Episode: 1841
Title: HPR1841: My way into Linux
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1841/hpr1841.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 09:58:51

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This is HPR episode 1,841 entitled, My Way into Linux, and in part of the series, how I found Linux.
It is posted my first time post-focus, and in about 10 minutes long, the summary is,
from punch card to mandaro.
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How I got into Linux. Table of contents. One preface to early times, free Commodore,
and Atari 4 Macintosh 5 Debian, and beyond. One preface. Hi, I'm Fokie, English isn't my mother
tongue, so forgive the third time doing to the language. As this is my first distribution
to the HPR I will take up, the fine tradition to do a more or less short talk about my way
into, and with Linux. And for the more I'm taking the opportunity to test how well
these speakers do in replacing my voice with its heavy German accent.
Two early times. I was born and raised up in Eastern Germany. All my contacts to the computerized
world until 1989 are a little bit behind what you would have been the Western world.
My first contact to bits and bites were a visit to the so called,
part of the brigade of my school class sometime in the middle of the 1980s that happened
to be the IT department on our biggest local industry fabric.
Now we saw big big things all along the wall, and in the middle of the room a tiny black
white monitor, and another big thing that was handling some kind of cards sliding from one end
on this big thing to the other, and on the way, you guessed right.
They were still working with bunch cards to store one month's wage for an employee on,
but we didn't know that this one out of time technology, and I thought that is cool.
We could type in our names on the keyboard on the board with the monitor, and magically
there came a card with goals on some positions, and now a name written in plain text on the head
on the card out of the thing in the middle of the room, and I learned about the coding in
zeros, and ones that the goals are representing.
But I called and lived out in this fascination more than to have fun writing down zeros,
and ones representing numbers, and charging some kind on ask it I suppose.
Free Commodore, and Atari.
The next time I touched a computer were when a friend having relatives in Western Germany
got a Commodore 64, it was astonishing.
A real-life computer not even the size of the keyboard I've seen in the earlier described
visit to our part of the brigade connected to a TV set in the house of an angry teenager.
I spent hours, and hours with this friend, and his miracle device.
Mostly we played games, but also fun programming nonsense in basic.
You know, the usual 10 print something 20-0-10, and some base levels right moving to.
After the fall of the wall my parents gave me the greatest premon timer until then.
A broader Commodore 128 from a first visit to friends on the other side.
I nearly choked my farmer with my delight hugs.
Now I don't all the fun things I did before with my friend by myself,
and only a short time after some of my classmates got their Commodore's too, and we could skip discs.
But again we nearly only played games.
One day shortly after I attended gymnasium, the German secondary school,
a older cousin being a must teacher wondered why I'm still using such a play toy,
instead of a real computer, and gave me an outdated Atari mega-resty.
Today you will laugh about this kind of distinction between those two,
but in this time I saw it this way too.
I began to use my Atari for the more usual use cases of a computer in a home.
I wrote essays for school on it to the bewildering of my language teachers still
and used to printed texts from pupils.
I began building a database on my musical collection, and of course I also played on this.
And I began to program a little bit again.
I tried to write a program to calculate tables on the different soccer leagues
for a friend owning Atari too, and interested in such sports.
The result was unsatisfying, but I enjoyed the process though.
4 Macintosh
In 1993 I began university studies, and succeeded to convince my parents that I need a new computer
at working tool, but I didn't want a winter computer, because all I've seen of those
times were disgusting to me.
I attended a computer course under one year in secondary school using a Macintosh classic,
and that was what I wanted.
So I bought a Apple Macintosh Performer 450, one Prouder short time, and then upset,
because only two weeks after the newer 475 was released to nearly the same price.
That was the first time I experienced this short time cycle on computer releases we are used
to today. I soon learned my lesson. It's no use to look at the market the next weeks when
you just bought hardware. You always will find you bought the wrong time.
Now I want satisfied for years. I want a Apple user my heart.
Mac OS was my operating system my choice. I laughed about all those the MSDS and Windows users
having hard times when I just used my devices. Yes, I had problems, because there was so much
in hard and software that was incompatible to my beloved Macs, but I could live with that.
You know my Macintosh's were still niche products. I liked the system that was serving me, instead
of me serving it. In the end of the 1990s a friend of mine from the time of Komodia,
and Atari that got my old C128 for more use than I did on it, he really programmed on it in
assembly code, now having a con computer, does anyone remember those, tried installing some
strange thing called Linux. He spent it to compile, and I only shook my head not understanding
what use all the running text and children. I thought this shows only once more what kind
of lovely strange nerd he was, but he didn't say the only one. A friend too, and another one
began to look at this Linux. But not me, I had my Mac OS, built to serve me, not me too,
you know the phrase. Then came the time when I needed to write long texts with an happy
mixture of that in precand Hebrew words. It was hard to do this in the usual word processor,
I was using, and it was annoying to get all such things as footnotes. I'm a lot of it,
in the scene and table of content to work properly, and one of those friends recommended that he
X to do this. He gave me a short introduction, and I won impressed by the mic on the source.
I installed some RTX distribution on my iMac I owned Mac then, don't remember which.
The first text I wrote this way looked good and I switched to writing all printout texts in
RTX soon, even let them to friends and family. And one using RTX known about the learning
curve, and often visited this friend driving problem out of the way. On this occasion I saw
how he could work much more effective in the shell and on my so-be-loved mouse driven system.
So I became more and more sush new year eggs, sush to try this myself.
One day he took the occasion, and talked about something called dual-root, and that he wanted to
test Linux on PowerPC too, because he used the usual X86. I'm ambient, and beyond.
So on a spring evening of 2001 we packed my iMac in a car, and drove to our faculty,
where another friend, who wants to turn over his working room so that we could download all the
software we needed directly to my computer. At night my iMac became a ambient machine and I never
looked back. First the process was a pain in the rust. The Macintosh keyboard lacked some keys we
needed, so I bought an extra keyboard with all we needed. The ILO setup was a mystery we solved
by reading manuals, and FAQ on the other machine we could not hand. Also the graphical,
and audio setup was all pretty easy, but now I wanted it done not to stop.
When the sun went up again, literally, we had succeeded, and went to bed, tired, but lucky.
The following time I used my ambient partition for testing, and writing at the X-Tex,
and otherwise macOS with all the programs installed there. But that shifted soon to all
ambient GNU sush Linux, and only games under macOS. By the way, we talked macOS iMac and
ambient potato for more than minus time, as far as I remember it. First I learned more,
and more to use the shell, and then I'm out in the philosophy driving the GNU project.
The moment I understood the floss concept, I wanted to move over to the free world by heart,
more than I ever was a mac user by heart. Some years later after getting my own mums,
but didn't get any employment I switched past and took a course in programming in another town,
and needed something more handy than my iMac. So I bought a Dell Inspire with Windows XD pre-installed.
I didn't delete this crapware, because some part of the course handled with it, and I wanted to
have something, if I should get something like home lectures. But otherwise it wasn't GNU,
and Linux I wanted to use. First I thought I'm out installing ambient on this machine too,
but remembering the problems we had in 2001 I decided to test the new kid on the block called Ubuntu,
at least it was derived from ambient. To my surprise all worked from the start. I once sold,
and became a devotee. I lasted until Unity, and some other signs that Canonical no longer listened
to the users. This way I got a distro and desktop environment hopper. First I thought Ubuntu,
or Ubuntu could be the compromise, but once being in the mood for testing, and exploring
I looked around a little bit more, and over the time on some years I used ambient again,
Sparky, GNU instead, Mint and Bond high. Some gave all the talk about Archon nearly
and Ritec podcast I was listening to, not me to see over the fence on the deviant remates,
and I gave it a chance. But I must admit Archon itself was a little bit too much for me,
being our family favor I had and to the time, and patience to go so deep into installing,
and configuring. I searched for a compromise. The first attempt, one Archon on an old IBM
dated 2004. That worked quite well as a game machine for my eldest son, but for my every day
laptop I wanted something a little bit more, and just in time came a little hype over Mandaro
Linux. I installed a third boot option in addition to Mint, and Bond high, and now I've been
using it for at least two years. It suits me exactly. You get a good compromise between stable,
and fresh software, and being part of the Arch family you can use there you are to get nearly
all there is. I think it's time to round up. I hope you didn't get too bored about my distro hopping,
otherwise you could get something similar about my desktop in my remit hopping, just joking.
Have a good time, and I'm a known HPR Meta and would say, don't forget to support free software.
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