At some point in between 2004 and 2005 in Italy appeared a hacking magazine, called "Hacker Journal". I discovered OpenSource software, Linux and the Hacker ethics. That's the turning point in my digital life: I began experimenting with Linux, Slackware being my first distro. Slackware was a mess with management, in turn. I looked for an alternative distro with a native package manager: Mandriva screwed up my hard-drive, Debian didn't install and swaret was just a little nice script (talking of Slackware).

Then (mid ~2005) I found Gentoo: portage looked like heaven when compared to other package managers. Flexibility, regular updates and on top, semi-automatic source fetching&compilation. Solving Windows' errors seemed really silly when compared to a compilation error. I learned almost everything about Gentoo. Followed the updates regularly, installed packages, moved to graphical interface, learned the tools. In the end, learned bash and began scripting. Then, with first year of university, learned C ad began modifying little parts of the kernel (power-patches) and programs (davl tools). Learned the process of creating an ebuild and created my own overlay. The status of Reiser4 support gave me the idea of creating Reiser4-enabled minimal liveCDs. And so, here we are. This is a sum of all the things I learned.