Well, I have to give you a bit of background on me and my beliefs of computers and operating systems. I consider myself a computer person. I don’t ascribe to a particular operating system or computing platform. My experience in computers dates back to 1977 and an IMSAI 8080 running IMDOS and BASIC. From there to various CP/M, Vax, and early SCO Unix. I’ve seen and worked on the gamut of operating systems and hardware. Including proprietary stuff like Cisco IOS. I’ve been through my share of network operating systems from Novell, Unix, early Microsoft Server stuffs. So, I think I am a relic.
Over my career when I was primarily in the tech fields, before my management and lately entrepreneurial phase, I jumped on the Microsoft bandwagon and learned how to maintain large networks with Active Directory and Windows Server. I got complacent and forgot about my roots and love of command line OS’s. I had dabbled with Linux in it’s early days, but as my time between tech and management roles became demanding, I gave up “playing” and stuck with the practical and corporate based applications. I actually got to the point where I got so involved with management that I no longer had any time for anything “fun” in the computing world.
Well, over the past few years being in business for myself, I have had the opportunity to get back to “playing” I have built and configured servers internally running every OS I could get my hands on. I have to say, I missed the fun. I am lucky that I am able to afford a decent co located server or two and several PC’s (about 40ish) at home. (Well, we got up to about 40ish as of 6 months ago… we’ve since sold most and have switched to laptops which we now are at about 10+ current models)
So, I started playing with Linux again. I have played with all the current popular flavors (Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, and others) I have decided that I like CentOS best for server stuff and Fedora for my personal stuff. But, man, I must say I am having fun again.
The crazy thing is, that since I went into management about 10 years ago, I lost touch with a lot of friends that were die hard tech people (or most of them just found their career and stuck to a particular path of technology). Anyways, since I was getting into Linux, I decided to find a LUG - Linux User’s Group.
Since we’re moving to the Los Angeles area and I would need to make some friends there, I looked up L.A. based LUGs and found the San Fernando Valley Linux User’s Group ( www.sfvlug.org ). Jens and I took a trip down there last Saturday and finally caught up with them since their regular place got the reservations mixed up.
We met some real cool people, and for the first time in a long time I felt like I was around my own kind for a change. I am thinking of driving down on Monday and meeting up with them again. Might be a regular thing.
Anyways, there was no real point to this post, I was just thinking about it and happened to be on my blog… hehehe
