About
Quick and dirty
- My name is Shem Valentine.
- I married my beautiful wife Alesia in June of 2007.
- I am a Network Engineer for an ISP.
- I use KDE and Vim, and I don’t care what you think is superior
- My grammar is horrible, and I’m okay with that
- My favorite Desktop Distro is Arch Linux
- My favorite Server Distro is RedHat/CentOS
- My goal is to become a CCIE by the time I am 30
- I am currently working on my CCIP
Long winded
I started working with Linux about 5 years ago. My first Distro was Red Hat Linux 9, of which my first experience was horrible. I couldn’t get it to boot for the life of me. All the boot-up [OK]’s were very cryptic to me back then. After about a two weeks of fiddling with hardware I had just finished trying to reseat the RAM. In my haste to see if that worked I powered it on forgetting to plug in my USB keyboard back in. At log last it had booted. When I went to type my username and password and didn’t get anything (keyboard was still unplugged). I plugged the keyboard back in, and it crashed. Went back to my USB to PS2 adapter, and it ran fine since.
I was never really a big fan of Red Hat as a desktop back then. Perhaps it was the deep seated frustration I felt over the OS not loading because it didn’t like the keyboard interface I had chosen to use. I had sadly gone back to Windows, but was still very interested in Linux.
A few months later I decided to give SuSE a try. I had managed to find a, what I thought, not so genuine version of SuSE on the internet, I can’t remember what their business model was. I gave SuSE a valiant effort. Dual-booting for a over a year. Then one glorious weekend I decided I hadn’t booted into my Win partition for some time, and decided to wipe it.
SuSE looking back, was probably the most frustrating time I had with Linux. Probably due more to the fact I was a self tought beginner. Not knowing anyone that used Linux, I could only turn to myself and google. I must have reinstalled SuSE dozens of times. YaST would always break, and I would end up with a broken rpm database with unsolvable dependancies.
I tried Ubuntu 6.something LTS. I have never been a fan Gnome and I didn’t like the way Debian did things. I was too reliant on the RedHat ways. One thing I did learn with Ubuntu though, was how to compile a kernel. I desperately wanted to create my boot theme. I submitted it to a site that never posted it. It was called “Macabre” and if anyone runs acrossed it, please e-mail it too me.
Then about two years ago I decided I had enough experience to give Gentoo a go. I had great and horrible things about it, and decided I was up for the challenge. My first go at it was very messy. However, I struggled my way through and found the Distro that was right for me. I had switched all of my Linux machines to Gentoo.
Now it’s 2008, I’ve grown tired of updating a source Distro on several machines. Surely there must be a Distro as simple as Gentoo, without the compile times. Enter Arch, my new found joy. All the beauty of Gentoo with the ease of pre-built packages, and the flexability of a source repository.
Now, just to clarify, when I say simple I mean the simplicity of a bare Linux system. Not that it’s easy to use. Simple as in you build it to run the way you want, with the backends you want.
Wow, that turned out to be a longer history than I thought. Thanks for reading it if you did.
The company I work for is currently in the process of purchasing other ISP. My main duties are to integrate other ISP’s that we acquire. When not doing that I work on the Core Infrastructure, such as Servers and Routers.