There was this Suse 6.3 CD in CHIP magazine when I was in the 9th standard (2000). Since I had read about this Linux thingy and had acquired a book (Linux unleashed), I installed it onto my computer, fiddled around, learnt stuff, right from how to shut down the machine safely to configuring X. In my 11th and 12th, there was a brief break. Then, I had the good fortune of coming to IIT Madras, where several machines ran GNU/Linux. I learnt as much as I could in my free time, and became familiar with the various tools present on the system, especially those which helped with my studies.