This is the first post on this new site. Our old web site (circa 2007) was a home brew affair running on an old Pentium 166 that I bought for $1.00 around 2001. That machine was so old the BIOS wouldn’t let it boot from the CD-ROM drive. I wanted to load Linux on it but first I had to find a Linux distro that was still available on 3.5 inch floppies. Slackware Linux to the rescue.

I think I loaded Slackware V7.x. I think it shipped with a Linux 2.2 kernel and I needed at least a 2.4 kernel so my very first experience with Linux (after getting it installed) was to build an updated tool chain and compile a new kernel. I followed instructions from the web, assembled the prescribed source code, did the old .config, then typed “make.” I figured there was no way in the world it would compile, I mean come on, there’s no way…low and behold, soon as I hit return, the screen filled up with text output from the compiler…what do you know, it seems to be running…but wait, almost every line seems to say “Warning.” See, there you go, it’s going to chug along and eventually error out. It was running so slow I just left it to run all night.

Next day I was amazed to see that the kernel actually compiled with no errors. Followed some more instructions from the web to get the kernel installed, and re-booted. What do you know, the machine actually rebooted and launched Linux 2.4. That was my intro to Linux.

From there I toyed around with Apache and set up a home based web server. Hacked together a couple of versions of a web site, learning HTML and CSS along the way. When we finally got broadband service to the house, I put the web site on line via a Dynamic Domain Name Service (DDNS) until the ISP blocked even the alt HTML port I was using.

Anyway, flash forward to now and here I am posting on my very own professionally hosted site. The whole endevor is just a vehicle to learn WordPress. More to follow….

By the way, the picture is totally unrelated to this post, I just wanted to see how to attach a picture to a post.