Episode: 1133
Title: HPR1133: How I got in to Linux
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1133/hpr1133.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 19:33:21

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Hello my name is Dick Thomas, you can find my blog at www.expd259.co.uk.
I've been listening to Hacker Public Radio for about six months now and I'm loving every show
and I was just checking out the website and it appears that requested topics are how you got
into Linux and how did you get into Linux geeked them. So I thought I'd do a quick podcast on that.
So where to start? I think where should start is my first computer.
I was about eight years old so that makes it around 1989, 1988 and it was a ZX Spectrum Plus 3.
This was my very first computer, it was an 8-bit Z80 CPU and it was an awesome introduction
to computers before the Mac and PC was affordable really for a home PC.
It used basic and I learned how to program basic and did really well in it and even learned some
machine gold. I can't remember anything now except 10 go to 10 print 10 and all that rubbish.
My favourite game was our type which sadly you can't legally acquire from the
Spectrum archive repositories and so I've had to resort to an Xbox version which isn't quite
the same playing it on the Xbox 360s, it was playing it on the Spectrum. I used that machine until
I was about 15 when I took it apart and blew it up and then a family friend lent me his laptop
which I subsequently broke using double space to try and double the amount of hard drive space
available to me. I broke it by not letting it run all the way and then I had to manually run it
stop it, copy over some files, delete the files and it was just a pain in the ass.
So I learned lots of system commands in DOS and this was running Windows 3.11 for work groups.
It was a first experience for me using DOS and I learned so much so I'll always be thankful to
him for lending me that computer even though I did break it by him. My first computer of my
own I got one hour 16, I got a part-time job just to pay for the thing, saved up 200 pounds
went to a computer market, bought a computer and it was a 33 megahertz with a turbo button
to 66 megahertz. It had four mega RAM and a 150 megabyte hard drive and I believe it was running
Windows 95 which I bought at the time. I also had internet access which was new and novel for me.
At this point I started learning how to make web pages,
staying up all night, reading everything I've possibly could about making web pages.
This was before HTML4 I think, but I'm not sure so don't quote me on that.
I remember I used front page because I didn't know HTML but we digress.
I stayed with this computer for a few years until I was about 16 when I moved to Cornwall
that's in southern England and I live in the north of England. It's about seven hours journey.
I was at a police auction and I found a copy of Windows NT4 that came with a legitimate serial key
so I bought that for an extortion at £2 which was about $3.50 and I really loved that
NT was more secure than Windows 95 was. Not much more secure but more secure.
I stayed with this for a few years but I wasn't quite satisfied with it
and the quality of the software wasn't particularly great. In 1991 Linux was released as we all know.
I heard about it but I had no idea how to get it or how to use it or anything.
In 1997 a PC magazine that I bought had an article about Linux and how it was going to become big.
This caught my interest but the magazine didn't come with any kind of CD1 and it just gave a link
to I think Slackware and I just didn't have the dialogue capability to download all those floppy
disks and make working copies of the floppy disks and then I had no idea how to partition safely
and I didn't want to break my then girlfriend's Windows installation just so I could play with
this exciting new toy that I found about but I kept an eye on it. In 1999 I came across
Coral Linux on a book so I bought the book, put the CD rom in the drive, there was no downloading
and it was just good to get on without the downloading. Unfortunately it was a painful experience,
almost no hardware worked out of the box. I was limited to the command line. It took six months
to get a X11 display working in VGA mode but it got me interested in free software and it got me
interested in Linux. Unfortunately I had to give up on that because the printer didn't work
or even on the Windows I think there was something wrong with it hardware-wise. It had been dragged
from one end of the country to the other and with no internet connection under Linux it was
impossible to memorize all the commands I needed to try reboot and then try them under Linux
and then reboot back to Windows to look for another answer or another
permutation of the commands I needed so I gave up again unfortunately. In about 2000 while living
in London's working as a chef I had access to an internet cafe so I downloaded Mandrake Linux
burnt it to a CD and played with that. I got 3D acceleration working and I was so happy that I could
now play Tux Racer and over 3D games on my Linux box that I actually deleted Windows off the machine
and stuck with Linux. Unfortunately after about six months in London I could no longer tolerate the
lifestyle down there. People were just too rude and too busy so I packed up, moved back to Yorkshire
and I lost the CD but at the time I didn't really care because I had a working system and I didn't
think anything would go wrong. Much to my horror about six months later the computer failed to boot
and I didn't have a Windows CD, I didn't have a Linux CD so I was stuck with this dead computer
and I didn't know what to do so I went out and bought a copy of I think Windows XP maybe.
This was about 2002 but while I was in PC World the computer store I also spotted a boxed Linux
of Susie so I bought that as well, it was about $70.00 and got a cup of tea and it was about $9.00 so
I'm really enjoyed. Hello and welcome to the hacker company. I'm your host the hacker community
and with me tonight is Foxy but I touched or a man has tried in his home and has been
raid neglected computers. A group of teenagers use an host to steal government's secrets.
PGP drive encryption using only eight dungeons and dragons 20 sided die and finally we'll talk
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Okay, got a cup of tea feeling quite fresh now. Where were we?
At this point I was still using XP and Linux, most Linux for fun and games and browsing the internet
protects p for my college work. I finished college, I then moved into my own house and my next
our neighbor was one of the gen 2 developers so after an epic system crash or a virus infection
or hard drive failure and lost all my documents I no longer had any reason to keep the Windows partition
so he helped me install gen 2 and configure everything, get Nvidia graphics working,
set up Wi-Fi, set up a server with my own mail server basically he could do anything as a complete
utter star. Total geek but a star. I really love gen 2 it was everything I imagined Linux to be
was free was open software is available at a huge repository but unfortunately as I moved to an AMD
64 machine at that time the unstable branch was more stable than the stable branch so many things
didn't work and I wanted to stick with 64 bits and help report bugs but the constant errors
huge build times like open office could take two or three days to build
bad politics flaming when you tried to report a book I just gave up on it these things have
improved so I've been told but at the time I just couldn't be bothered anymore with the hassle
so I looked around for a new distribution at this point I also got rid of Windows
this was 10 years ago now I've used since then used various distributions but I settled on Ubuntu
because that's what other people at the look we're using in leads so I had some supports there
and I've never used Ubuntu or a Debian distribution before but it just worked and I liked that
and I used it for maybe two or three versions and then Unity happened and while many people do love
Unity I love gnome and gnome 3 so I wasn't happy with that so I distro hopped again I must have
gone through everything from open suze Linux Mint Fedora BSD I finally settled on Debian
I thought why use a Debian derivative when I could use Debian itself and I didn't need any
handholding after using open suze after using Ubuntu even and my gen 2 experience helped with
the command line stuff so I'm now a fully paid up member of the Debian fan club it's on my
HP microserver I've got a trute on my net galaxy nexus it's on my desktop it's on my laptop
it's basically on everything that I can get my group of little hands on I've also contributed
financially to the Debian handbook which reached its liberation goal so you can download the Debian
handbook for free from Debian hyphen handbook.info as can be the PDF or an e-bub
I also now make videos for Dix installs on youtube promoting free software and Linux distributions
I show the installation from downloading on the website to the review of the desktop which I
do not for any of a reason then to help promote the Linux that I love since I can't code very well
and book reports are a bit fewer and far between because I don't really know how to
explain the bug and I do find them so you can find those on youtube I'm also learning c and gtk
for the purpose of writing a screen capture program because at the moment I'm using a bash script
I created using Zenity I also am learning how to use git and bash for the purpose of improving my
Linux skills and my command line food and this is brings us up to date where I'm a Debian user and
happy with it I run weasy I have quite a powerful machine so I enjoy the gnome 3 interface and
it works very well with my workflow on my laptop I use xfce because my laptop is quite a few years old
but I'm happy glad I've not used windows for 10 years I do have a virtual machine with windows 7 on
it but I've installed it and I've never used it since I do use some proprietary software
such as Spotify but that's only because there isn't a open source alternative as far as I know
so that's it thank you for listening I hope you've enjoyed this and thank you for listening to
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