In my college life, one day on the way back to home i bought Red hat 9 CDs, at that time it was newly released. I tried to install that but the CDs weren't burnt properly. It took me about 4,5 rounds to visit market and exchange CDs to get Red Hat installed. I don't know whether it format all my HD or not, as before installing it i backed up all data on a spare 40G hard disk drive and then format my original disk (as i heard that Linux doesn't recognize NTFS). After installing RH, i played with it for some days but soon got bored because i never could play my games, couldn't listen to music and all those problem that a noob faces, never to mention i hated using Shell though i did a course on MSDOS when i was in my high school. The only command that i could use without thinking about any circumstances on Shell was "dir"
(which now i really doubt is a Shell builtin command, as per my research it is same as "ls -C -b", probably dir is just an alias to "ls -C -b" as both binaries "ls" and "dir" has exact same size, atleast on my systems, i guess that binary of "dir" stores alias to "ls -C -b", If i am wrong, please correct me.)So i un-installed RH, installed XP back and said, "Thank God, atleast now i can play my games and listen to music". Then i joined university; there was this guy who always talked about Linux. You will sit with him for a minute and he will tell you that Linux this and Linux that. His name was Bilal Mughal, if i remember correctly. So in university this guy was my inspirartion. I installed SuSe back then and it couldnt detect my sound card. This was my first experience with KDE; i simply loved that. After that tried many distro, you name one and i will say yes, i do remember that one
But all that was part-time as i always dual booted my system and ran Linux when i had nothing to do, so sometimes i didn't touch Linux for days and weeks. One day i was surfing on web and i wont lie to you; i was checking on some free stuff and ordering that. I found something called Ubuntu, read some about it, saw it screenshots, and ordered a whole bunch of CDs. That semester passed and i never got any Ubuntu CDs. One day we all were sitting in hostel and this attendant came and asked that who was Muhammad Shoaib from Room # 302, i said i was, and he handed me a bundle; to my surprise it was full of Ubuntu 5.04 CDs. I distributed most of the CDs and kept a couple with me. The very first thing that i liked about it was that its Live Session was cool; it was fast and secure; in the sense that no matter what i do, my hard disk wont get even a little demage as i always disconnected my hard disk before running Live Session.
Ubuntu came as a change in my life. And i am not being biased, but it still remains my recommendation for a guy migrating from windows to Linux. I always say, "Ubuntu: you got me
". So this was the first time when i ran Linux as my fulltime OS. At that time i was also working with couple of Open Source Languages, mostly with PHP. I dont remember exactly from where i heard/read the word Open Source for the first time but it caught my eyes, and i started research at my level that what was it. And today here i stand as a fulltime Open Source Promoter.So if you ask me that when i got into Open Source, i would say when i ordered Ubuntu CDs.
Thats how i got into Open Source, how did you?
PS:
that was quite some story, wasn't it?
