I am very much inspired by Richard M Stallman's pioneering work, and so GNU/Linux is my obvious choice as my Operating system and environment. Stallman  founded Free Software Foundation in 1984 and he is the man behind gcc, Emacs, and gdb.

I use free software for all my projects. GNU Logo

        For example I use the gnu tools for all my programming,  for signal processing I use scilab , though the industry   standard  Matlab   is available for Linux.    The reason why I boycot Matlab is that the company is selling the software in India as high as six times the price they are selling in US!

        See my links page for more articles, info, and other stuff on GNU, Microsoft etc.

        I bought my first machine ( a branded 486 machine with 4MB RAM and 630 MB harddisk ) in september 1995, a month after the much hyped windows 95 release.At that time I thought windows is everything. Since my machine is a "low end" in the eyes of windows gurus, I did not install win95 and was contented with DOS/win311. But in March 1996, an Indian magazine devoted to PC hardware and software called PCQuest distributed the Slakware distribution with kernel 1.2.12, with the magazine. Unfortunately I had no CD drive in my machine.  Adding to that, I did not know what Linux is, or what a kernel is. So I did not buy the magazine. But I had a chance to read that issue, and I was fascinated by the story of Linux. I always like experimenting with new things, so I decided to give it a try.

         But again lots of problem were in store. As I said I had no access to CD drive. If I take out my harddisk, I will lose the warranty of the machine. After a lot of thinking, I decided to let the warranty go, took out the harddisk. Meantime I learned to play around with devices, and started uttering jargon like primary master, secondary slave etc.

         I copied all the disksets in the slakware distro and made rot disk, boot disk etc, and started installing. I was also happy that the distribution claimed to work with 2 MB of RAM. But I could not even boot the system from root and boot floppies. I tried changing those floppies but of no use. Finally I took the harddisk to my friend's ( Prakash , who is my first linux guru ) house and installed it from there ( he had 8MB RAM ).

         After that PCQuest remained my only source of information and software for Linux since I had no access to Internet. PCQuest came up with Slakware 96 in september 1997 with kernel 2.0.0. I installed it in the same manner as above,but now some change in the kernel allowed me to use ramdisk to boot the compressed image.( correct me if I am wrong ). I was very much satisfied with the Slakware distribution. Even now I like it.  I understood how my low end 486 performed under Linux as a high end workstation.

         Meantime I learned lots of things in linux, thanks to Anil Elson, my friend who taught me lots of Linux/Un*x fundaes. I was working with a 200MB partition of Linux and rest with windows. I learned how to compile the kernel, what a kernel image is and so on. The learning curve was really exponential. In the same time, the entrance of computer in my room was reflected in my 5th and 6th semester BTech marksheets. It was very poor performance but who cares for marks...

         In May 1998 PCQuest again came up with a linux - only isue. But it had another disto called RedHat. I was hearing that word for the first time in that magazine. In the same month I upgraded my machine to 200MHz MMX, 32MB RAM, 2.1GB harddisk and color monitor. I jumped at the issue and installed it. At first I liked the graphical configuration and installation. But after using it for about a week, I erased it and installed the old slakware 96 again. But since Redhat 5.0 had lots of things new from slakware 96 I again installed it and slowly started using it. But I was not at all  satisfied with it. Once when I upgraded my gtk libraries, it broke glint the installation tool. Like this so many issues came up. The default window manager given was fvwm95 which I did not like. I liked the good old fvwm2. Changing window managers was a bit painful ( may be due to my lack of knowledge ).

         In july 1998 I left for higher studies in Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.  I had to leave my machine in my home. I was amazed to see allmost 99 percent of IIT running in GNU software. In the Electrical Eng. Department, all the machines were networked and was running RedHat Linux ( different versions ). I was exclusively working in Linux for the past one year in IIT. Another milestone was that I started experiancing the phenomenon Internet  after comming here. I started spending all my spare time on Internet, and by chance, I stumbled upon an article announcing  the launching of Linux-India.  I went to that site and subscribed to the mailing list. I was fortunate enough to interact with linux gurus like Sudhakar Chandrashekhar of Netscape communications, Arun Sharma of Intel, Atul Chitnis, Raghavendra Bhat and many many others. Most of them had no high speed access to internet and were using the "PCQ Linux". By the time I subscribed to the list, a group of people from chennai headed by Arun krishnaswamy had already formed a user group called ILUG-C. I had the chance of attending the second meeting onwards. The second meeting was in Arun's house with about six people, the cheif speaker was a developer from Australia. He was said to be a developer for another distro called "Debian". I was of the opinion that Debian is not a good distro and slakware and redhat are leading one. This was the impression I got from the PCQuest magazine. I blindly beleived it. Arun was also using Debian, and I even heard one fellow telling Arun not to use Debian and use RedHat. Interestingly that fellow is a "Debian follower" now. After the first semester I had a one month vacation. I asked Arun for a spare Debian CD and he was kind enough to oblige me one. He warned me about the installation procedure of Debian, and I was prepared for the worst. I also had the chance to meet another Linux guru Raghavendra Bhat alias "ragu". He is also a debian follower. he also encouraged me to install Debian.

Debian Logo
          I started installing debian and was really fed up with the manner the installation tool "dselect" behaved with me. I wiped it off and again installed redhat. I had the chance to read about a NASA space shuttle experiment and that they used Debian. I did not think anything more. I started slowly installing debian. I read lots of documentation about dselect, first installed the base system alone and finally succeded in installing it. The version was 2.0. The sheer number of packages amazed me. The way dselect handled the dependencies was also very much appealing. Another thing is that one can configure it without X installed, which is a good thing. Debian has a package format called "deb"  like the redhat "rpm". This format and the associated program "dpkg" accounts much for the success of Debian. The package takes care of dependencies. Also Debian has what is called menu system, which installs menu entries in your X window manager configuration files. So no more playing with Xdefaults, fvwmrc etc. The documentation is tremendous and it comes with tools like dhelp, dwww etc which can be used to maintain and read documentation. Another interesting package is "kernel-package". It has got tools to make a deb package from  kernel sources. I am using it extensively now a days.

           Debian strictly is a non voluntary organisation and is not interested commercially. Debian adheres to Debian Policy Guidelines. The policy manual lists various things that a debian user and developer should be aware of.  Debian is not in a hurry unlike redhat to come up with new versions. Debian uploads new packages only if they are 99.99% stable. This explains the delay in the arrial of GNOME deb packages in the debian ftp sites. What more do you need ? Richard M Stallman is using Debian in his laptop.

           Debian has its own documentation project called Debian documentation Project. It has got a lot of manuals both for newbies and developers ranging from topics like installing a debian system on a low memory system to making debian packages. The docs are of high quality and is very useful. Debian provides scripts to maintain the installation clean and proper.

           I guess my friend Raghavendra Bhat, VU2RGU, require special mention here. He is an ardent proponent of free software. He had been helping me out on several issues. I should mention his special role in making me understand lots of features of Debian. He is also doing great service to Debian users by spending time and effort in maintaining the tar balls of debian-user list archives. He gave me lots of encouragement to study and often keeps me abreast of the happenings in the hacker world.

            My ambition now is to become a Debian maintainer for some packages of my interest. I have fully got rid of windows now and I have installed  debian in 2.1 GB Harddisk. I recomend Debian GNU/Linux for all groups of users.

            No doubt, RedHat is doing great job by funding major projects on development of GNOME, sound drivers, and other kernel related things. They are also bringing out innovations in a user friendly installation method. But how their installation methods weigh with their counter part in other commercial distributions like Caldera, SuSe etc remains to be seen.
 

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