New to CentOS - Hello

[drmalony]

I'm Dale and I've been using various Linux distro's at home for 15 years or so as I was frustrated with Windows 98 security and stability, not that desktop linux was really better then. Firefox was Firebird then (still in beta) and I couldn't believe I needed to use a script to mount a floppy. I dual booted for a while until I got stable footing and never looked back. Now I'm starting my first project at work (Industrial Controls) using Linux and have a variety of reasons to use CentOS. I'm certainly no programmer or sysadmin, but I have learned enough over the years that I can always find a way to do what I need to do.

I cut my teeth on a boxed set of Red Hat v7 floppies when I was on dialup. Back then my distro preferences were guided by whichever worked best with my printer. I tended to hop to new a distro every time a non-elegant shutdown corrupted ext2 or in some other way caused problems rebooting. Also experimented with whichever distros were included by Linux Format magazine on the CD with the paper magazines I used to buy at Borders for about $12 each.

Suse was an early favorite for a while (the only other distro I purchased) and I learned to prefer KDE over Gnome, but YAST gave me heartburn and forced me to learn more about text editing config files. I moved to Mandrake before it became Mandriva. It didn't take too long before I wearied with rpm hell and decided to give a Debian based distro a try. Mepis was my intro to deb packaging, and I never again had to resort to rpmfind. Soon after I started with Mepis, Warren decided to upgrade/convert to a new version based on Dapper Drake, a relationship which didn't last very long. I then learned to like Kubuntu, and eventually Mint KDE - my current favorite at home.

I have two daughters who have grown up using Linux. My wife and her parents use it. So I figure it won't cause too much heartburn to introduce it to a group of maintenance technicians at work for a SCADA project. We're leaning towards using Siemens WinCC OA and an Oracle database, and it was a pleasure to learn that WinCC is multi-platform and speaks Ethernet/IP. I prefer to avoid putting windows on the ICS network.

If my project proves successful on CentOS, I presume we will convert to RHEL. Until then, I'm on a tight budget and free CentOS should enable me to get things rolling. I'll start out on an air-gapped network, so I need to learn how to maintain via a local yum repository - my yum memories are covered in cobwebs.

Looking forward to getting things done in CentOS and hopefully I'll get up to speed enough to give back to the community.