Episode: 877
Title: HPR0877: Welcome Frank Bell
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0877/hpr0877.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 03:56:06

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Hello, my name is Frank Bell, and this is my first submission to hacker public radio.
I've been considering making a submission for some time, and after listening to Poké's
plea on the Linux link tech show today, I decided it was time for me to get off my
rear end and get to work.
One of the things that has been holding me back is a puzzlement as to what subjects I
might be competent enough to talk about it to the HPR community.
But I have a couple of ideas now in the back of my head, and I decided to get the ball rolling
by describing how I got started with Linux about six and a half years ago.
A little bit about myself first, as a trade, I write and design training courses, training
manuals.
I have done some user manuals both for technical topics such as computer use and non-technical
topics such as customer service, problem solving, all kinds of things over the course of my
30 plus years as a trainer.
My first encounter with hands-on computing was about the time computers were starting
to appear in the workplace, and those days computers generally appeared first on the
secretary's desk because most managers viewed them as glorified typewriters being used
to produce documents.
I managed to get my hand on a surplus 8086, a very rare bird, and get permission to
put it on my desk where I played with it and used it to experiment, learn my way around
the DOS command line, and do a little elementary stuff.
Nothing so sophisticated is coding, I've always been a user, never a coder, but it was
my introduction, and I quite enjoyed it.
I think that box was running DOS 3.3.
By the way, this was about the time the term keyboarding came into the language.
Up until then it was called typing.
However, typing was viewed as women's work, and then as women's liberation proceeded
a little, it became viewed as underlings' work, but it was definitely beneath the job
skills of a manager.
So some enterprising consultant came up with the term keyboarding, and suddenly it became
okay for managers to take typing classes as long as they did not call it typing.
I took typing when I was in high school.
My children took keyboarding, and I have observed one difference between those who take
typing and those who take keyboarding.
The people who took typing can type.
The people who took keyboarding by and large cannot.
Anyway, that's neither here nor there.
My first home computer was a RadioShack Tandy 386 with DOS.
I think it was DOS 6 and Windows 3.1.
In those days, the computer booted to the DOS command line.
You could either run programs and DOS, or if you wanted to do something with a Windows
program, you would type in the command WIN and start the Windows 3.1 interface.
When you were done, you could exit Windows and go back to doing computing on the DOS command
line.
Within two weeks, I was deep inside the RadioShack Manual for this machine, and in those days,
RadioShack wrote really good manuals.
Optimizing the AutoWix Xbat and the Config Suspiles teak a little bit more RAM available
under 640K, so I could run slightly bronier programs than otherwise.
I won't try to explain what that meant, but the DOSY old timers will certainly understand
where I was headed.
I wasn't afraid to tinker with the darn things.
When I got that, that was the family computer for a number of years.
I didn't start with Linux for quite a while.
I had heard about it, but I didn't want to take a chance on breaking the only family
computer, and I didn't want to take a chance on breaking my own personal laptop because
I needed that to do work-related stuff, and the place where I was working at the time
was a Windows shop.
It was about 2005.
I had a colleague who had run a business out of his garage making granny computers.
He would buy surplus computers from the IS department at his White's Workplace, which
was a local university, load them with Windows under the existing license that was attached
to the bottom of these computers, and sell them for $50.
Sell them primarily to grandparents who wanted to keep up with their grandchildren or
parents who wanted to keep up with their grown children, hence the term granny computers.
He decided that business was taking too much of his time and closed it up, and gave
me three computers.
One was a gateway, it was turned out to be junk, it was beyond saving, and he gave me two
IBM PC 300.
Now these were original Pentium, Pentium 2 had not even been dreamed up when these computers
rolled off the assembly line.
300 megahertz computers, and he gave me three hard drives of 8 gigabytes each.
So now that I had a computer that I could devote to learning Linux, two computers, in fact,
I had to pick what kind of Linux was I going to start with.
Before I went any farther, I took a second look at that I want to go down this Linux road.
I did what many people did in those days, I downloaded NOPEX, that's KNO, PPI, X, if
you're not familiar with it, Google it, and made a bootable CD, and they are sending
it work one day when the tech support calls were slow, I booted into NOPEX, and I decided
I like this, I want more of this, then I began to cast about for a full distro to install.
I can't remember which one I tried first, I think it was either PPI or a damn small
Linux, but I couldn't get it to work.
And through some series of decision making, which is lost in my memory somewhere, way
back there, and not to be retrieved, I ended up with a set of slackware CDs that I burned
on my CD burner.
So I sat down to install slackware.
Many people will say that slackware is difficult to install, it really isn't except for one
thing.
Slackware does not hold your hand in the installation process and offer to partition the hard drive
for you, it expects you to partition your own hard drive.
One who is not partitioned to hard drive and formatted is immediately out of his depth,
and that frankly is the case with most computer users these days.
It wasn't so much true back then, but certainly it is true today that most computer users
have never installed an operating system and find the prospect of doing so intimidating.
And even more intimidating when they have to partition the hard drive and can't find
the C drive anywhere to work with.
Fortunately, I had a lot of experience installing software.
At the time I was working for a company that manufactured high-end security hardware,
and the accompanying software to run in a Windows NT 2000 domain environment.
I had lots of experience formatting Windows.
As the trainer, I had to install the software on my various training machines, update them
when new versions came out, sometimes because I was also part of support, I would be installing
software for our customers to use, installing Windows on bare metal.
So the prospect of formatting a hard drive was not new or strange to me.
However, when I fired up Linux FDISC, that was new and strange to me.
So I tried CFDISC, which is also included on the Slackware installation media.
That I could figure out fairly quickly.
I probably created and deleted and created and deleted six or seven partitioning schemes
before I felt satisfied with what I had and wrote the partitions to the disk.
Then I proceeded with the installation.
I think that first day, that first Saturday morning sitting there in the guest room,
I installed Slackware three times.
At no time did I blame Slackware for having to redo it.
For one thing, I knew enough about installing operating systems to know that if you mess it up,
you can always just do it again.
You haven't heard anything.
And as I installed it the second and third time, I realized that the things I had done
that I was dissatisfied with were the result of my own failure to read the stinking directions.
It was all there I just needed to keep reading.
Third time, I was happy with what I had.
And in fact, I used that particular software load with changes.
I'll tell you about later for a number of years.
So now I had this Slackware machine.
What was the first thing I was going to do?
I was going to install an antivirus.
I had at that time the practice of never putting any machine on the internet without an antivirus
unless it was to get an antivirus.
Now I know that people argue you don't need an antivirus on Linux.
Well, yeah, the horse is still a barn because Linux has a much better security model than Windows.
Indeed, whenever I see that Windows is improving its security, it appears to me they're trying
to put another lock on what is essentially a screen door.
I'm aware, especially now, six and a half years later of the differences between the two security
models, but I guarantee you this.
When there is a Linux virus in the wild, I'm going to read about it.
I'm not going to live it.
Anyway, I went out to get F-ProP, which at the time I was using on my Windows machines,
I quite liked, and they had free for Linux.
I went to install it by running the script they provided for installation and it promptly
threw an error message.
I had some dependencies I needed to fulfill.
F-ProP suggested C-Man, C-Pan, Charlie, Papa, Alpha, November for details.
So I typed Man C-Pan in on the command line and was immediately thoroughly confused.
But I managed to model through and was able to use C-Pan to install the dependencies.
And this was truly an aha moment.
I'm sitting there at a computer at the command line.
Those of you who know Slackware know that it boots by default to the command line, not
to a graphical display manager.
Watching text fly across the screen as my computer reaches out to a server somewhere
out there in the internet and install software directly.
And I'm thinking, yes, this is really cool, more like this.
Eventually that I got that done, I also wanted a firewall.
I was far too new to know anything about IP tables, so I went hunting around and found
a piece of software called Firestarter, which I have since learned is basically a front-end
for IP table.
At the time Slackware still came with GNOME, so all the libraries that Firestarter needed
were present, and Firestarter became the first program that I compiled from sources for
installing on a Linux computer.
And for quite a while, my primary mode of installing software was thought slash configure,
make, and make install.
It was no big deal to me, though sometimes it did mean quite a long coffee break.
So now I had this computer set up, I've got my user name, there's the root user, the
graphical interface, which was KDE3-something, I think 3.5 or 3.6 back in those days, which
I actually quite liked, and what was I going to do with it?
And I realized I didn't know what to do with it.
I'll come back to that.
I had this other computer here, Blink, bare metal, as people like to say, and I thought
of something I could do with that, I called up my daughter, who was newly graduated, working
her first job as a school teacher, several states away, and asked her if she had a computer.
I did not think she did, I confirmed she did not, so I asked her if she wanted one.
And she said, certainly, so I installed Slackware, still 10.0 on that machine, set it up,
write her up a page of instructions, and ship this door, and she used that for a number
of years.
And you know what?
She didn't call me with a single support question, and this is the example I always use
when people try to tell me that Linux is difficult.
No, it's not, it is different, it is not difficult.
In fact, she may still have the computer the last time I saw her in person, now she lives
on the other side of the country, but the last time I saw her in person, she still had
the computer, but they weren't using it because her husband and her wanted a computer where
they could do stuff with video, and that old Pentium 300 chip could not do video, it could
do audio, but it could not do video at all, video with just too much for it.
Well, there I was with a computer, and no use for it, other than to play with it.
And frankly, I have never learned much when I was just playing with something.
I need to have a purpose.
Even if the purpose is completely unimportant to anyone else, I still need to have some
direction, or I just sit there and stare at whatever it is.
Just like I like to build stuff out of wood.
I like to build bookcases and things like that, but I won't build them just to build them.
If I need a bookcase, I'll build a bookcase, but I'm not going to build a bookcase and
then go try and sell it down at the flea market or something like that, that just doesn't
interest me.
I did find a purpose for this computer, about a month and a half later on a business trip
to Chicago, and I will tell you that story, and also what things I learned from my initial
introduction to Linux in the next installment.
Thank you very much, I'll be talking at you again.
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