"And so begins my tale of conversion. It was that Winter that I found myself using a pay phone outside during an extremely cold and icy winter to call Microsoft. My Internet and phone lines were down, and I needed to re-activate Windows XP, which I just reinstalled. I was freezing cold, angry, and frustrated. All I wanted to do was use my computer. Was that too much to ask? After convincing the Microsoft associate that I was not installing it on more than one machine I wrote down the activation code with shaky hands and went home and activated my copy of XP.
"I was also in college at the time, and I believe Redhat 7.1 (somewhere around there at least) was the popular distribution. I took a class called "Linux Administration" and I fell in love with Linux. At that time though, I did not feel that it was good enough to replace Windows XP so I always kept it installed as a dual boot. There were a great deal of things that I didn’t know how to do, and tweaking and experimenting on my system resulted in RPM "dependency hell" that was too hard to recover from once I broke something."
