It was at the Linux orientation program at our college when I first saw and heard about Linux.It seem to be an interesting stuff and I made my mind to give it a try. But it was only 5 minutes from then when my friends started talking about crashing their hard disks with Linux.It made me double minded. I did not have my own computer until then and would work on my home PC which had a lot of important data loosing which i could find myself in great trouble.

Few months from then when I got a PC of my own.Soon i approached a person who could help me with installation of Fedora 7.

I got it installed and was impressed with the spinning cube. But soon I realised that I was “jacked”and found the operating system which was to be installed with 6 Cd’s was uploaded with only one.Now I was left with only a spinning cube and some other tit bits.It was a bit disappointing and I decided to go for a fresh installation.

I approached my university’s Linux user club head and gained information about various distributions.I then decided to go for Suse 10.2 the then latest version.I got it installed with the help of the LUG head and was finally satisfied with it.Now i had a triple boot system with Suse10.2,Vista and Xp.Finally i got frustrated with Bill Gates new product and decided to dump it for the time being unaware of the fact that it was going to kill my grub loader.I ended up screwing up myself with no operating system in a working state and much of the data being lost.that was the time I was most frustrated in my journey with Linux.I then moved forward with my old companion(MS Xp) for some time.

Then I discovered that Suse 10.3 was ready for release with many new features and more stability.Within a couple of weeks of its release,I had it installed on my system.Then came the exam time and I could not find much time to tamper with my computer so I continued to work on Xp.

Then in my vacations,I was desperate to study and use Linux so, i joined a Linux course where i worked mostly on the terminal and used Red Hat9 for the GUI part.Also I continued to use live Cd,s of Ubuntu and Knoppix on my home PC for more FUN.Knoppix was great as it required no installation and also gave me the option to save my settings and work.Ubuntu was quiet simple to use and I must say that it is the coolest for newbies and has extremely simple installation.

Knoppix still helps me to find the data on a system whenever someone ask help with a stuck up system as it has a feature of auto mount without any installation.Also the availability of audio(but no video) codecs in it is worth a mention.

Red hat was quiet simple and powerful though it was an older version still it was full of opportunities.

when i returned from my vacations, i discovered that my PC needed some treatment as it went on to be very slow.so i decided to format it completely .

I then installed Xp and Suse 10.3.For me Xp remained a necessity since the university network had blocked various websites and the surfing speed was quiet slow and and XP compatible software was the best solution.

then I reallied that my new Linux installation was full of bugs and needed re installation.After one more installation of it I discovered that my graphics card was not supported and i was not able to use various softwares.But still i continued to use it and came across a software named “crossover” which enabled me to use many windows softwares on Linux.Also I use gcc and kdevelop for my C and C++ work(as a part of my assignments).It turned out to be a great experience.

I started to search for a better distribution of Linux and read reviews of many Linux users and found all positive reviews for Mandriva.And as usual shifted to it within no time.This time I experimented a lot with the installation and i had to do it 3 time in order to reach the desktop.But as the say patience pays.I was pretty impressed with the clean looks of the operating system.This was the first time my roommate also appreciated the looks of Linux!!!The most prominent features that i found in this distribution were clean looks(like that of mac),automunt of windows drives,full audio and video codecs,windows files and settings transfer wizard,Qt 4.3 and the clean desktop effects.To be very true I did not use windows for quiet some time after installing mandriva.Things such as getting audio,video,setting up Internet connection which took a fair amount of time were done on the first run itself.The updates were very easy and user friendly.It is the easiest way to shift from Xp to mandriva.Some of the drawback were the unavailability of any of the windows emulators such as wine or crossover.Though virtual machine emulators are provided I was unable to use them even after hours of struggle.

At the end i would say that my journey with Linux will keep on going and is now on a faster pace.Finally I would recommend all The windows users to give Linux a try an feel the difference.

Currently I use openSuse11.0 with kde3.5. I have aready quit windows and am an active menber of the Linux user group of JUIT and on the forums relating open source.(Updated 18 Sept

‘08)