Episode: 370
Title: HPR0370: How I Found Linux 004
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0370/hpr0370.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 19:11:59

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Hey everyone, welcome back to Hecker Public Radio.
I'm Monster B, and this is how I found Lennox Episode 4.
Enjoy!
Hi, this is Skirlit Hudson Writer, and I'm a co-host on the Fedora Related podcast.
I'm going to tell you how I came to find Lennox, um, let's see.
Well, I'm a graphics designer, and software for that's really expensive, and so basically
like my major, um, reason for, like, finding Lennox is, like, money, um, it's free, and
that's awesome.
And when I heard that you can get these amazing, um, design programs, free of charge, I was
all over that.
So I got into Fedora, and I tried to boom to too, but I just really like Fedora and KDE.
I went to, um, an event that Google had for this, like, big KDE release thing, because
I was just, like, a started getting into this and realized that the, like, community
was just a bunch of really, really cool people who are into freedom and, um, and into, like,
doing something for the sake of doing something cool, and the whole, like, Linux thing is
just, like, I'm just all about it.
It's about, like, anarchy, it's about freedom, it's about doing stuff because you want
to do it, not because, like, someone's paying you to do it, and it's about collaboration
and ideas and all this amazing stuff, um, yeah, so that's pretty much my story.
Thanks.
How I found Lennox.
This is Nick, and I found Lennox in 1996.
I found out about Lennox and BSD from a hot tub.
In late 1995, I met Paul.
He had a hot tub connected to the internet.
Paul talked about the power of Unix and the GNU toolset.
I was completely fascinated with a hot tub that could send and receive email, and I had
to find out more.
At the time, real Unix servers had serial green screen consoles, and I needed to have one.
Free to a good home was the ad on the local log mailing list, and that was a key part
for me.
I managed to get a pallet of green screen monitors into my small car.
I could barely see through the windows, but managed to drive home.
J from the local log helped me with cable and problems that played me for more than six
months.
I was often running with my network of 486 machines and my serial consoles, and I've
never looked back.
Uh, good hello, hacker, public radio.
My name is Six Flop, and this is how I discovered Lennox.
It was a while ago.
I don't remember the date exactly, um, but I, for whatever reason, I got to know Lennox
and I got interested in free BSD, and I wanted to download that and install it.
I think free, the free part of it kind of sparked my interest, but I never really did, um,
download it and install it.
I think the size of it was a little intimidating, it would take a while, and I had mentioned
this to, um, this father of this person I was dating at the time, because he was in
tech photography and things like that, and he's like, oh, no, no, no, you use this, and
he gave me a Lennox CD, believe it was Red Hat 4.2, and I installed that on my laptop
and used that for a while.
And at the time, um, a little bit before I was teaching myself C, and I was using Microsoft
QuickC, and, uh, the Lennox CD that he gave me, uh, came with a nice compiler, and all
sorts of other things, uh, makes assemblers well, and, uh, all these tools for writing
things in C, as well as some bunch of search code to things, uh, and so I think that's
the reason why I kind of stuck with it, uh, when I stuck with, with Red Hat 4 a while,
um, I got another laptop, I had two laptops, like a, this other laptop a little bit later
on, and it had a, uh, no CD-ROM drive for anything like that, and so I was looking for a distribution
that, uh, I could put on to it with its flop, with its floppy drive, excuse me, had a floppy
drive, and so I came, came across Slackware, and I don't remember what original Slackware
was, but I put Slackware on that, and, uh, ran the two of those for, for a good long time,
and, uh, hmm, I actually, uh, got hacked, while ago I had, uh, Red Hat Machine, um, on
the internet, and PS and Morgan kept on changing, I didn't really know why, uh, and so I
stringed them, and, uh, some of the symbols, uh, had owned, uh, in front of them own,
underscore, log in, things like that, so I kind of took that as a cue, probably a pretty
obvious cue that I've been, uh, in fact, so I switched to something, something else, I
think at that time I downloaded, uh, Debian, um, I had heard that Richard Stolman used
it, and I thought, oh, I should use that sometime too, and see what it's like, so I ran Debian,
um, for a while after that, and I don't remember the details, after that too much, uh, right
now I mostly, uh, run OpenBSD, as well as Linux, um, on two laptops, I like to have, at
least two different operating systems, two, uh, running things on, nothing runs the same,
um, all operating systems, but, uh, that's how we discovered Linux, so, uh, thank you
for listening, and take care.
Hi, my name is Nick Oli, I'm part of the Winter Podcast, uh, the Linux C got planted
in me, probably in the early 90s, the university lab that my dad spent a lot of time in, had
these Apollo workstations, Apollo had their own proprietary OS, but it was a politics
compliant, and, but they had a pretty cool front end, and it was pretty nice compared
to Windows 3.1, which had just come out, Apollo wasn't Linux, but the use of the command
line to do real work kind of stuck around in the back of my head, my real introduction
to Linux was, uh, in the fall of 96, or spring of 97, I was a freshman in college, uh, I'd
gotten this Dell Pentium Pro 200 with NT on it, tinkered, tinkered around with it for a
while, um, but it really, I didn't care much for it, didn't really hate it or anything,
but it just didn't get me excited in any way, uh, the computer labs on the other hand
have these Solaris boxes. Now, they always got me hot and bothered, by the same time I'd
a friend who started talking to me about Linux and BSD, um, probably have to admit that
one of the big reasons I started thinking about it was, uh, thought it would be cool to run
something that nobody else did, um, give me some geek cred, or as my co-host on the Ubuntu
podcast, Josh Chase says, uh, it's all about the e-cock. Um, so then I kind of started looking
into getting a copy of Linux and Red Hat was the big distro out there, um, and I just went online
and ordered, I think it was Red Hat 4.2, uh, CDs, um, and it didn't, it didn't start fine and, uh,
it was okay, but I couldn't get on the school network because apparently I had a new
fangled 3-com, 905 ethernet card, and the drivers weren't on the CD, um, but found somebody at NASA
had actually written drivers and was maintaining drivers for the 3-com, and so in the process of
getting, trying to get that to run, I learned, you know, just operational basics, just had a mount,
this, I had a mount the floppy drive from the command line, copying files to it, unmounting,
um, then came the actual front of building the driver from source, uh, that's kind of when I learned,
that's when I got introduced to the wonders of mate, configure, make install, and all that, um,
after I got the driver installed, started learning how to use PINE for email links, uh, just
to do quick browsing, and, you know, for actually doing homework, learned the wonderful ways of the
UI, um, after a couple months I still, uh, reinstalled windows, there were too many issues that I just kind
of figured out, um, but something we would happen, uh, a little bit later, I was taking a class which
used MATLAB, and the labs that had MATLAB installed on them were running HP's Unix, uh, being lazy,
like most geeks, I realized that I could export out the display from the live workstations to my
computer, so Linux went right back on my, uh, machine, but still I could windows back on after
that semester, there were still things I couldn't figure out how to do, and when I was probably
stood on my desktop for quite a few years after that, um, Linux was always there in the background,
as I did tinkering with it on old machines that I got in a hold of, um, I did some sysadmin work,
which was, uh, Linux or Unix related in some way, after graduating all the server stuff,
all the server side stuff that I was working on was, uh, pretty much Linux, so Linux was definitely
there every day, um, probably about four years ago I started looking into using Linux full time
again, um, had some previous experience with Dibby, and so I gave that a shot, surprisingly, it,
everything worked right out of the box, um, but there was still a little bit of something missing
for me, um, it was probably the integration within the desktop, everything worked functionally,
but, uh, I still needed a little bit more, and eventually, you know, heard the whispers
about Ubuntu, and the whispers just kept getting louder and louder, and I decided to give it a try,
um, either around 5.04, or which was Hori, Hedge, something, and, or, uh, 5.10, I think that was
breezy badger, uh, was the first Ubuntu archive, Hori, Hedgehog, that's it. Um, yeah, I,
the first, once I gave Ubuntu a shot, that pretty much settled it for me, um, I'm Nick Ali from
the Ubuntu podcast, we do a video podcast, obviously about Ubuntu, and specifically, what is going
on in the Ubuntu community, uh, visitors at Ubuntupodcast.net. Oh hi, world, um,
Christopher Schumaker, I'm a blogger at Giganetworks, Ostatic, and I'm a full-time
Linux user. I started using Linux way back in the day when Allosaurus roamed the earth, and
floppy disks needed to be manually mounted in order to be readable. That was about 2001. For reasons
that remained shrouded in mystery, I had gotten it in my head to build my own computer with two hard
drives. Two hard drives, of course, beg for two operating systems, but over time, I actually just
started using one. And that was Linux, and every has things in their life that they can look back
on and say, ah man, that wasn't supposed to work out that way. And that's kind of me with Linux,
but actually this is in a good way. I had no idea that I'd like it as much as I did, and that I'd
find it so handy at work, or that it would eventually become the life saver that it is now.
When I was able to work in the library, I was working in reference systems, and there were all
sorts of little syrup dishes ways to sneak open source software into the mix. Open office,
firefox, again, I seriously stopped the library for paying for a full Photoshop license because
all they needed to do was resize a picture. Come on. It was moving the public computers to Linux
that was a massive win for us. The staff had a lot of less hassle in managing the computers,
and the patrons could safely do a hell of a lot more with them. And most had no idea that they
weren't on the usual machines, except for those little stray comments like, wow, these computers
are actually fast, and they don't freeze up anymore. It was actually when I froze up that the whole
game changed for me. A neurological condition made it impossible for me to work reliably
at all outside my home, and sometimes it makes it hard for me to work reliably inside my home.
Linux wasn't, is still a life line for me, and not none, I have a fallen I can't get up kind of
way. It's actually a lot more than that. While Linux can always just work, it also allows me to
break it and take it apart, and look at its innards, and just try to stuff it all back together.
And in those long, agonizing time spans with nothing going on, but Jerry Springer and Judge
Judy reruns, it kept my brain active and engaged, and it didn't care that I needed to periodically
lump away and lay there. But then the bizarre part kind of happened. I realized I actually was
learning in some way about how it worked, and I began writing about it. And then Linux wasn't
just a single life line, it was a big coax cable thickness knot of life lines like reaching out
in all directions. I'm still not completely sure how I found Linux. It feels more like it found me
some days. It's a one unexpected turn though that I am totally okay rolling with.
How many was taught, occasionally seen around the internet as YoYoNED, and I thought I'd tell you how
I found Linux. Back in probably 98 or so, I had a friend who was doing some real early work
with LPA, the Linux Professional Institute, and he was working on their tests. They're helping
them develop the testing that they did. So anyway, part of his job was obviously he needed to know
something about Linux, which he did. He was a big computer user, but you know, at the time,
not never meeting people knew anything about Linux, including himself. So he bought him a 46
off of eBay, and I started learning Linux and was pretty excited about it. I had just gotten
basically my first computer at home, and it had Windows 98, just like everything else did back then.
I quickly learned to use it, enjoyed using a computer, but got really frustrated with
the instability and couldn't do more than two or three things at a time. Everything you wanted to
do cost money and I was cheap. So anyhow, he had convinced me to try Linux every time I was
complaining to him about what my computer was doing. He would say, well, you know, that stuff
that didn't happen in Linux. So I was real worried about losing any data that I might have. So
I didn't want to do an installation of Linux. So at the time, there were a few Linux distributions
that did something similar to what Wubby does now, where you can install Linux, but it lives
inside a single file on a Windows partition or that partition. So the one I used was called
Pat Linux, which was spelled PHAT. I need to download it to zip file, extract it, and then
you boot. When you started Windows, you'd start into DOS mode and run this batch script,
and then it would boot into Linux and run this file. Well, it was pretty useless.
I could get X to work after some, well, I could get X to work. I'll just leave it at that,
but I couldn't get on the internet. I had one of those Windows-only modems, and this was
long before the days of ALSA. So there was just a handful of sound cards that were supported,
and Mon wasn't one of them. So no internet, no sound, barely any graphics. So it was stable,
but it didn't do anything. So I kind of kept up with it with Linux a little bit. I'll talk
to the guy about it occasionally, and he was trying to get me to do a real installation, and I was
just too worried about, I didn't want to do any partitioning or anything like that. So anyway,
at the time, while this was going on, I was in the Navy, and I was getting ready to make a six-month
deployment. So he was going to lend me a laptop to use while I was on the ship,
and the laptop he lent me had Red Hat 6.2 on it. I was going to take it with me thinking that,
I've got six months, I'm going to board out of my mind, I'll be able to learn Linux and
really get into it while I've got it. So I wanted to have some documentation and some backup,
software, and stuff like that. So I went to, I don't know, one of the box stores, I don't remember,
and bought a boxed copy or a box set of Red Hat 7.0. This was early 2001, I don't remember exactly.
So I bought Red Hat 7.0, I came home and just without any help, the night before I reported
the ship for good, for six months, I'm sitting in my living room and I'm installing Red Hat 7,
it came on a disk of like four CDs and it had a, I'm maybe a 50-page installation god.
And the other thing I bought while I was out was a, I forget the exact name of it, but it was a
pretty thick Linux book. So I bought that, bought the Linux book, install Red Hat 7, took it on the
ship, and you know, I spent a lot of time just fooling with it. I learned, I took a collection of
audio CDs with me, so I learned how to rip CDs with it, convert those CDs into MP3s, I read tons
and tons of documentation, you know, I learned how to install Linux, I installed it and uninstall,
or you know, would wipe it out and install it again, I did that a bunch too. Learned about
gnome and Katie, it was really a good way to learn Linux, I didn't have anything else to do.
So anyway, by the time I got home, I was, I was familiar enough with it and I was comfortable,
dual booting, so I went ahead and installed, I think by the time I got home, I may have
installed that Red Hat, but I remember real specifically using Mandrake a lot, so it was probably my first
real home installation was Mandrake, probably in 7s or 8s, I don't know exactly, but that's how I found Linux.
Hi, my name is Lawton Paul. In about 2006, I sort of discovered Linux or Linux kind of discovered
me when we came together. At the time I was a Mac user and I had been for about 10 years and I
really loved the Mac and you know, I still do in a way, I mean the interface is beautiful and
everything just works and all that good stuff you hear about the Mac is true, I think, especially when
you compare it to Windows, you know. But there was one thing that, and I still do, I do, I build websites
with my SQL and PHP and Apache and I was doing that happily on the Mac and there was one problem
though with all of this. One thing that kind of was like a thorn in my little computing world and
that was I had a perfectly good piece of hardware, but when OS 10 came around, suddenly my hardware
just wasn't up to snuff, but it was good enough for me and it was good enough to run Photoshop 7
and everything else I was using, so it kind of annoyed me that I was in this position where I had
to upgrade the hardware that was the only thing. I mean the macOS was heading in one direction and
my little computer was being left behind on an island, so I was just kind of frustrating that I
was being forced, I was in this position where I had no options. And I had even begun to, like, whenever
I walked past a computer store, I'd look in there and see these, you know, bare bones computers with
no OS for, you know, a few hundred bucks and they were more powerful than my computer I had and I
thought, wow, could I, maybe I could use Windows? And I even considered that for a while, but that was
just, you know, that was just not an option. I really hated Windows at the time, I think I'm a
little, I'm more, I'm a Linux person now, but I'm less, I'm more computer agnostic, I suppose.
Anyway, so that's the spot I was in and I just was kind of didn't know what to do, so one day I
was walking a lunch and out in front of this boutique of all places, there was this computer sitting
there, just sitting out front with a bunch of junk. And me and my friend walked by and I, of course,
I saw the spot at the computer and ran over there and asked the lady, you know, what the deal was
with the computer. She says, oh, it's kind of virus, you know, it's dead, it's that sucker's dead.
I said, well, you know, I could take it off your hands and sure enough, she's a Windows, she actually
in the boutique she points over to her husband who's sitting at a, you know, brand new Toshiba laptop or
something with a smile on his face, so they really didn't want the thing. So I took the computer,
sure enough, booted it up, did not connect it to the internet and just million pop-ups just,
you know, came up, you know, it was just amazing to watch, you know, I just was laughing.
So I, you know, they even gave me the Windows C, so I put the Windows CD and slick the hard drum,
reinstall the OS and them, I got a perfectly good computer. It's an AMD 1.2 GHz Duron, okay, it's
not, you know, the fastest thing, but actually that was faster than my Mac at the time. I upgraded
the RAM and I had a pretty good little box and I used it to test websites on because I was running,
you know, building websites in a Mac and the worst thing is to, you know, build a, you know,
spend 10 days, you know, developing the, you know, getting the look just right and then realizing
it doesn't work on internet explorer, five point, whatever, six point, whatever.
So anyway, but it just felt bad having that, having Windows, just didn't feel right, you know,
felt just like, I called it slag box, you know, because I didn't even like the computer,
because it had Windows on it, but, you know, I gradually used it and, so, you know, I've been hearing
about this Boone 2 thing, you know, or Boone 2, or whatever. I didn't, you know, I was like, what is
that? That's some Linux thing. So I, I just been hearing about a lot and kind of kept coming up
and coming up and so I thought, okay, well maybe I'll try this, you know, maybe that's, that could
be a solution. And I really came in with no expectations at all. I didn't know what an ISO was,
I didn't even, you know, I went to, I burned an ISO, or downloaded an ISO, it was dapper 6.06.
And I got the, got it onto the CD again with absolutely no expectations. It stayed in my bag
for like a week, forgot about it. And then one day I'm sitting in the computer and I looked
in my bag and there's the CD and I'm like, what is that? I didn't even remember what it was.
And I put it in the, in the computer. And I remember, oh, that's the, you know, that's the Linux CD.
And so I booted, rebooted the computer and installed Linux and amazingly, it installed.
I, of course, you know, there's always little problems. I didn't have, I couldn't record audio.
I could hear audio, but couldn't record audio. And that was, you know, that actually as problems
go, that wasn't, that wasn't very big at all. I was off to the races. I ended up installing
Zubin 2XF CE4 and it just, it worked. And I was, I couldn't believe it. You know, here I was.
I had this, this operating system that was elegant and fast and there was so many options.
And that was the thing that really made it for me. It's like, I did have an off. Suddenly,
I had options. You know, I could go, you know, KDE and have all the, you know, how should I put
this nicely, all of the stuff that comes with KDE or I could go super minimal like I wanted to do,
you know, and, and, and run, you know, I don't know, at the time I didn't know about it, but I could
run open box or whatever. I ended up on Zubin 2 and the thing just worked. And what I did was I got
a KVM switch, which I could switch and I hooked it up to them between the Mac and the Linux box.
And then I could just press a little button and go to the Mac when I needed to and press the button
again and boom, I'm back in the Linux. And I just left it that way for about, about six months.
And in that six month period, I just, I used the Mac less and less. And the only thing, of course,
here we go, here's the old story. The only thing that sold me back is Photoshop. So I'd build a
website. I got, I got everything going on the Linux box, you know, and the, the, the Apache minus
QLP of course, you know, it was just, it was just wonderful, you know, and it was fast. It worked
well. And I didn't have any problems. I didn't, you know, of course, there's no virus issues.
I just, you know, too good to be true. And so I had the KVM switch set up and it just got to the
point where I never even pressed the button anymore. I just stayed in Linux. My wife just kind of took
over the Mac and all of my, you know, a website building duties just went to Linux. And I'm still
there now. I don't have Photoshop, but maybe I got to get so we're good to go. And so anyway. So that's
my story. Oh, and thanks, Monster B. That was a cool idea. I hope this wasn't boring. Peace out.
All right, episode four. If you like to be part of episode five, please send an audio clip to
Monster B at Linux cranks.info. And remember, it doesn't, there is no time limit. So it could be
one minute or an hour. It doesn't matter. Just send it to me. It can be in a wave,
aug, flag, or even an MP3. Well, I hope to hear from you. And thanks for listening to Hacker Public
Radio. See you.
You
