The first Tuesday in November is a significant day in Melbourne - that's the day on which the Melbourne Cup horse race is staged, an event which has earned the name of being the only race that stops a nation.

That day will also be significant to me from now on for it was on Tuesday, November 6, that I helped to set the editor of iTWire, Stan Beer, on the Linux road.

At the time I started playing around with Linux - December 1998 - there was no live CD available to see what the operating system looked like before it was installed. You had to take the plunge, make space on your hard drive and run a dual-boot system if you wanted to taste of what was then, more or less, forbidden fruit. My first Linux CD came with a copy of the Australian Personal Computer magazine which was selling for $A15; there was a small Linux pocketbook as well. The CD had a copy of Red Hat version 5.2.

These days, there is a plethora of live CDs which people can use to look at the interface.

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