Another successful iso burning was a debian net-install disk. It was only about a hundred fifty megs and once I figured out how to connect it to the internet, the computer with the CD burner became a debian machine. I learned to use apt rather than rpm, the Red Hat installation files. I also started learning about live-cds. Knoppix, the Ubuntu installation disk, dyne:bolic which thrilled me as I was an artist, DSL (Damn Small Linux) and many others. All of the above except dyne:bolic were based on Debian so I got to know it very well. The only problems I had were with PulseAudio (for which reason I do not consider Lennart Poettering a hero) and Mono (ditto Miguel de Icaza though he did a lot of good things with Gnome).
I began to meet other users again at about this time and one fellow at the Seacoast Linux User's Group told me he had spent two weeks installing Debian into someone's computer. Since I had first spent most of a day doing it, that surprised me until I learned he installed them from a set of CDs. A LARGE set of CDs which was too large, in fact for him to install everything. It was also about then I started cartooning again and as you will see above a lot of what I drew was about what I know. I managed Slackware again briefly, but had learned Gnome, I wanted Gnome and they weren't supporting it. So I settled for Debian with a gnome desktop (he lives in a cute little house and smokes a pipe, the gnome).
Then came the two programs I mentioned above, and other issues and I began to lose patience with Gnome. Dyne:Bolic came along and blew my mind. The desktop image was very cool. It was clearly a vector drawing and they had a vector drawing program called Inkscape. I'd had vector drawing when I came back to college. For me it was like all the best parts of watercolor an none of the other stuff. Dyne:Bolic had something else too: the xfce4 desktop. I very soon switched full time.
Dyne:Bolic was one of many programs I ran from CDs. These included Knoppix, DSL (Damn Small Linux) Ubuntu and even as my computers changed Fedora. I came to appreciate both how Ubuntu was taking over mindshare and, since it was a debian derivative, Debian was taking over how most of us ran Linux. Slax, a slackware derivative, was fun but one day my mind was blown, while playing with dyne:bolic when I found installpkg removepkg and pkgtool on it and realized it was nothing more than a repackaged Slackware.
Round about 2007, as I was switching to laptops, I got fed up with Debian. I threw Fedora 9 on my machine, and it ran sweetly till I upgraded to Fedora 10. Fedora was still, to my mind, a resource-hog. So I decided to try Slackware for a few weeks. I'm essentially still on it.
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