I started off in Linux somewhere around 2002. Back then I believe the first OS I installed was RedHat 5.2. This was back in the days before RedHat Enterprise, Fedora, or even CentOS. I didn’t really do much with it other than play around with some tools in the GUI. I actually started getting more into it when one day I decided I wanted to start hosting a website where I could give my friends a place to upload files to share with each other. I originally did this on Windows XP using Apache. It wasn’t very stable and would crash a lot. A friend suggested I try to run Linux as a server and give it a go. I think that was my main turning point in my journey through Linux and beyond. I tried out many different distributions of Linux back in those days, I remember Mandrake (which later became known as Mandrivia), SuSE, and Gentoo were some of the more well known I tested out. Each one has its own strangeness to it and little quirks here and there. What really got me going was I believe in late 2003 a friend gave my a disk that contained Slackware 9.1. I was hooked. Sure it was harder to use that the others and it didn’t have all that great of a package manager at the time, but once I got things working, they stayed working and never broke. It was my Linux of choice for everything for many many years. I eventually dumped Windows at home a few years later because Linux could do everything I needed it to.
It wasn’t until I realized that I could actually make a living off of keeping Linux running that I really branched out and started learning as many distributions as possible. Today I’m well versed in most major Linux distributions based on either RedHat or Debian, but I still run Slackware at home. It will always have a special place in my heart.
Now that I’ve shown how much of a nerd I am with Linux, it isn’t the only thing I have going on in my life. I have a wife and child who keep me very entertained and I couldn’t image life without them. I do enjoy getting out from time to time and seeing different things with occasional long distance traveling. Most of my hobbies do revolve around technology, like keeping my home server going (which this site runs on), as well as finding new uses for a bunch of Raspberry Pi devices I have throughout my home. I enjoy learning new things and finding solutions that no one has ever thought of before. When I come across a problem I don’t stop until it is fixed.
I don’t want to go into too much detail, so if you want to know more about me, you can always contact me. Thanks for reading!
-Dustin