with Mac OS X (10.4). Even Windows made its way back –
one single Windows XP machine to run the children's games that refuse
to work under Wine… ;-)
On the hardware side, I still have that old, trusty, black AT
bigtower from the 486, but its contents have changed many
times. Currently, it sports a 1.3GHz Celeron (yes: on an AT
board!) and gathers dust. I might actually give it away or scrap it
after all…
Around it, a whole network of a wide variety of machines has grown over
the years: Many PCs (nothing special – the fastest one is an AMD 64(?)
3200. I do not really follow the PC developments), some old laptops,
some 23 Sun Sparc/UltraSparc workstations (I've dedicated an
extra page to them: Sparcla), six SGI machines, one
Digital Multia VX40 (Alpha) and the iMac DV 400.
Being a very satisfied Linux user, I was interested in contributing at least a bit back to the Linux community. Aside from using my (very limited) C coding skills to provide bugreports and maybe write the odd patch or writing a bit of documentation here and there, I turned to building RPM packages to enable other folks to use programs I like as well. Being notoriously short on time, it's not all that much anymore &ndah; these days, I'm happy if I manage to write a halfway decent bug report… Anyway, here's what I have done: