My First Linux Experience

My First Linux Experience

I had heard much about Linux and open source community prior to actually going for Linux. The first place where I came to know about the word Linux was a Newspaper article about Linus Torwald. It stated how he started a small project while kidding with a system code, and how it grew into a full fledged OS with the help of open source community.

My first Linux experience was with a magazine distribution PCQ Linux 7.1, which came with July 2001 issue of PCQuest magazine. This distribution was based on RedHat Linux 7.1. At that time, I had a computer with intel 810 motherboard and Intel Pentium III processor (552 MHz.) but without any modem. Everything worked fine with this distribution. I cant' say about connection to internet, because there was no modem with me. But everything from sound to display worked fine with that distribution.

I was just fascinated by seeing how well can a free software work! After that I also toyed with some other flavours of Linux, like Caldera OpenLinux release 3.1 and Mandrake.

Now I have a collection of many flavours of Linux. But test of my real skills started when I purchased a new system with Intel 845 chipset motherboard, Intel Celeron 1.7 GHz. processor and PCTEL HSP56 Micromodem. I installed PCQ Linux 8.0, which was based on RedHat Linux 8.0. I was told that it no longer support PCTEL internal modems, it does not support Intel 845 chipset sound and graphics. This simply meant that it was not meant for me. But I decided to go the hard way and configure it to suit my hardware. Here started the real story of Installation hassles of RedHat Linux 8.0.