Computer show Saturday, in Manchester

[Ben Scott]

On Sat, Aug 18, 2012 at 9:46 AM, Roger H. Goun <roger at bcah.com> wrote:
> Ah, OK, I'd been using Yggdrasil in 1993-94, so it wasn't. But it was
> when I started a long run of using Red Hat.

  Ah, Yggdrasil.  "Plug and Play Linux". It was a "live CD" distro
back before that term was invented.  It took bloody ages to boot on a
2X CD-ROM with 8 MB of RAM, but it worked.  Much like the dancing
bear: It's not that it dances well, it's that it dances at all.  I
remember playing with it in the lab at UNH I worked in at some point.

  I ended up using that Red Hat 2.1 disc for the first install on a PC
I owned.  At the time, nix seemed pretty weird to me, since I had
mainly used OSes descended from QDOS (such as MS-DOS, OS/2, and
Windows 95).  It wasn't until I started reading the man pages for the
shell and the kernel and the filesystem that I began to see there was
actually a *design* to that OS.  I remember at one point remarking,
"There's a certain insane elegance to all this".

  I tried Slackware once.  I remember the installer got confused and
tried to install LILO on the CD-ROM, and then tried to eject the hard
disk.

  I ran classic Red Hat Linux for years.

  I tried SuSE for a while, but ultimately decided it had basically
the design aesthetic as Red Hat, but with less third-party support.

  Tried Mandrake for a bit.  Ditto.

  Ran Ubuntu for a while, but got tired of their goofy pointless
changes with no escape to the way it was before.

  Ran Fedora for a while, but got tired of their goofy pointless
changes with no escape to the way it was before.

  (Aside: At work, we're mainly a Microsoft shop.  I'm tired of their
goofy pointless changes with no escape to the way it was before.)

  Currently, at home, I'm on Debian, because dammit, if I just want to
run FVWM and xterm and emacs, there's no problem with that.  It'll
even let me mix in the occasional GNOME or KDE program without having
to jump through hoops to avoid the rest of it.  The glacial release
pace means I rarely am raced with an upgrade-or-die scenario.

  At work, for the Linux servers, we run CentOS, because RHEL has the
broadest industry support.

-- Ben