Episode: 1634
Title: HPR1634: How I got into Linux
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1634/hpr1634.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 06:08:10

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It's Thursday 6th of November 2014, this is HBR episode 1634 entitled, How I Got Into
Linux, and is part of the series, How I Found Linux.
It is posted my first time post-bidic, and is about 18 minutes long.
Feedback can be sent to notrefiseatemail.com, or by leaving a comment on this episode.
The summary is, How I Discovered Linux.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
It 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code, HBR15, that's HBR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair, at An Honesthost.com.
This was recorded on a SansaClip.
You can email me at notrefiseatemail.com, and you can't Twitter me or Google Plus because
I don't do it, so thanks for listening.
So this is my first HBR episode, and since I've enjoyed listening to other people tell
how they came to Linux, I thought I would try to relate how I discovered Linux.
I think I inherited a 286 MHz computer from one of my relatives.
Now bare in mind, at this point in time, I had been through high school, and there was
no computers.
We had typewriters, and we learned to type, if that's what you wanted to do, but you
went to typing class because if you were a male because you wanted to see any of the
girls that were learning to type, it wasn't really on the map at that point.
Being after graduating from high school, I was more of a mechanical gear head.
But the surrelative who gave me this computer kind of related how she was more of a word
type of editor, and it was just like the coolest thing to her because she could just change
words without ever having to go back and fix the typing error or whatever, and the word
processor was just like the most wonderful thing, and I think the first PC IBM compatible
PC I saw was a 5.25 floppy disk with probably an 8080 or something in it, I don't know exactly.
But that's how I came to computers, I was not some kind of college student or anything
going and learning how to program, and this was the newest thing, it just was kind of thrown
in my lap.
So after discovering that, I had to figure out, well, what do you do with this?
For me, it was taking parts out and putting parts in, and there was a video card, and there
was all these circuit boards and things on it, and that was just really cool to me.
So after getting over that and figuring out how all that worked on a general level, I decided
I needed to do something in front of the computer screen, so I found a ray tracing, this was
in the era of, I guess, 16-bit video cards, and that 286 would take all night to create
a 3D image with the specular highlights, and it took me probably after learning how
to type in, it was basically a programming language, how to type in 3D image to it, I would
make changes and then start it overnight, and it would grind away, and sometimes I'd
go to work in the next morning, it would still be grinding away on a 320 by 240-bit JPEG
of something, but things went on, and I supported this person who went through versions of
Windows, her DOS and then Windows, and Windows 3.0, which would crash, and they'd call me
up and say, all the work I did, where is it?
My computer is messed up, and I'd come over and try and figure out what was going on,
so I kind of became the family techie, I guess, and then went through Windows 3.1, and I
still had other interests, I was working and doing other things, but this was kind of a side
thing, but I really became, there must be something better than this thing that keeps crashing,
you know, this is my person that I'm supporting, keeps losing stuff, and they have to go back
and redo it, they're paying hundreds of dollars for this, so I became more and more interested,
and I'm thinking that there's got to be something better than Windows, so I started looking around,
and at that point there was OS2, and I got a version of IBM OS2, and that was a very stable,
good operating system, but it was not supported, and there was no programs, you know,
that were cool for general users, games, and things like that, for, you know, just the general
user, there was business apps being made, you know, you could probably make a career at that
point of, in that, but I wasn't doing that, but I played around with that, and it was impressive,
I was like, OS2 is, you know, this thing runs, and runs, and runs, and runs, and it was good,
it wasn't like Windows, it didn't, you know, you didn't work in the middle of a session,
all of a sudden boom, it died, now I wasn't a power user, so I wasn't using anything really
sophisticated, so maybe that's naive for me to say, well, you know, I continued along,
continued along, and then I found an OS called BOS, and I got a whole of that, I think on a
some kind of special thing, or they gave it to me for free, while I installed that, they
mailed it to me, I installed it, and that was cool too, but, you know, as an end user, I just didn't
find, there was all that much to do, you know, there was, yeah, there was the basic text you could do,
all that, you know, you could write a letter, you could do this, that, that, but, you know, the
cool stuff was going, being developed on Windows, so, you know, I was going there, kind of,
and I ventured through when 95, and I ventured through when 98, and I supported people who were
having problems with it, and they were, it was crashing and dying and losing data, and
and the whole time I was thinking, there must be, must be, must be something better, well,
I didn't know about Unix, I didn't know about what was going on other than that,
so, I continued on, and eventually, around, oh, I would say 96, I found, I was in a computer
store, and there was a box-litning set, probably, I don't know, sushi or chorale or something,
but I didn't really want to spend the 99 dollars on it, well, eventually I found that,
through a BBS, or that was kind of pre-internet, or just at the edge of the internet, I could
download it on a 32k bit modem, and I somehow, oh, no, if I download it, or I got it, I got it,
but I got, you know, the whole thing, and all these floppy disks, and I,
I think it was Red Hat, or something, I installed that, and it, but, uh, that was really, you
like, yeah, this is going to be really cool, this is, I got to try this, but, and it installed,
and the desktop and everything was good, but, there was, at this point in time, all the
motherboards have software modems, this is probably, and that was secret sauce, I guess, to the
manufacturers, and you had it, that was an open source, so Linux just didn't really support that,
well, I continued to, uh, try to get onto the internet, or onto BBSs and things, and
I found that, well, what I ended up doing was buying an external modem that just plugged in
the serial port that had all the hardware, oh, that worked beautifully, and when I plugged
that in, Linux worked fine, but still, at this point, Windows 2000, and things were coming out,
that seemed to be pretty good, and, you know, I could find games and do other stuff, so I still
wasn't, you know, completely sold on Linux, it came to the point, probably in, about 1998, or,
so I want to say, 99, that I finally did install, on an older, you know, computer at a second
desktop, I kind of set it up as a Samba server, and, you know, that was fun, against my Windows XP
box, and, you know, I could access files and do things, and, but still, you know, I just didn't,
I don't know, it was there, and I was pretty happy with Windows at that point, so,
I wasn't having problems with Windows, because I guess I was just proficient enough not to have it
be crashy all the time, you know, just, you know, and if it did, I could fix it, so,
yeah, life went on, time was the one on, but, in about 2006, I guess, I finally was like,
finally was surfing the internet, and I saw a bunch of, and they were like, we'll send you a,
we'll send you a CD, so I was like, okay, send me a CD, and it was, you know, basic a bunch of,
with, uh, Nome 2, and that just worked beautifully, I just, I loved that, you know, that was fine,
and I can't remember if I was dual booting it through, uh,
Lilo, or whatever came, uh, but, but, I believe I did do that, so I was able to, at that point,
I was proficient enough to partition the disc on my laptop, and it worked really well,
and that's basically when I got hooked, and I was just like, well, at that point, I wasn't playing
any kind of games, I wasn't really interested, I was surfing the net, and, you know, I just, you know,
was kind of like, well, this would be the, you know, I don't want to, why do I have to pay Windows,
and, you know, I wasn't, I still wasn't completely convinced that, you know, I was worried about
viruses and things, even though I never, never, ever had one, that, you know, by downloading
software and executable and installed it, you know, and I had already discovered open-source through
Windows, there is open-source on Windows, and so, you know, it was just like, okay, but I didn't
really know the ethicalness of it at that point, but, uh, once I kind of hit on a bunch to,
I took off, and I used it, and for what I was doing, it was fine, it was great, in fact, you know,
it was different, and the, uh, you know, getting software with apt-get, or, you know, there's
everything there, I didn't have to go serve to a website and download an executable, and I was just
like, this is awesome, so I just kept going, and, uh, so about 2007, I completely went to Linux,
and, uh, you know, I tried different distributions, I tried a bunch to, and, uh, maybe Red Hat,
Fedora, um, uh, around a bunch of, for at least a couple of years, and it, it was fine with me,
and I changed the Debian, and I tried testing and different things, and I really liked Debian,
and so, kind of fast forward now, uh, I just didn't like the, uh,
uh, having the updates just went, you know, always there, and, uh, I think I just decided that,
you know, after searching around, I eventually tried Arch, um, I did, and successfully installed it,
he went through the beginners' guide, and, and I just fell in love with the, uh,
rolling release model, so, uh, that's where I'm at now, I, I don't,
you know, I, I feel like my, uh, computer skills, as far as being a techie and fixing things,
have fallen off, because it just never gives me any problems, it just runs, and I do updates, and,
it's been years since I've had an update, give me a problem, and, uh, I'm a happy, happy camper,
so that's my story, and, uh, I hope you enjoyed this, thanks to the HBR community.
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