This will probably be short and sweet becasue otherwise there would be a lot to write here. The first of the first is of course, how I learned of linux's existence. I was a Windows User. I was leeching pirated software from every corner of the web when I realised that their must be something better to do then this. I was right. I wasn't an IE fan and I looked for an alternative (after leeching all that pirated software, I knew there must be one). I decided to go with the first alternative I'd ever heard of, Netscape... I remember netscape pretty well. But shortly after I learned of Mozilla and actaully, Mozilla is what really got me interested in the hole open source movement. If it weren't for Mozilla I would've never heard of linux. But I did, after many google's later I landed there. I'm sure we've all been to http://linux.org. At the time of course, I assumed linux was a company (or an operating system a company was making). Boy, was I wrong. Linux really broght me up a LOT from noob. Anyways, we'll skip past the boring stuff until the first distro I ever really booted on my box. It was SuSE's live eval of 9.1. It really got me interested. I knew I wanted SuSE that much. I was on dialup at the time, no broadband in my area so I had to beg family and friends to burn me CD's. This was a very big research period for me. About 6 Months later, I got lucky. Broadband was avalibe in my area. I won't go in to setup detail here. I realised that if I ever wanted to install linux I needed to partition my drive. And at the time I had read mixed comments about linux's partitioning ablity (not about tools in specific, I was too big a noob for that). I now have to admit one of the stupidest things I've ever done; I bought a LEGAL LEGIT (OSS really sent my piracy rate straight to hell) copy of VCom System Commander. And actually, it hindered more then it helped. The first thing I tried to do with it was remove a gig from my fragmented NTFS partition. Unfortunately I lost power during this operation and had to rip through manuals worrying about photos that new got backed up and now appeared GONE. I found out that all I had to do was unhide the drive so, I was in luck. Now, at the time there was no real free and easy (you had to do a web install that seemed confusing to me at the time) way to get SuSE so I had to pick the distro that appealed next most to me, Mandrake. Mandrake was the first distro I ever installed on my machine. It was a great distro all around. I quite liked their GUI "Control Center". But only 2 days into my usage of mandrake, all hell broke loose and my windows boot sector was magically corrupted :-(. I did a total windows reinstall, fortunately all data was still there, just the boot sector went dead. Since I reinstalled windows, I did loose my GRUB bootsector and with no backup I couldn't really get it back. Oh well, I thought, maybe Linux isn't all it's hyped up to be (this was now the second time I was glad to be with my pictures again)... But that though didn't last me very long. I researched a lot more here until one day SuSE released a personal test cd. I though this would be a perfect opportunity for me to get linux on my box again. I booted it up and in about half an hour I had linux running. I had to read tutorials to do almost anything, but I liked that, for once I got to learn something new, something that windows could no longer provide me with. I had this distro for about a week until another armageddon. It crashed on me and I thought it tried to mount some strange network drive at boot... Oh crap, I got hacked I thought to myself. I'm not sure if this is what really happened, I just know I paniced and (this time I had learned of fixboot and fixmbr) reinstated my windows MBR. Once again, burying linux. Now, I belive I also tried a fedora out in here but there was some problem with it, I forget exactly what it was. Anyways, I'll skip the details. In the end I bought a second box and installed linux on it. I started with SuSE (was crazy and did a net install). The great thing about this was that I would never have to worry about destroying a windows partition ever again. Now, the graphics card in that new machine I had got was an SiS, they have 0 linux support for 3d rendering (or atlease none that I could understand at that time). I ended up switching with the windows box which had an Nvidia graphics card. Unfortunately I didn't feel like doing another SuSE net install so I used mandrake for a while. Eventually a newer version of SuSE came out and I switched to that. I used SuSE for weeks (that's a REALLY long time compared to how long some of these distros had lasted) and eventually started getting annoyed that the limited package selection in SuSE, I wasn't very big on compiling things at the time. But I realised if I wanted more packages, I had 2 options: Fedora and Debian (there was no ubuntu at this time). I had bad past experience with Fedora and debian seemed to have more packages anyways. I had been gaining command line knowledge steadily as I went along but I wasn't quite sure I was ready to do such things as set up X11 from scratch. I decided I needed to test this procedure out. And what better way to test something than with a VM. I grabbed the linux trial of VMware (it'd probably be gone in 30days :D). And installed debian. I learned a lot of things here. I could use my system completely from a command line. I decided it was time to install Debian. A few reboots later I had a working debian OS. Debian is one of the best linux distrobutions I have ever had the pleasure of using.