Thirteen years ago, when I first installed Linux, I didn't realize how it'd shape my future.

I was wandering around in the magazine section of a local book store looking at the video game magazines. Back in the day, these rags came with CDs full of demos for the latest, greatest games, and I was looking for new fodder to keep me busy. Someone misfiled a copy of a Linux magazine that included a CD with a copy of… Slackware, I think? I had read on the internet that Linux was a "hacker's OS", and I had decided that when I grew up, I wanted to "hack the planet". Intrigued, I bought the magazine and took it home.

My family had two computers in the house at that time -- one was a snappy 300mhz Dell that had access to the internet over an extremely expensive cable connection, while the other was our aged 486DX2 over clocked to a Pentium running at 83mhz. The latter had no internet access, but when I told my parents I wanted to install this Linux thing and it required a reformat, they immediately pointed to the older computer.

It was most frustrating install of my life, but I wasn't about to let it get the best of me. I figured out how to make a boot disk and start the install, but after running through the install application, it stopped recognizing the CD drive so I couldn't install any additional applications. It took about a week for me to get X11 (the Graphical User Interface) running, though I couldn't figure out how to install a window manager and had the ever-ugly default interface of TWM staring at me. The moment X11 actually started and didn't immediately crash, however, was a triumphant day and I'll admit I did a prepubescent geek victory dance.

Linux is an interesting beast in that it can do pretty much anything you'd ever want it to do -- if you can figure out how to do it. It can be incredibly frustrating for simple tasks (a few years later, trying Gentoo for the first time (before stage 3 installs existed), it took me a good two weeks to get sound working), and most certainly is extraordinarily daunting for new users.

This is where the strength of the Linux community rears its head. The frustrations I experienced were not new -- everyone who installed Linux in those days had a problem getting something or another working properly. Linux users ask for help, get clues and hints, and when they eventually solve their problem, they're proud of the solution and happy to share with the next generation of neophytes. Nowadays, there are thousands of bustling websites devoted to troubleshooting problems that people encounter using Linux or Linux applications, and the developers are engaged with the community, actively fixing bugs that people encounter and updating documentation to prevent further issues. It's a giant organism of knowledge with millions of people giving and taking as they learn and in time transitioning to teaching.

People often ask me "How do I learn Linux?" The best way is to embark upon a project and find a specific problem to solve -- setting up a custom Linux router, for example, building a TiVo clone, running your own web or email server, setting up an ad-blocker proxy, the list is endless.  There are thousands of step-by-step HOWTOs on the internet for each of these tasks, guiding you through the processes. If something goes wrong, there are countless avenues available to ask for help with eager geeks just waiting to offer an answer. Working through problems will require more and more knowledge as you work towards your goal -- when you eventually achieve success, you'll have picked up quite a few skills in the meantime and hopefully be hungry to put them to use as you find more cool things to do with Linux.