Drew Kwashnak

1754 points
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New England, CT

I have always been interested in computers, and would find myself hanging out with the Computer Science students instead of the Aviation Management or Business Management students I was a part of. At home and at work I have been largely self-teaching myself using computers starting with Excel and Access with VBA through ASP and SQL at work. Thankfully my current employer values education, and so I have been taking classes and not only learning the technology, but un-learning what I have been doing wrong over the years. At home, though, I have been teaching myself Linux, system administration, networking and the overall method of migrating our system from Windows to Linux. I am involved in the Danbury Area Computer Society (DACS.org) I have the opportunity to take what I've learned the hard way and hopefully help others.. I have been enjoying Open Source for a while now, and I am hoping to get a better understanding of the entire model and application.

Authored Comments

My first experience was technically a DEC Vax (VT100) system in '89-93 but I didn't know anything about OS's and such (I was studying flight operations and accounting). I used it for schoolwork and the occasional game of Conquest, including one time when everybody playing was in the same class and none of us wanted to be the first one to leave the game for class.

I know when I installed Red Hat Linux 8.0 because the day after I emailed a friend of mine to say I did it. It was "Thanksgiving Eve", or the night before Thanksgiving in 2003 and we had 2 children at the time (one 6 months old). He was instrumental in pulling me to the dark side and I picked RH so we would be on the same system when I had (many) questions.

We were running Windows XP at the time and it was in need of an upgrade. I couldn't afford a Mac at the time and wanted something new and up-to-date. Linux gave me that breath of fresh air!

Funny thing is, too, that the computer I installed it on then was the last computer I purchased new for myself to use (bought in 2000). So that computer saw me to the start of my Linux "career" which opened the door for all of the second hand computers since that time!

Wow, so it was 15 years ago?! A lot has changed since then!

I do the split root and /home partitions but that is because I am constantly fighting myself to keep from trying a different distro, or different desktop or let's try this ...