This is part three of my “Discovering Linux” series. Here’s Part One and Part Two.

2007 was a busy year. I was graduating from university and as such, that February I was smack in the middle of senior projects, all of which seemed to be happening right at the same time. Still, I was coming up with excuses to sneak away and use my Linux-ified Laptop. I lurked around on Ubuntu Forums and idled on Linux-related IRC channels. And more and more, having Windows XP on my desktop was starting to bother me. It was compounded by discovering that downloading an mp3 from Apple would play on my iPod but not Winamp, and downloading an mp3 from Microsoft would play on Winamp but not my iPod. This irritated me beyond belief. How could these companies expect to justify not-pirating-stuff if they made it so difficult to listen to music? I didn’t think I could do much about it, though. I needed Windows for games, right? And all those other programs that Linux couldn’t use, right?

I can’t recall what I was doing with my computer, exactly, that fateful day in February. It was the week that all of my senior projects were happening. Film shoots, theatrical plays. I wasn’t working at the time, having saved up a lot of money to take the year off, and yet there were days that I was gone from 9am until well after midnight.

And somehow, amidst all of this, I managed to royally screw up my computer. I think I must have known that what I was doing would screw it all up, because I conveniently happened to back up all of my important files the day before. Maybe I was trying to set up a dual-boot… who knows, really. I can’t remember. Regardless of what I was doing, though, I destroyed my Windows XP. Here’s how I wrote it on my Livejournal at the time:

I was just going around minding my own business (okay, maybe I was sorta messing with things… >.> shh!) and I had to restart my computer and when it came back up I was greeted with all sorts of fun “OMG CAN’T BOOT, OMG NO DISK, OMG RESTART, OMG STUCK” errors. Going into the BIOS didn’t help me at all, and a Google search on my trusty laptop informed me that the solution for this particular error was essentially this: “Nobody knows exactly what causes this error. Here is a list of 5,389,126,734 things you can try that may or may not randomly fix your computer. If none of those work, you’re screwed.”

So what did a very exasperated and rather un-amused Pike do?

Stuck the Kubuntu 6.06 CD in the drive and reformatted, of course.

Granted, it wasn’t all fun and games and smooth sailing. I had tons of display and graphical issues and I became very well-acquainted with the dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg command. And, if I recall correctly, I actually had to go out and buy a new wireless card. All of this in the middle of my senior projects that determined whether or not I’d graduate.

And yet, it was worth it. For the first time in years I felt like I was doing something really and truly productive and, dare I say, fun involving my computer. It was challenging and frustrating and it was a blast, and within two days I was all set up and ready to go.

…and that’s how it happened. Since then I’ve been a Linux user. Three years as of last month.

A lot of things have happened since then. I began playing World of Warcraft in May of 2007. I am forever grateful that I was a full-time Linux user before I started playing because I can guarantee you now that I would never have considered a full-switch to Linux if I was on Windows when I started playing and I thought that maybe Linux might do something to my precious WoW. (Um yeah, I was a serious addict for a while. *cough*)

WoW on Linux/Wine was relatively easy to set up– although I had no sound the first day or two that I played– but this was quickly fixed and I leveled to 70 (the then-level cap) without ever logging onto a Windows box. Things got tricky when I started raiding and suddenly Ventrilo was a must; Ventrilo, try as I might, never ever worked for me on Linux.* So it was that February of 2008– after one year of being an exclusive Linux user– I caved and turned my computer into a dual-boot machine. I’ve dual-booted since then, although I don’t particularly like it. I give Linux the lion’s share of my hard drive and only ever use Windows for Ventrilo or FRAPS, and since those are very situational uses I still do consider myself to be a “Linux exclusive” user in the end.

(In fact, right now my Windows partition is quite gimped– no sound, broken graphics, and it won’t connect to the internet. Linux did it all out of the box, so I’ve no desire to go mess with my Windows partition, especially now that I no longer play WoW.)

And so it is that we reach this point. I’m not a computer wizard. I’m not “elite”. I’m not a programmer (though I yearn to be one so I dink around with Python.) I’m just a girl who fell in love with open source one day and decided to see how deep the rabbit hole went.

And so begin my stories…

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* Ironically I finally started to get it to work about two weeks before I quit WoW. My last ever raids were done, perhaps fittingly, on Linux, so I’d come full circle.