Kudos to World renowned FEDORA Project !
Let me introduce myself..... I am Bhaskar. I would call myself a Software guy who till now is not much familiar with the Fedora architecture, but who knows how to use it well. I am quite impressed by the motto of the Open Source Software because of many reasons, but the one which really captures my mind is, "It provides an opportunity to any technical person in the world to contribute his/her skills !"
A Short Story
It was March 30th 2008 !
I got up at 6:00 am and turned on my new Laptop (HP dv2601tu) which I purchased the previous day. It came with "Windows Vista Home Premium" version pre-installed. My friend had called me the night before who suggested me to format the disk and install a fresh copy of "Windows Vista Ultimate", the pirated copy of which he had.
Taking his suggestion into consideration, I formatted the disk and started with the installation of Windows Vista Ultimate using the pirated CD. To my surprise, when the installation reached a point where it says, Completing Installation... and the three dots keep running as if something is in progress, the system hanged up for nearly half hour. I thought may be Windows Vista Ultimate takes a long time to install, since it was my first experience installing Windows Vista and left the system untouched for nearly 2 long hours. Still the same ugly Completing Installation...
Mind you I re-tried, doing this for the next 3 days and could do nothing other than watch my new Laptop lying useless in an unstable state.
At this point, as anybody of us would have done, I decided to install Windows XP on the laptop thinking that Windows Vista Ultimate had some compatibility problems. I started with Windows XP installation. And for God's sake, not this time...I came across a screen which said, "Installation is unable to find any Hard Drives connected to the system". Just imagine how bad I felt at that moment ! I was just helpless and could do nothing but curse Windows for its unreliability. The copies of Windows XP/2000 which I had been using for installation on my desktop since last 4 years have turned useless.
It was during this time when I happened to try installing Fedora 9 (Sulphur) which at the very first attempt got installed perfectly without any glitch and atleast I was able to put my laptop to use. May be, Fedora 9 did not provide any drivers which were compatible with the on-board Fingerprint Sensor and Webcam of the Laptop but, the thought that atleast some other OS I could install on my laptop and could use it made me happy. From then on, I have been a great user and fan of Fedora and Fedora Project and would like to contribute to it in whatever way I can.
Thank You