I realized today that I have been a Linux user for a little over 15 years. I was first introduced to the Linux operating system in 1994 during the first semester of my junior year at Texas A&M. At that time I was running two other operating systems: MS-DOS 5.0 and OS/2 Warp. After seeing a friend use some programs on his Linux box to connect to the campus modem pool and surf the net (using a program called lynx!) I decided I had to try it. This was amazing to me because, at that time, A&M didn't even offer PPP or SLIP accounts (it was several months later that A&M started to offer such accounts to students). So I borrowed another friend's set of several dozen 1.44MB floppy disks, containing Slackware Linux, and installed Linux as a third operating system.

Since 1997 I have been using Linux exclusively. The last Microsoft operating system I used was Windows 95. OS/2 was around for awhile but I stopped using it before I even graduated from college. I know a number of people who use and love Apple's OS X. It looks very nice but I've never been tempted to use it.

Do you only have a non-Windows/DOS operating system installed on your computer? Do you want or need to flash your motherboard's BIOS? Then you should really read this.