WARNING WARNING WARNING!!!!! This is very long-winded. You can skip to the last paragraph.
My trajectory to debian actually started when I got out of Grad school (1981) and decided that I wanted to do calculations at home. My first home machine was a Kaypro with two (count them!) floppy drives that ran CP/M. I actually wrote several important papers on that machine and did some small monte-carlo calculations. My next machine was , I think, an 8088 running DOS with this really neat front end called norton commander. I then went to a 286 (with an external math coprocessor I'll have you know). All of this time I had spent really disliking UNIX. I had grown up on CDC machines and what time I spent on unix machines was very painful. The termcaps ALMOST worked. and it appeared to have a purposefully rotten fortran compiler. It took an enorm- ously long time to compile code that ran really slowly. (You should know that there is still a large, active group of scientists that think C stands for cryptic- That it was designed as a write-only language.) UNIX simply seemed like a garage project from Bell Labs that wasn't ready for prime time. Only when I went to University and was given a SPARC-1 did I start liking unix. First, someone had finally written a decent fortran compiler. Second, the term- caps really did work (at least on the sun) and the windowing system was, I thought, pretty slick. Third, I began to appreciate the consistency of learning only one set of utilities that could be used anywhere that ran unix. It was about three years later that I decided I wanted to have UNIX at home. Two years after that (1997) I was on sabbatical, now using a 486DX, and I decided to try Linux. It was Red Hat 4.1 and getting it running was something of a nightmare. I had the LI error and ended up almost wiping out all the data on my hard drive trying to fix it.. That's when I learned alot about FAT's. I will say that the moment Linux started working, I was a much happier person. I knew that I owned a real computer. I could, for the first time, really do calculations at home. I was pretty happy with Red Hat until it started to get very expensive. I then shifted to SuSE. That was OK, but as I got more confident with Linux, I wanted more control. Also, I now had a Linux box at work and one at home. The one at work had come with Debian loaded. I started to really like its organization. For instance, I liked the way /etc is organized and the way fvwm2 worked. Also, I got tired of having to keep several systems in my head (remember that I'm a physicist and not a computer scientist). I had avoided actually installing debian on my own machines because of the reputation of its install. I decided to take the plunge and Install Debian. In retrospect, I don't know what all the fuss was about. After installing RH 4.1, debian seemed pretty straight forward. I'll admit that the module installation was a bit foreign, and I had to figure out what kind of ethernet card I had, but it was just fine. I acutally came to like the low-level character of the install because it gives great control. More importantly, I finally had one flavor of Linux that I decided to learn fairly completely. I didn't even know about apt-get until about a year ago. It is just incredible. Finally, the lists are simply the best support I've ever had. Art Edwards Yes, yes, yes, this was very long-winded but useful for me. I realized that
