About Myself

My name is Benjamin Klopfenstein, and I am a 23 year old student of Colorado Technical University. I have previously studied at the University of Colorado, and I am currently pursuing a bachelors degree in information systems, with an emphasis on management.

I use Linux on a daily basis. Gentoo is my favorite all around distribution, but for practicality I also use Kubuntu regularly.

Ancient History

I have been using computers for various purposes since around 1993. at the age of 10 I was typing in BASIC programs from a book of my aunt's into my parent's Mac 512k Enhanced. I enjoyed modifying existing programs, but even back then I liked what might loosely be called system administration. Back then I would find and collect all of the floppies my parents kept all their software on, and I cataloged and made copies of everything. I made a set of disks with a menu for word processing, a set of disks for everything graphical (like macPaint or whatever it was called) and one for games. I then sifted through all the disks I had and found the newest operating system I could, put that on the software disks, and just variously tuned everything so it worked well.

Of course, it was shortly therafter that my parents decided the mac was getting quite old, and decided to pick up an old 386/44 and I began my fun all over again, but this time with the benefit of a 100 Mb hard drive and three Zip Disks. I used various TSRs to bring up a menu when you clicked, or did other things to catalog the large collection of games and other software that was present on this system.

I had a fun time setting all this up, and eventually realized there were other problems with this machine, and I used norton utilities to eventually with much hassle dispose of a 32Mb file named 'bogus'. There were other issues, some relating to windows 3.1, others to the non-IDE cdrom drive.

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Coming of age

After my stint with the 386, I was given my own 486/33. I was happy to have this, and bought a 16Mb simm to supplement the 4Mb of built in memory. There were few people that were willing to sell me only one simm, but this Packard Bell only had one simm slot, which I was told was impossible.

I was again given a machine, this time a 486/66 DX2. I eventually had windows 98se running with a combination of one 200Mb hard disk, one 250Mb hard disk, one 100Mb hard disk all unified with BigDisk. This machine had a sound card running one of the hard drives and the CD-Rom Drive.

This was now around 1998, and I was about to learn that there was more to PC operating systems than just DOS and Windows...

About this time, a friend from high school gave me a Mandrake Linux CD to try out and told me "it's way better!" Better than what, I didn't ask, but I promptly loaded it up on my 486/66. some short time later I was in complete disgust; I had no idea how to do anything, it took forever to boot on my ancient computer, and like most linux distributions of the time, it didn't really do anything too flashy.

Despite all of this, it wasn't too long before I discovered I had a real use for it. I got a copy of Redhat, and used it to share a single dial up connection with all the computers in the house. At the same time I enabled Squid to do caching so the dialup service would seem a bit faster for commonly accessed pages. This also meant that we did not need to always be dialed in.

At the same time, I began an internship with a local radio station's engineer, and quickly began to assume responsibility for their computer operations. I also began to implement a system similar to my home setup for multiple computers sharing a single phone line, but my internship ended before I fully completed the setup.

I began to experiment with linux more often, and soon installed a newer version of Mandrake and dual-booted my new e-machines 466 mhz Celeron. I used Mandrake for a while, and it was during this time that I began to understand how linux really operated and began to enjoy linux. I switched to SuSe, which i highly preferred.

The year was 2003, Linux as an operating system began at this point to really strike a chord with me; I enjoyed how it operated, and I was not afraid to delve in and learn about it at the lowest levels. It was probably for this reason that the next distribution I tried (partially to get away from the annoyances of RPM dependancies) was Gentoo.

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More Recently

Many people have said many things about many distributions, but what has been said about Gentoo more often than most anything else consists of two things:

1. Gentoo is a pain to set up.
2. enduring that pain will teach a person a lot about Linux.

I would certainly agree with both of these points; Gentoo is indeed a pain to set up. I have used gentoo now on five laptops, at least 9 desktop machines, and four servers all for various personal endevors. The reason I have endured the pains gentoo puts me through is because it exposes the true flexibility linux offers, and I believe that it is important to bend the will of the machine to meet my own, so to speak.

I also believe that using gentoo, especially in conjunction has taught me more about linux in the 4 years I have used it than most have learned in that amount of time, and certainly more than I would have learned had I not.