Episode: 410
Title: HPR0410: How I found Linux Part 6 
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0410/hpr0410.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 19:59:22

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Hey everyone, welcome to Hecker Public Radio.
I'm Monster B, and this is How I Found Linux Episode 6. Enjoy!
Hi, this is Guitar Man from the IRC. How I Found Linux. Well, I think back in 1999 I was working for a company that did CRM
software, and somebody had installed a Samba server, and I think at the time it was called
Dera Linux, and that sort of was an interesting thing in the tech department. I was curious about it, but I didn't really play with it.
I just saw the boot screen once, and that sort of planted the seed in my head about the word Linux and about sort of what
that was probably a couple of years later, an employee that I was working with when I was
clinging coffee for an unnamed large coffee shop, and she was a student who was studying, I think she wanted to be an
astronaut, and she used Sucy Linux, and that again sort of reminded me, planted the seed.
I think I ordered a Corel CD at some point, Corel Linux, and I think I was actually too afraid to install it
at the time where I didn't have a spare computer to install it, so that just again sort of sat there.
And finally, I think just looking around, I was interested in doing audio work, and I found Planet CCRMA
and had an instruction, a bunch of instructions on how to install, I think it was Red Hat 7 at the time, and install all the
music packages to get that happening, and so it came at the time when I was going to redo my Windows system anyway, and I installed
Red Hat 7, and I put all the music packages on that computer, I think it was a Pentium 2 system at the time, and I liked
that, and ever since then, I've been running Linux of some form, and after hopping on many different
distros, I've settled for now, for about the last year and a half, I think, on Slackware, and that's how I found Linux.
How I started using Linux, and why it's going to stop.
Hi, I'm Oscar, and I live in the Netherlands, ever since episode 1, I've been meaning to do something, send it in,
but you know how it goes, but I listen to lots of Linux podcasts, and hearing all the presenters of my favorite podcast
come by, one by one, I thought, well, now it's a time, as a podcast listener, to get on with it, and record my story.
So, how I started using Linux, and why it's going to stop, and a bit of history, I lived in Australia for 20 years
or so, and in the early 90s I worked as a volunteer in a community radio station, and the computers there, they ran on a unique system,
they said, it didn't mean anything at the time, of course, I just filled in a form, maybe now and again on the screen,
and well, that's about it really, and well, that was probably just about my only experience with computers
until about four years ago, a family member died, and my mother's place, there was a laptop left in the house,
so I decided to teach myself how to use a computer, and ran XP, and it had to be maintained, of course,
so I learned all about anti-virus software, spyware scanners, malware and movies, I'm testing the system,
and well, I thought I was a real system admin, I've seen realized I was spending more time on keeping up the system of the date than being productive,
but I got an interest in PCs, and well, that's a very good thing, and I ran into a problem, I took the laptop to a friend's place,
and we got talking, and I mentioned Unix, and he said, oh, Linux, yeah, I know, that's okay,
and when I was time to go, he handed me a nopics live CD, so the CD had been planted,
I took it home, put it to live CD, and wow, this is great, but I clicked on way too many buttons,
not realizing that a live CD around slower than when the system is installed on a higher drive,
and the result was that the system locked up, and that was the end of that really.
And I kept hearing and reading about Ubuntu, and I got a new PC, and I do uploaded it,
Ubuntu 710 got it given, and I started using it, and I loved it, I was sold off course,
and I deleted the Vista partition to free up the display, and happy times.
I did some display hopping on some of my other computers, and found the wonderful world of Linux,
and the freedom that comes from with it, and well, time goes on, and now at 45 they tell me,
I can feel it as well, that I've got mouth and throat cancer, and remember, I only used Windows for two years,
so we warned, and the cancer is going to finish me off, and that's the reason why I'm going to stop using Linux,
until the death has to do back, as I could say, this office has a new opportunity, maybe, in cloud computing,
maybe I can apply for a job as a system admin in the cloud, and I'll keep you posted.
For the past three years, I've enjoyed using Ubuntu, learned lots, and we shall have more time to learn more,
the possibilities with free software are endless of course, and then, yeah, this is my story, how I found Linux.
Big thanks to all your Linux podcasts as well there, keep up the great work, and enjoy listening to all your shows,
and remember besides catching the possibilities of catching a virus, proprietary software, and systems,
and make false cancer, okay, this was my story, and that's it, see ya.
Good day, this is Weeded out.
Before getting started talking about why I use GNU Linux as my primary operating system today,
firstly I'd like to just give props to Monster B for inviting me to participate. Thanks mate.
My first exposure to Linux was around 10 years ago, in the form of some version of Sousa.
My initial interest was pure curiosity, and perhaps a way to save a buck or two, not needing to buy a proprietary OS at home.
A coworker of mine was using Sousa Linux, both at home and at work quite happily.
While in the meantime I was frustratingly having to reboot my Windows 98 PC, quite often several times a day.
Unfortunately at the time, as much as I tried and wanted, I just could not make Sousa Linux my main OS.
There were just too many incompatibilities with the software that I was using, both at home and at work.
Sousa had a lot of great software packed in its 7 or 8 installation CDs, but they just could not replace many of the core applications and games I enjoyed using at the time.
Virtualization was at its infancy, and the wine project was just getting started.
If you all recall back then, wine literally just ran notepad.exe, and that was just about it.
In the end, I reverted back to a crushing Windows 98. However, the seed was definitely planted.
After a few years, open source software grew like an oak tree.
The quality of software coming from projects began to compete with commercial offerings.
It was time to give it another shot.
First I tried Sousa Linux 8, then Red Hat 9, Fedora Core 1, Mandrake 10.1, Arch Linux, and finally my beloved Gen2 Linux.
Today I choose Linux over any other operating system, because the quality of the software is simply awesome.
It's stable, and I'm allowed to choose what I want to run and how I want to run it, whether it bought B for a media center, my laptop, my servers, or my games computers for the kids.
Just one OS, and in my experience, it's ended up being Gen2 Linux.
It does it all, and it does it well. Updating both my OS and applications is easier than with any other operating system I've tried.
One command, once a week, does it for me, and I never have to reinstall again.
Of course, cost is also a factor, particularly when you have a family with four children.
If I had to choose to run Windows XP or Vista, or even Mac OS X, I would probably have to either resort to software piracy, or taking out a second mortgage on the house.
It's just not going to happen. The choice in the end is easy.
Plus setting up Gen2 boxes at home and at work has taught me a lot, and my children are also learning having to use their games computers on Gen2 Linux as well.
In the end for me, it's simply a no-brainer. Linux all the way.
Everyone. I would like to tell you about Linux, how found me.
But for reasons that are not worth getting into right now, I am not able to talk anymore so please be patient.
I will let Linux do it for me. Like several people before me computers, were really unknown to me till college.
My degree plan required me to take computer logic and elementary foreground program.
Of course then, everything was on punch cards. I fell in love with it, but I did not want to spend the rest of my life punch on cards.
Time went on and my youngest brother, brought home a 10-DTR, SAT model on. We played some games on it. I asked him if you could program it.
He said yes and I asked him if it ran foreground. He said he did not know, but threw the manual at me and said read it.
It did have basic, and it was very much like foreground. I was hooked and started writing all kinds of code.
I was lucky enough to have one of my programs published in one of the early TR SAT magazines.
I was in hog heaven and computer bitten. As a side note, my brother went on to get a master's degree in computer science and is a teacher at a local college.
At the same time, I started taking various classes at the local community college and computers. I was obsessed.
Those classes were able to get me into computer. I would work more than one job at a time.
Very quickly, I was welcome to computer jobs in a chin to teach him at the local college. That was before I lost the physical ability to speak.
Anyway, I would work during the day as a maintenance programmer and deboss and RPG II. I also worked as a tape drive jockey at night for a local major bank.
I did those for a while till I decided just to teach. Eventually I got a job at a finance company where we had to pull credit reports on a print terminal with an acoustical modem to connect with the local credit bureau.
No long after that I had a Commodore 64 with an acoustical modem. Found about ASCII codes and tried to see if what I did at the finance company would work on the 64.
The finance company should have changed the password. Use your own imagination here. Anyway, I started writing all kinds of software, specializing in modem and BBS software, but my first job, make a money on the home computer, was a kettle price projection.
With my knowledge of the Commodore 64, I was able to work in a small computer store. I spent so much there like a kid in the candy store. At the same time I was transferred from teaching account to teaching computers. In hog heaven again. As time went along, I was able to meet many people.
One hardware technician we had with brag about Unix. I said okay sure. Then customers would come and ask him whether they could run Unix on their home computer. We started to sell Mark Williams' e and coherent. Finally one of my good buddies at the time wasn't to Linux. He used Slackware. He tried to get me into it by giving me a scoozy drive and some IS Ethernet cards with the jumpers.
I played with it a bit, but I was so busy that I really did not have time to get into it. About that time Microsoft Windows 95 came along and it was a lot easier. Linux went unhold, but I kept an eye on it. I started helping people when they bought new computers part of it, was moving and converting files from the older machines to the newer ones.
I had to use my knowledge of modem slash serial power program and to convert files from one system to another. You had to move files over the serial power because there was no standard disk formats like there are now. Anyway people would start to give me their old machines without software. Being the good person I was, I thought I needed to buy the operating system for a very free machine I had.
Being the cheapscape that I am, I wanted an alternative. Since I worked for a college I could get Microsoft software cheap, but that began to mount up. I had bought reddit ether405.x from the local computer store and started using that little.
The was after I let the small computer store. I began making money writing programs for the Microsoft platform, so I started to put off Linux again. The nice part of the job as a tech for a local college. After I had been working there for a few years, the computer science teaching staff wanted to get away from using an old scope server and have Linux on the local machines.
No one on the team wanted to do it. Since I had heard of Linux, I was elected okay, forced to volunteer to do the job. So I was given the reddit 7.xcds and told to get it on the machine. I did some research and found out that you could do something called dual boot.
I built a Windows image and left room for Linux. I installed it on there and we had a work of image. Then came the fun part we had to image all the machines in the lab.
Not all the systems had the same size drive. Ghost was not that smart. A lot of machines would not boot. I thought I would die. I was still an office at Linux fortunately my brother had offended Unix for a living and we were able.
To get Lilo squared away and all the systems were ready for student use.
Anyway I started to play with Linux in the labs in my spare time T the same time people were still giving me their old computers.
I could not believe how much application software came with Linux. On the lab machines were lots of programs to detect network problems.
I used the packet, capture them quite a bit to catch problems and problem users. I was hooked. I just started using Linux at home as well as work not long after I leave them the same job where I had been for 10 years. Microsoft was no longer in the machines at home.
We have been Microsoft free since now that I was free not to use Microsoft anymore. I began to build all kinds of servers.
First there was the thin client lab with LTSP then web slash media server and eventually the RBL clone is a server. Then I started doing open source firmware replacements to routers.
Now I started to learn about clusters, interface and electronics with older systems and now part of my old software to Linux.
I love Linux and open source. That is how Linux found me.
Hi, my name is Daniel. I'm also known as Linux Fan Dan on Twitter and Identica and I just thought I would record a short clip on how I found Linux.
Well, going back to when I first discovered it, it was, or the first time I heard of it, in fact it was even earlier. Probably about 1994, maybe 95 and I just discovered the internet and I was well into chat rooms and searching and talking to people and all that sort of stuff.
And I was used Windows back then and was using MIRC to connect to IRC and there was all these sort of cool scripts going around that did these really cool things like DDoS attacks and stuff like that.
Anyway, I looked at these people that are newer hackers and crackers and I thought that's really cool. I want to find out what they're using.
So I tried the scripts that they had and discovered it didn't work on Windows. It worked on this other thing called Linux and I thought, ah, right, okay, no idea about it.
Anyway, a few years passed and I decided to give Linux a go because it had become a lot more mature and there were a lot more distributions around.
So I did a bit of searching and discovered Red Hat and that seemed to be the most popular at the time.
So I was in Tennessee at the time and I went into a store otherwise known in England as a shop. I think it was something like Computer City or something like that.
About Red Hat 7, I bought a box set for about $30 and got home back to England from Tennessee and I installed it and unfortunately I was using a win modem at the time and it didn't work.
I looked up about how to make it work and basically answer was it doesn't go out and buy a modem and I was a bit short on cash because I'd got the travel bargains too busy flying around to spend what was a huge amount of money on an external modem.
It was 56k modem at the time and it was loads so I didn't want to do that so unfortunately I went back to Windows until about 2002 when I tried again.
This time I had high speed internet access. Well, high speed at the time for 2002. It was 256k speed touch modem, the little turquoise blue frog type thing and it was a USB modem.
So I got hold of Red Hat 8 or sometime after could have been Red Hat 9. They were using blue curve by that time I thought that looked really cool.
So I installed it and it did look cool. I also downloaded Sousa, tried that as well. I didn't like the idea of Mandrava for some more Mandrake as it was called.
I didn't really like the idea of that for some reason although it was called the newbie distribution. I don't think I wanted to be tired as a newbie so I thought no I'm not having that so I tried Red Hat and Sousa.
Neither of them would work out of the box with my speed touch modem. You had to put some kernel modules into the kernel and I think it involved recompiling the kernel which on day one was not the sort of thing I felt I could do.
Although I did give it a go I was busy typing in these command line prompts on day one and feeling happy with it but it just couldn't get it working.
So back to Windows again. However at that time I had downloaded the ISOs of Red Hat and Sousa and I was selling them not for a profit.
I was just like paying for the disks and postage on eBay for anyone who wanted to try Linux but not having a fast download speed.
So I thought you know I want to do what I can for Linux so I thought I'd help people out that way and that went well.
Then a couple of years ago beginning of 2007 I thought I really want to try Linux again.
So the first thing I did was went back to familiar places which was Red Hat and Sousa.
And when I went to Red Hat I discovered there was no such thing as Red Hat desktop anymore and couldn't actually find a link on their website for Fedora.
So basically if anyone from Red Hat's listening that's what cost you me you know I'm sure you're really disappointed about that.
I looked at Sousa but then I think I typed in Linux distros into Google and Ubuntu popped up fairly near the top surprise surprise.
So I went to their website and I thought I'll like the look at that and it was a nice I think nice something people don't like it but I thought it was a nice brown desktop.
I thought that looked really cool and I'd lived in South Africa for a while so the whole African ideals of it was what really appealed to me.
That's actually what got me to use Ubuntu not because I thought it was popular but because it was African.
So I go over to go and have never looked back a couple of years down the line and I'm loving it.
So that's my story I hope you enjoyed it and if you fell asleep then I hope you weren't driving.
Okay bye bye.
Hi Monster Bee. My name is Yuki Treats and I hope it's okay for a podcast listener to participate in your how I found Linux call out.
In April of 2007 I had been listening to a few podcasts from NPR like Kartak, Prager Home Companion and Weight Weight Don't Tell Me.
And then I found this show called Geekspeak.
One of the hosts mentioned that Ubuntu 7.04 had been released.
At that time I only knew about Windows and Max. I knew a lot more about Windows and Max but nothing about Linux.
I started using Windows when Windows 3.1 came out.
I knew DOS, Edlin, Registries, FDISCs, I knew hardware, installation, hard drives, memory, building computers.
I make my live and writing Windows software, first pass scale, then don't buy and now see sharp.
So when I heard about Ubuntu 7.04 I thought, I have the Sony Vile laptop with the Pentium 3 processor that's just sitting around gathering dust because it takes forever to boot up and IE7 won't run on it.
I decided to take the plunge and install it on a laptop.
How has my two-year journey been, exhilarating, mind-expanding and downright fun?
I went from Ubuntu to Linux Mint and now to CrunchBang.
In the next few weeks I'm going to install XBUTU.
The Vile was gone and I gave it to my sister.
I'm not running Windows on my desktop but I am still using one piece of Windows software.
My five-year-old daughter has an AcerSfire 1 and I set up my own free NAS box.
My hope is to one day get a Myth TV box up and running.
I've already tried about a dozen times.
I would like to thank all the Linux podcasters for your time, content and help.
I couldn't have done it without.
Alright, that was pretty sweet. I just won't let you know.
You don't have to be a podcaster to send in a clip.
I just think we hear a lot from podcasters on how I found Linux because they already have the recording equipment.
But I would like to add a phone number in the future.
So people can just call in on the regular phone and leave a message.
Then I can play it on the show.
But for everyone else, just record an audio clip and send it to Monster B.
At Linux Crankstown info.
And it doesn't matter what kind of format it's in.
The only one that I probably won't use is a WMA because it's a Microsoft codec.
But if you have a Dropbox account or a server, you can just send me the link so I can just download it from you.
If you don't want to send it to me by email.
And thanks for listening and I'll talk to everyone next time.
See ya.
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