Story of a hard core piracy lover turned a FLOSS evangelist

Let me first introduce myself

I am Anant Shrivastava a floss enthusiast and i am presenting here a story of my intro
and working with GNU/LINUX.

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| FROM HARDCORE PIRATE TO FLOSS PRIEST |
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The story of my introduction to linux starts in 1998.
When i was in 7th standard i had a deep passion for computers
and the first computer magazine i bought was PCQuest
it was the gaming special :-), from this i got the information
that the next issue will cover LINUX.

Till that time i didn’t knew what it is and for the first time
i thought that it will be some kind of a new software and to my
utter disappointment it came to be as a operating system which
was of no use to me(which later became my first distro).
I read about it in the magazine and not even a single time a thought
like lets give it a try came in my mind.

This was my first interaction

Life continued monotonously with a big hole (what we generally call as WINDOWS).
The things started to change when i did a course on HARDWARE ASSEMBLY
(if i remember correctly P-II where latest at that time(Y2K) and P III was on its way to the market).
Their i got a hand on experience to install windows and other softwares off course not knowingly i was thought how to do piracy. Then i was deep in piracy for couple of months.
One day while cleaning my shelfs the copy of PCQUEST which i bought in 1998 came in my hands and in curiosity i started reading it, then i asked my friend that have they used
linux so far or not and what i got in reply was a big NO.

Being adventurous by nature and also after reading some more stuff on Linux i thought that “LETS GIVE IT A TRY”.

I was having an old 486 with 50MHz speed, i though that lets try on this pc and i installed it with the help of the installation guide (if i remember correctly it was RHL 5.2). One of the important reasons to install and use LINUX was that when ever i declared that i use LINUX many eyes were raised and many questions were asked and that was what i wanted (to be in the lime light). I never tried to learn about how to do all the works it was just a show peice
for me till that time (this situation changed soon).

In 2001 i laid my hands on RHL 8.0 and till than i was very much fed up with the piracy work i installed it on my latest pc giving out 10 GB’s of my memory and this time i concentrated on it for knowledge purpose, when i got a hint that it was build on net i searched on net and got to know a lot about the GNU, FLOSS and other such terms as well as the philospy. it is after reading all this throughly i moved on my path to be a FLOSS PRIEST. to be frank till now all what i have learned is through my self practice. after successfully running GNU/LINUX
(now i knew correct word is GNU/LINUX and not LINUX) i helped about 10 of my friend in the 2003 to start of their working on LINUX. Then a thought came in my mind to give some thing back to the society which has given me so much from that time onwards till now when i am writing this story
i have helped about 50-75 persons to switch over to GNU/LINUX and also have helped many others to solve their problems related to installation and peripheral configuration. in the past two years i concentrated my self on the installation and peripheral configuration as i saw it as a big hurdle in the path of switch over. then i joined my local glug and worked to spread the word of FLOSS in the community.
this is how it all begin and till now their is no looking back.

i hope this story will help some one to switch over and be part of FLOSS community.

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