During my high school I used to wonder looking at the banner plate “ UNIX LAB” pasted on door of our computer lab. As it was an Undergraduate Lab, we high school juniors were not allowed to enter to the lab. Back in those days we barely surfed Internet to find answers for any curiosity.
Co-incidentally I entered that UNIX LAB one day to meet my senior who was busy writing codes in a black screen. Up-to my knowledge I assumed that he was busy with some programming stuffs at command prompt. Later I noticed all computer screen were black and few more students were busy coding in that black screen. Curiosity was increasing and I asked my senior:
What are you doing in this black screen which has no menus to click?
Why is this computer screen black without any colorful screen?
That day I heard Linux first time in my life. My senior explained me first about the Microsoft Windows and then said about Linux, both of them are operating systems. And the black screen stuff was a terminal like command prompt MSDOS in Windows. And he had said to me that he was writing some codes for his project. This is how I became fascinated about that black screen. I wanted to know listen more and use that computers like my seniors, but in those days all I knew about programming was printing texts in QBASIC.
It took me so long to use that black screen and install Linux in my laptop, which I did in my first year of Undergraduate of Computer Science. The first distribution I got from the ISMS department of my University was a UBUNTU 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx. Well soon after a first few attempts of installing a Linux based operating system, I realized that black screen my senior used was not a common man's choice to dig in. Errors and bugs always made me angry and frustrating. List of hurdles faced to be a open source software user will fill the entire blog but all experiences had a fruitful advantages that is I got the chance to know the problems and would ultimately find the solution as well. This gradually increased my knowledge level , which gives me this confidence to call myself as a FOSS user and OPEN SOURCE PROMOTER as well as ADVOCATE around my University and community.
My first encounter to the word or world of Linux is kind of cool. I would love to hear such stories from you people as well. Together these words will spread positive message about Free an Open Source Software and Open Movement. If this story will please atleast an individual to dig in and try Linux , I will say writing this blog online is worth it.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.