The linux mascot Xenia is such a big deal for me because
1) shes trans
2) she's a fox
3) she's into Linux
I am
1) trans
2) a fox
3) into Linux
@renbymon Xenia is such an awesome mascot. I adore her name!
@chloeraccoon @renbymon @darac I tihnk it was 2.3 for me, from a magazine cover CD. I even remember I bought that magazine in WH Smith at Heathrow. I can't remember which terminal, but we were heading out on a school exchange trip!
@fatedfox @renbymon @darac Impressive! I was still using a 28.8k back then, and never did DoD. The single most difficult but if I Internet connectivity hardware I've used, though, was definitely a Connexant AccessRunner PCI ADSL card. Not only did that involve learning ATM and updating a driver multiple times, but also dealing with a pretty poor card in terms of hardware. It still did okay for a good few years though!
@fatedfox @renbymon @darac I know Alcatel and Lucent all seemed to become one at some point, I wouldn't be surprised in Conexant were pulled in/pulled them in too.
I think we'd just got rid of the AccessRunner before you came over. It was an… interesting thing. ADSL was theoretically supported up to 2Mb/s downstream, but in practice you'd never get anything over around 600kb/s because of the really poor PCB layout and dodgy clocking, so we had to swap out to an external modem when >512kB/s because an option for us.
@dh @renbymon @darac A lot of Alcatel / Lucent IP was used in the early days of xDSL. I found an article about it from 1999 :) I'm reasonably certain when we met, you were using external CPE *nods* https://www.eetimes.com/conexant-pairs-with-lucent-to-speed-deployment-of-sdsl-connections/
@fatedfox @renbymon @dh I got #MyFirstLinux on a magazine cover. Mandrake Linux sounded good because it was optimized for Pentiums! Then I found the pain of installing RPMs before yum was a thing, and switched to #Debian.
@renbymon @darac @dh I don't recall ever having a problem with rpm, or the early days of dpkg when Leonerd introduced me to Debian :) Debian did win out for me in the end, it was just more organically intuitive to me, and remains so! (Although my linux interactions now are fairly limited - Y'all run rings around me!)
@fatedfox @renbymon @dh It was dependency management that did it for me. As I recall, installing a package consisted of downloading it, then telling rpm to install it and then being told what packages that required, so you'd download those and try again. And again. And again.
Dpkg, on the other hand, seems to have always been paired with dselect or apt to do the legwork for you.
@LightTheUnicorn @renbymon @darac i think Ubuntu did a lot to make things familiar to people, but without making everything completely proprietary. I can see why a lot of people like it.
I don't recall exactly how I got into Linux. I think I'd gotten a copy of Mandrake and then SuSE 7.2, but the big thing was definitely @darac and @dh giving me a copy of Debian (Woody or Sarge) to play around with. :)