About Me

My name is Al Rix. My introduction to Linux was in 1996 in the pre-2.0 kernel days - I wanted to install a machine which had a cool user interface like the RS6000 AIX boxes we were using to monitor our cisco network. It was a bit of steep learning curve at first and took several nights for me to download the floppy disk images but I got there in the end and had a debian machine running a fvwm desktop on my old 486 DX66!

Redhat 5 came along and so did the first betas of KDE, I spent hours tuning Xfree86 to optimize my S3 graphics card for colour depth and resolution at an acceptable frequency on whatever monitor I could get my hands on. PPP bugs, Netscape Navigator, running Lotus Notes under early alpha's of Wine, and a desktop that looked good and never crashed!

Early 1998 and I had replaced the failing company DNS servers with two recycled 386's running redhat and bind - a temporary solution that I believe lasted another 5 or 6 years! And this was a major UK bluechip org! Linux was a dirty word amongst some management, but I was touting it and my management were coming round to the idea that this could be the future.

These days I work as a systems architect for various orgs, some with a Linux base and some with other OS's. The core skills and knowledge I learnt in those early days is what has got me here and I'm thankful to all those developers who got it started! I still use Linux on my laptop and thats why I'm here, giving a bit back and testing my favourite distro on whatever laptop I have at the moment.