I am a big fan of the open source community. I’ve been enthusiastic about its growth and implementation in the real world since 1995 when two acquaintances invited me to check out a tradeshow at a convention center in Panama (where I was living at the time). At the show, I saw a lot of stuff that I was already playing with, primarily networking technologies, Novell Netware services, and some great gaming hardware when all of a sudden we bumped into a stand for GNU-Linux. I had heard about *nix, and in particular, Slackware, which a former co-worker had been fiddling around with (he had arrived from the States when I met him at PCC, so he had an advantage over me when it came to having the coolest and newest geek toys…) That day I purchased my first copy of a Linux Distribution, and yes, it was Slackware. I tried to install it on my kick ass Packard (B|H)ell 486 and well, I had some struggles, but I got it to work, but there wasn’t much I could do, and since I really had to focus on other stuff like, work and my IT chores at home, my initial dabblings in Slackware were limited. Yes, parents do take advantage of us geeks, don’t they… It’s okay, dad… Honest!

A year and a half later, I moved to Miami and one of the first things I did after I set up my bedroom and rebuilt my PC (because I had shipped it disassembled for fear of damage) was to go check out CompUSA (for the first time ever) and buy a copy of book on Red Hat 5, which included two discs with the (in)famous fedora on their covers. By that time I had two hard discs and I had purchased a better motherboard for my computer so I could choose which boot device I wanted to use without messing with boot.ini or whatever boot manager RH5 had back then. It was a more pleasant experience, and for a while, I’d experiment with it, and leave all the heavy work to Windows 95.

The years passed, and before you knew it, I needed storage space for my MP3s. Good bye, RH5; hello fdisk.

Since then, and until 2003, I had pretty much lived a Microsoft life. I played with Windows NT, Windows 2000, and finally Windows XP. I thank God till this day that I was flat broke to buy Windows ME (snicker snicker snicker). And then one day, the bug bit me again. This time it hit me with a tornado. Since that moment, I started spending a lot more time with the Debian distribution, and I enjoyed almost every moment of it. The only times I cringed was when I wanted to make a device work and well, I’d have to find a way to do it… A little frustrating at first, but I learned to like it and now its one of my favorite things to do if it crawls up to me unannounced. At work, I’d implement a Fedora based solution for both our client laptops and servers, just to make sure I could “keep my hat on”, so to speak… That, and well, FIU had a mirror available within its network

Then came this friendly Debian fork called “Ubuntu”. I started playing with Hoary Hedgehog (5.04) and I fell in love with it. I actually almost succeeded in converting one of my best friends to it until she decided that she really didn’t have the time to check it out. She’s still a geek tho, event her official job description calls her a Chorus Director . Wassup, Lupita!

Two jobs later, I was still preferring Ubuntu for my Linux needs, and to an extent I still do; but after having to use a Mac every day for web development/design and publishing, I decided earlier this year to get a Mac. I’m glad someone over in Cupertino had the vision to scrap System 9 and start with a solid *nix foundation, even if its BSD. I got my Mac about 2 weeks ago, and boy was I impressed. I didn’t’ buy the latest or greatest, but I did buy a barely-used, awesome Intel iMac from a friend (which made it even better because I’d rather help him than a company make ends meet – not that there’s anything wrong with capitalism )

What does this have to do with haberdashery? Lots,  in a non-vestment kind of way.

Since I started at my new job, I decided to grow with the experience… I’m currently studying for my Linux Professional certification, and while we’re an open source shop at work… a RH enterprise shop to be exact. Sure, I’m familiar with RPMs and how RH folks prefers to launch things with service daemon [start|stop|status|whatever] versus /etc/init.d/daemon [start|stop|status|whatever] and how there’s always the yum versus apt-get debate. I live in the best of both worlds: I build mission critical daemons. Binaries are okay, but sometimes you want that extra “ummph”.

Two weekends ago, I decided to backup my /home folders and install CentOS on boh, my AMD x64_86. The hat is now back on. It was an interesting experiment… I settled initially on CentOS 4.6 because that was the version we were using at the office, but a few days later, after it took me about 2 hours to get my nvidia on board Ethernet adapter to work, I installed CentOS 5.2. So far, so great. I finished building my development server (on boh) for my various web projects… On Saturday, I finally implemented bind for localized DNS… happiness! As Moni would say, “gosh, you’re a geek”. Yes I am.

As for Ubuntu: it hasn’t gone too far, yet. I use Sun’s VirtualBox on my Mac to run things I can only find in the Linux world.

If I had to recommend a Linux-based end-user desktop solution to a bunch of people right now, I’d defer immediately to Ubuntu. The fact alone that Mark Shuttleworth is about to fund the further development of Linux into the mainstream, makes it even more well-positioned for it to become a standard. As for servers, yes, you can (and should) use Debian or Ubuntu Server Edition… But CentOS isn’t such a bad option either, and its starting to grow on me.

Wow, time flies, its been 13 years already, but it never gets tiring