I’ve used a large number of operating systems over the years. In fact I’d be hard pressed to name them all. Most no longer exist. The one I use most consistently is Linux.
My first exposure to Linux was the Slackware distribution on a 386 (no math chip!). It was a pre-1.0 kernel, but I can’t recall if it was 0.99… or 0.98… I do remember downloading it over a 300 baud packet switched ham radio link that my brother had set up. It took weeks. A new kernel took days. It all fit on my 20 MB hard drive. I can’t remember the amount of memory installed, but it was probably less than the 640K max that haunted us in those days. Ah, memories!
The control freak in me stuck with Slackware in those early days. Red Hat had all this newfangled RPM technology, but at the time integrating custom package builds was quite simply a pain. I didn’t switch to Red Hat until many years later.
So fast forward a few years and I have some machines to play with. This is when I started playing with Red Hat again. It was around the time of RH 5. At this point, Red Hat became my distribution of choice, and it remained so for many years.
Fast forward a few more years, and I got my first Opteron. The processors were out before I could get a system for them, but I bought a Tyan S2880 as soon as it was available. It still runs today even as other machines have come and failed. I’ve upgraded it a few times with memory and processors, and the addition of RAID storage, and it’s still a top of the line system.
When I first created the machine, giving it life was a challenge. 32 bit Windows ran on it, but Windows Update wouldn’t because it claimed not to recognize the processor. This led to the machine being infected by a worm. It was a couple of weeks before Windows updated their update. Their 64 bit OS was coming “any day now” for more than a year. It didn’t actually arrive until Intel produced their 64 bit processors, and I’m one of the conspiracy theorists on this point.
So I went with Linux. At the time, SuSE was the first to market with a 64 bit OS, so I gave them a try. I had issues with drivers from the start. I’d bought this beautifully fast SATA drive, but the SATA drivers wouldn’t work at all. They then fixed it so they’d work, but I couldn’t boot from them. To be fair to the Linux community, a lot of the problem was Tyan’s poor driver support. I added an IDE drive for my boot disk and all was well. As for the OS, I was hooked. Their update mechanism was head and shoulders over Red Hat at the time. I was with them a long time.
And then came Novell. They took a wonderful update mechanism in the form of YUM, and in the process of integrating it with their own system completely and utterly mucked it up. It’s usable now, but it wasn’t for a long time. Of course, now they’re trying to integrate the worst features of the Windows interface, so I’m not likely to go back to them in the forseeable future.
In the meantime, my work environment was switching from Solaris development to Linux development, and as part of that I switched to RHEL. I still run RHEL 5 on the machine even though I’ve moved on. I did what little Windows development I needed to do in a virtual machine, and I still don’t have a native Windows machine. I don’t miss it.
So the two main issues I have with RHEL have been update and expense. I run multiple machines for testing and development, some of them very old. I can’t justify the expense of update contracts for all of them. RH definitely improved their updates with the introducton of yum, so I’m liking that. By necessity though, the packages aren’t cutting edge. Sometimes though, you just need that. So I develop in Fedora running in a virtual machine. Life is good.
In the meantime, I’d been running a hosted server for a number of smaller projects, including hosting some charity sites. Volume is low, expense is low, but supporting multiple domains made my configuration complex. The service provider gave me limited options for OS. Specifically, I could get a Fedora or SuSE distribution one release behind. This meant I was upgrading once a year. This meant, because of my complex configuration, a week of downtime and intense work to get everything up and running again! When they offered Ubuntu as an option, I had to check it out.
I installed it in a VM first to play with it. The first thing I liked was their minimal server install. More importantly, I liked their upgrade path for the LTS (Long Term Support) versions. Ubuntu was into 8.0.4, but my service provider was stuck on version 6. Ubuntu allowed me to install version 6, and immediately upgrade to version 8! Ubuntu it is! I now use Ubuntu for all my servers. I haven’t played with the desktop yet.
I’m not a total convert to Ubuntu, but that’s Debian’s fault. Specifically in how they’ve built some of their packages. One of my projects used the Berkeley DB system, but Debian modified it so that all the utilities were renamed to include version numbers. This meant a substantial overhaul to my build scripts, and automatically obsoleted my package builds. That and their build system is poorly documented. RPMs are a whole lot easier.
So here I am. Some Red Hat, still some SuSE but that’s not likely to continue, and some Ubuntu. I’ve loved and hated them all!
Tales of a Developer 
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