Usage: Past, Present, and Future

This article could also be labeled "Chad's Linux Credentials" 

I've been using Linux intensely for about 2 years now, and had some kind of experience with it since about 1999. In '99, I installed Red Hat 6 on a 100 MHz 486. And for the most part it sat next to my desk unused and turned off about 99% of the time, with the exception when I turned it on to tinker and feel smart. This of course backfired, and I always ended up demoralized trying to do anything on it. 

My next experience with it was with Red Hat 9, which I installed on a 366 MHz laptop. This was the first time I was able to be impressed with a Linux based OS. It was much more intuitive to use and definitely had better graphics and user interface. However, this also sat dormant on my hard drive and never got more use than a quick boot up now and then to show off. At this time I also started attending Boise State U, where the lab there has a cluster of Linux based machines. I was required to use this submitting programs and to verify that any program I wrote ran on the system. But mostly this was done via SSH and rarely at the terminals.

Begining of the summer of 05, I decided it was time to retire my web and file server, a 300 MHz machine running Windows 2000 Server. I stumbled across a 667 MHz PIII and installed Fedora Core 2 on it, which I used for about 9 months. Recently I've upgraded to Fedora Core 5, and some new hardware, a donated blade server, (dual 866 PIII, 15 gig SCSI main drive, 160 gig datadrive, 1 gig DDR RAM) which I have installed on the ceiling of my garage . It's currently hosting a few websites, 3 subversion repositories, and acting as a file server and development machine. 

Lately, I've also had some experience setting up and running SUSe 10.1, which was largely disappointing for me. As a server, stuff that you'd expect to be there isn't installed by default. When you attempt to install the missing packages, you find yourself in dependency hell. Or if you make the decision to use yum for package management, then you find that the usual yum repositories are not configured and you have to do that part yourself. As a user coming from a Window's background, and having used FC5's "Add/Remove Software" option, it was a bit overwhelming and I found myself installing FC5. 10.1 does sport a new user interface, with multiple desktops on a cube that you can spin, and various alpha-blending options and display for information. However, I was never able to figure out how to activate it. 

All in all, Linux has come a long way (baby) since I first started using it almost a decade ago. It now has a larger portion of the market share for the x86 architecture and seems like it will continue to gain. I look forward to where it goes from here.

© 2017 Chad Jorgenson. All Rights Reserved.