My Story #1: Usman Malik’s Linux Journey So Far

We’ve asked our valuable readers to share their real life stories of the Linux journey for a variety of question. Here is the Linux journey of Mr. Usman Malik, who is a frequent visitor of Tecmint. His journey started a way back in the year 2004, when he was in class 9th.

Presently he is the CEO of ShellWays, Rapid Solutions and a Freelancer. Mr. Malik gives the credit to his father for making him aware of Linux. Here is the true story of Malik in his own words.

About Me

Usman Malik is a UNIX / Linux Professional having vast experience with Infrastructures based on Unix / Linux, Virtualization, Cloud Computing, Web Hosting and Applications, Automations, IT Security, Firewalls. He is Currently working as a Freelancer and with one of the leaders in Digital Security and Telecom Solutions provider. He did B.S (CS) BCIT, Certified Linux Professional Novell SUSE, Red Hat RHCE, Linux Foundation Certified, CCNA and is currently living in Dubai, UAE exploring new technologies, implementing them working with various clients, focused more towards standardized approach, documentation, research and development, developing new tools with existing opensource tools and scripts to automate system administration and DevOps tasks. He loves to learn new technologies, travelling, exploring new things and places.

I am answering to the question asked by TecMint – When and Where you heard about Linux and How you encountered Linux?

My True Linux Story

I am a Linux / UNIX / Security Professional and a frequent reader of TecMint, Team @TecMint is doing great work and I would really want to take sometime out to contribute few articles, how to’s and tutorials.

I have worked on multiple technologies, designing infrastructures, automation’s, DevOps, Virtualization, Cloud Computing, Server Hardening, Firewalls, Security and have quiet some certifications related.

I started Linux in 2004 when I was in 9th grade, At that time I was very keen with Websites and Web Hosting how they work, I started learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript and then when I wanted to move from static content to dynamic I started learning basic things in PHP for which I needed a web server.

There were couple of options for me for having a local web server as I was using Windows at that time but my father he was also in IT and convinced me to learn Linux and play with it. I started researching about Linux and got reviews on the web that most stable platforms use Linux as their base operating system for the web applications, we use that made me more convinced with Linux and wanted to get my hands dirty with it.

I then installed my first operating system Fedora Core 3 with a very old version of bundled GNOME :-) I found it interesting and really liked that way it utilizes the hardware, video and memory. I had old hardware and I was very impressed with the graphics performance and intuitive interface Linux has.

Then I started learning more about opensource, foss and history and started working with other distributions like Debian and FreeBSD.

Finally, after a lot of hit and trial I managed to get LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) working on my Fedora Core 3 and then I started testing my PHP applications a bit.

I must say till today, I never found myself bored with Linux, There is always something new that I learn everyday. Linux is everywhere now.

I am proud to be part of the Linux Community, FOSS and Opensource world.

I hope together if we change our thoughts rather than keeping the knowledge with ourselves and work like how TecMint and other websites are working giving back the knowledge to the community with proper documentation, Together I suppose We can make a great knowledge-base and give back to the community.

Tecmint Community is thankful to Mr. Usman Malik for taking time and sharing his Linux journey. If you have something interesting story, you may share it with Tecmint, which will serve as an inspiration to Millions of online users.

Note: The best Linux story will get an award from Tecmint, based upon the number of views and considering other few criteria, on monthly basis.