[COLUG] a/s/l -- no, really.

[Chris Clonch]

Warner Moore wrote:
> 	I am curious..
>
> 	What is the average background here?  What experience do you guys
> have?  What do you do?
Well, I too have been lurking for a bit; guess its my turn to sound off.

I'm a 2* something with a BS in Computer Information Systems working for 
a rather large telecommunications equipment manufacturer in Columbus ;-) 
.  At work, I own several of the manufacturing test processes for some 
of the cool networking elements running Solaris, SCO, and a whole mix of 
Linux.  I pretty much grew up with computer starting with a TI-80.  From 
there it was whatever I could get my hands on; Apple ]['s at school, one 
friend's Macintosh, another friend's Tandy.  I remember the day my 
family got our first PC, a Zeos 486DX!  I talked my dad into setting it 
up in my room.  Shortly there after I found the local BBS scene, then 
the long distance BBS scene.  I spent the following summer working off 
the phone bill...

I didn't discover Linux until I began college.  At the advice of several 
class mates, I began with RedHat 5.2.  I also tried a few others 
including Mandrake and Debian.  But it didn't catch on;  something about 
it just didn't click.  After graduating, my focus fell solely on HP-UX 
and Solaris.  A few years later I tried picking back up RedHat, but 
still didn't understand what was doing what.  Then I found Gentoo and 
the hook was set.  Building the system by hand taught me what I had been 
seeking for some time.  I now run a dedicated headless gentoo box at 
home acting as my server, dual-boot my main machine between Gentoo and 
WinXP (my wife ain't into computers), and several gentoo and Ubuntu 
boxes at work.  I am most proud of having a number of SPARC based Sun 
SunBlade 100/150's running Gentoo flawlessly, which we use as workstations.

While my first impulse is to run Gentoo, I have recently been trying to 
stretch out a bit and try some of the other distro's on for size.   I 
have grown quite fond of Xubuntu.  Here soon, I going to pick back up 
RedHat, well Fedora anyways.

I'm sure I glossed over something, but you get the picture.

-Chris