Linux and I

     

   

     
          It's been nearly a decade since my first encounter with Linux. I had reinstalled windows xp on my machine for the 10th time that year; I kept getting adware from who knows where. Well, I know where but that's neither here nor there. The point is that I was tired of Windows and I was looking into Apple's OS since that was the only other operating system that I knew about. As you can imagine, being the broke student that I was in those days there was no way in hell that I could afford an apple machine. Then one day while I was cruising through various irc channels someone told me about this thing called Linux.

Linux, at least what I was told in those days, was an OS that was more secure than other OS's, had tons of free software, and on top of that, the OS was itself free. My internet was super slow in those days so I  grabbed a small chunk of my savings and ordered a retail box of SUSE 10. Circuit city took a whole month to get that box to me and in the mean time I got more viruses on my xp machine. Damn, let me tell you, that SUSE box looked amazing. The month wait was worth it. The marketing team at Novell were doing something right because all of a sudden I wanted a shirt and a coffee mug that sported that SUSE chameleon logo.

I opened up my SUSE box and popped the CD into my computer. The installation process seemed to have gone without any hiccups. Low and behold, I booted into Linux. Hell yea! But that amazing feeling was short lived. To my surprised, the audio, internet, and printer were not working. I procrastinated on my school work for a whole week to try to get my machine working and had no success. Damn, I had even bragged at school (to my teachers and girls) how I used this cool OS called Linux. I procrastinated on my school work for two more weeks and I finally got everything working, just to have all those same things stop working a few days later. If that weren't enough, my machine stopped booting into the SUSE desktop a week after that. I was done and certainly my grades could not take another blow from my procrastination to get this crippled os working. So I did what any impatient young person would do, I popped that xp cd into my machine again and viola, everything worked as it should. And so my friends, that is how my short lived time with Linux came and left. But destiny had it that Linux and I would meet again, and we did, hence this blog. In my next blog post I will let you all know how I've faired in my new encounter with Linux.