Hari's Corner

Here's the second edition of my "blast from the past" series.

In my second month of blogging, I was just beginning to start getting a feel of the whole thing. Of course, it was also a period when I was very active in the Linux community, LinuxQuestions.org and so you'll find that most of my posts during that time were Linux related.

So, here you go.

Championing a Cause at LinuxQuestions.org - Those were the days when I was getting incredibly frustrated with trolls and spammers. Too much respect was given to people who were blatantly trolling and obviously disrespectful of the Linux community and a lot of good members were spending more of their energy in responding to them than in helping out with genuine technical problems. In some ways, you can see where I am now and understand my present attitude to online forums - particularly tech forums. I reached a point when I decided that the best way to keep out trolls is to stay away from communities.

Hardware Compatibility and Linux - Another topic that I felt strongly about at that time - particularly with video card support and printers. Things have improved a lot even in two years, but attitudes about Linux and hardware support are harder to change.

A look at Slackware and Debian - Like a continuation of my comparison of Gentoo and Debian. I wasn't a big fan of Slackware at that time. But like all politically correct Linux users, I tactfully avoided flame wars, acknowledging that some people do prefer its completely manual configuration approach. Not that I was always successful though. I am still primarily a Debian user, although I use Slackware as a light-weight desktop (without KDE or Gnome) for web-browsing and e-mail. Distro wars suck anyway.

More on Slackware and Debian - A continuation of the same discussion. A user at LinuxQuestions.org contributed more points on the topic and I thought I should highlight them at that time. So I did. People who want to understand the underlying principles of these two distributions should look at this topic and decide for themselves which they like better. These days I'm a bit indifferent to these distro issues.