Penguin

Linux and Giray History ...

It all started at Marmara University, Istanbul. We were setting up the internet
connection for the University, and had a very limited budget. As servers we bought
two Sun Sparc 10 workstations, and didn't really have money to buy a hardware router.

Having heard about something called Linux in 93/94 I set out to the Middle Eastern
Technical University in Ankara, armed with a 80 Meg IDE harddisk. I got Slackware
and I believe 3 floppy disks from Yener Yigit, and came back home.

The first server I installed was a 486 with 16 RAM, called turkuaz.cc.marun.edu.tr.
Having installed other unices before, the installation was realtiveley painless.
It turned out that I had to recompile the kernel to start up IP forwarding (routing)
which was extremely slow ... but then it was up and running.

In time we had several Linux machines doing print sharing, dial-in etc.
Then the first internet conferece (Inet-TR 95) in turkey was announced, and
the idea came to give a seminar on Linux. A mailing list was set up at
albatros.cc.akdeniz.edu.tr by Yavuz Selim Komur.

The idea was to give a seminar on Linux and set up a Lab. Peole eventually involved where

The seminar was given Kagan and myself. We had prepared for only one session, but after much
demand we ended up giving two. Maillogs and the Website of that event are at
http://seminer.linux.org.tr/konferanslar/inet-tr95/

Here were also the first corner stones laid for ''linux.org.tr' the Turkish Linux User Group. After
many years, discussions, fights and seminars and a few incarnations it is now a legal entitiy with a virtual address
at "http://www.linux.org.tr.

There were many tools, applications, procedures available to make different Linuxes Turkish friendly. However,
there was no single distribution that embraced them all. A team decided to make a Distribution with Turkish
support, and the name became to be Turkuaz

The core team consisted out of

Unfortunatley Turkuaz never made it beyond version 1.x due to the fact that most of the developers,
wen't abroad and/or just didn't have the time. Some other turkish distributions, however, did
arise afterwards.

After I moved to Amsterdam, I founded the Linux Gnu User Group Amsterdam (LIGA)
I also have moved the company I work for to think more towards Linux and Opensource, and we have now a
Linux Businesses Division headed by me called The Linux Platform.

I have given several seimars on Linux and Opensource over the time. Here are some:

also here are some presentations I have given at our LUG: I also regularly give Linux Awareness courses. Furthermore, I have developed
several Linux courses which I give not so regulary :).

Some publications