John64
John Ford
About Me
I am a student in Seneca's BSD program. I have been using open technology for a very long time. I started using computers back when a 386 with 1mb of ram was considered to be good. My introduction to open technologies occurred when I was at a book store with my mother. I found a box for Red Hat Linux 5.2. I found it really interesting, especially since I had just been given an old 486 to play around with. I read the accompanying book and got my system up and running. It ran FVWM and had a beta for GNOME that I never ended up trying. I stayed with Red Hat for a few versions until version 9 when they changed from having one product to having a Fedora project and Red Hat Enterprise product. I tried and disliked Fedora Core 1 and moved on to Mandrake. I played around with Mandrake for their 9 releases and moved on to SuSE 9.1. I liked SuSE at the time, but it was a hassle to use sometimes. I heard about Ubuntu Linux on some forums, and after hearing good things about their 4.10 release, I installed 5.04 when it came out. I felt like I had finally found a distribution I could stick with. I stayed with Ubuntu but increasingly became dissatisfied with their general direction. They focused only on the here and now, they didn't seem to worry about the future and they didn't seem to care strongly about being Free and Open Source. I decided that I would try Fedora once more when I found out that my new sound card was not supported in the ancient alsa drivers included in 8.04. I downloaded Fedora 8 and installed it, noticing that my sound worked out of the box! After a while I began to really like Fedora and realised that it had changed significantly from when I last used it.
Fedora had adopted a more community based development approach and has benefited tremendously from it. I decided to switch to Fedora once I began to understand the reasons they do things they way that they do. I have Virtual Machine installations of many Linux distributions, but I only seriously use Fedora.
Equipment
Desktop: Asus P6T with Intel X58 and ICH10R Intel Core i7 920 (2.66GHz) 6GB DDR3 Ram 2.75TB Storage Vista x64 + Fedora 10
New Laptop: Late 2008 Macbook (5, 1) Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz 2GB DDR3 Ram 250GB Storage + 250GB Time Machine Mac OS X Leopard + Windows XP (Bootcamp) + Fedora 10 (VMWare Fusion)
Old Laptop: HP DV2727CA 14.1" Screen Intel GM965/X3100 Core 2 Duo 1.66GHz 3GB Ram 320GB Storage Windows XP