[Wftl-lug] Tuxzine

[Charles McColm]

My Linux story started around 1996 when my younger brother came home
from university and told me about Slakware '96 (the box was missing
the c in slackware). What peaked my interest about Slakware was the
fact that it had a slew of BBS software packages available for it. At
the time I was running a Bulletin Board System for the Barrie User's
Group (BUG) using a commercial DOS package called Synchronet (there's
a Linux version now I think).

After a few failures I managed to learn a thing or two about Linux.
For some strange reason, I don't remember why, I switched to FreeBSD
between 1997-1999. I think it was because my younger brother took the
time to put it all on 50 floppies so I could install it on my Thinkpad
701C "butterfly" notebook. I bought a FreeBSD subscription which I
kept from version 2.2.2 to 3.x. By the time I unsubscribed from
FreeBSD I was pretty fed up. Discs were costing me about $50 each time
and a number of discs contained really bad bugs. (On one
/stand/sysinstall was completely broken, and you had to download an
update to get the installer working).

When I discovered that Red Hat Linux had support for my HP Deskjet
712C printer I was hooked. There was something else that turned me. A
CEO of a Linux company talked me through setting up a Linux router so
I could share my Internet connection between computers (ipchains,
yuck).

I joined a local LUG http://www.kwlug.org/ after their second meeting
and signed on for a project http://wclp.sourceforge.net/ that was in
the fledgling stages. I didn't know how much of a help I could be (as
it turns out I was a big help getting the PS/2 mouse working in our
distro) but I stuck to it.

I've flip flopped with distros, in part for experience, and in part
because of various projects I've been involved with, or because one
seemed to have out-of-box support for hardware that another didn't.
But lately I've run either SuSE, Red Hat, Debian, or Ubuntu. Yes it
sounds like a lot. I run Debian GNU/Linux on my Sun Ultra 2, Irix 6.5
on my SGI O2, Fedora Core 6 on my notebook, Ubuntu on my desktop (but
this will probably change to Gentoo soon), and a Debian-based distro
known as WCLP on the systems at work.

I started working with computers in 1982 with the Commodore 64. In
1983 I joined BUG, the Barrie User's Group. One of the things I loved
about BUG was that they had their own software library with software
written by BUG members, as well as contributions from TPUG (Toronto
Pet User's Group). The other thing I loved was that members were
hardware hackers, they'd done all kinds of neat projects such as
building light pens out of a magic marker and electronics components.
The Linux community is very much like this early user group community.
The sharing of knowledge it inspires is awesome!