History of distros

This post is intended to outline a brief history of ny use of Linux Distributions so you know my experience in that field.

Jan 2003: Red Hat 9

It didn’t take me long to break this… I didn’t really understand ANYTHING and managed to write over the bootloader meaning that I couldn’t boot into Linux or Windows… I think that really it was for the best, because once I’d ruined this it meant there was no going back to Windows… lol

Feb – April 2003: Knoppix

This was pretty much the only way I could use my computer until my friend rescued it during the next Uni holidays… when he then installed Slackware 9.0

April 2003 – Early 2005: Slackware 9.0 + 10.0

This was when I really learned to use Linux, got to grips with compiling software (I even compiled Gnome and KDE from scratch at some point because I didn’t know much about using packages).

When I finished Uni was really when the distro-hopping started… Since July 2005 I have used SourceMage, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora Core 4, OpenSUSE 10.0+10.1, FreeBSD 6.0, PC-BSD, Absolute, Frugalware, PCLinuxOS… and I settled for a while with Zenwalk until recently when I started playing with Arch Linux… For a while I think that I had issues with boredom… I didn’t really do anything interesting on my computer so I just kept searching for the distro that perfectly suited my needs… of course this was never really much to satisfy and once I’d installed multimedia codecs and got flash running in my browser it was just a case of customising my desktop for a couple hours before I was bored again… I’ve always found that every distro has it’s annoyances… For example, some ship with multimedia support, others don’t. Some let you install NVIDIA drivers from the binary, but Debian types prefer you to do it “The Debian Way”… At the end of the day I’ve always been able to get any linux distro to do all the stuff that I want it to with a bit of play.

In the last week I’ve been playing with Arch Linux on my old “craptop”. The craptop is an old Dell Latitude and has a PIII 500MHz processor and 128MB RAM. I’ve found that it’s just quick enough to use as a testing box before breaking my desktop computer… I wish I’d had this to play with when I was really distro-hopping because I probably wouldn’t have changed quite so much. As I install Arch on my desktop computer I will post about the stages as I go.