Claudio Carlquist's Homepage
I don't intend to create "Another Linux Zealot and Microsoft Hater" page. The web is already full of them. I just don't like to use Microsoft's products (at least not for fun!), but no matter what anyone can say, there are times when we SHALL use them. Think about your professional tools, your Web-Banking page that works only under "Exploder 5.0 or better", the "Incoming Tax" software that runs on M$ Windows only and so on... I'm lucky that I can do all those boring things at work when there's nobody watching me :-)
My first contact with Linux was in 1993 or 1994 when I've got some "Best of Shareware" CD featuring Linux's "boot" and "root" disk images (kernel 0.97) among other stuff. Just when I was looking for an UNIX-like OS for my own computer that could give me the "look and feel" I had in a SunOS machine I was used to work on that time!
After playing around with it, I just gave up (no Internet connection at the time...) until 1995 when I found an English magazine giving away some Linux-FT CDs. My first complete distro, unfortunately dead nowadays. After that I'd installed and used Slackware (2.2, 2.3, 3.3, 4.0, 7.0, 7.1 and 8.0), Red Hat (3.3, 4.2 and 7.1) Mandrake (6.0), Conectiva (Marumbi, Guarani), Debian (1.2 and 2.2) and others that I can't remember anymore.
Among those distros, I had used Slackware 2.2 for almost 2 years (years 1996 and 1997) using kernel version 1.2.13, a very stable one (most of the others were testing installation on spare HDs). I had decided to stick to Slack as long as it fulfills my needs. It provides the most clean installation of all Linux distros and gives you total control of your machine; all you have to know is how to set an UNIX installation, tuning some files by hand (I recommend the "vi editor" for this task) and doing the dirty job yourself. If you know precisely what you want, Slackware is the way to go. Their goal is to be "the most expert-friendly of all Linux distros", and I guess they've already got it!
My favorite Window Manager is the cool WindowMaker, developed by Alfredo Kojima, a Brasilian guy working for Conectiva. It's light and runs fast even on my Pentium 100 computer. I hadn't tried to install it on the ThinkPad 486 just because it has only a 540MB HD, otherwise it should be cool even on that kind of machine. Although I don't like KDE on a daily use, Konqueror is a very stable browser and kmail is a decent e-mail client. I hope it has SMTP-Authentication on the next version.
Anyway, Linux Rocks on any hardware you could install it. But let's think about the "K.I.S.S. approach" and keep it away from anything but computers :-) And register yourself and your machine(s) on the link bellow!