Episode: 2841
Title: HPR2841: How I got into Linux (and then some...)
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2841/hpr2841.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 17:49:18

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This is HPR Episode 2841 entitled, How I Got Intel Inux, and N-Sum, and in part of the series, How I Found Linux.
It is hosted by Christopher M. Hobb and is about 31 minutes long, and carries a clean flag.
The summary is a response to the request for, How I Got Intel Inux, and a little of my history with Linux slash BSD.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Hello again, HPR. This is CM Hobbs, and I figured while I would have the use of my generous friend's recorder,
I would go ahead and record yet another episode. I hope this is picking up well.
The last episode I did did not do so well, it seems like in the garage mostly because it wasn't facing me.
Looks like the input levels are okay, but I don't have any way to really test this out.
I don't have headphones to check the audio, so I'm just going to record it and see what happens, and maybe I can adjust it in audacity.
I was looking at the list of requested shows to come up with ideas.
I know I promised to do a DNS episode, and I promised to do a recap of my little network, which was formerly Liebernil.net.
I did an episode about that. It's now Manard Outspace, and we'll give a recap of that, and I will give a brief introduction to hosting your own DNS soon.
Probably when I move those services would be a good time to record it, because I can talk while I move.
But I figured I would do something quick and light and easy, just to help fill the queue, and maybe some of you guys will find this interesting.
I like hearing about other people's histories with Linux, and I know we all like to talk about that sort of thing.
So I figured I would give a response to what got you into Linux request that is in the list.
And while I was at it, I figured I would just give my history with Linux, just to maybe expose people to other distributions, or maybe we will tickle some people's nostalgia buttons, or I don't know, maybe it'll be fun.
I like talking about Linux, and I like talking about my history with it, so I figured I would give you the whole thing.
So this is how I got into Linux, and how I've used it through the years.
So some of this early history is pretty fuzzy to me. I wasn't really that young. I was still a kid, but the details are really fuzzy, probably because I was doing so much all at once.
I do remember that my first computer was a Tandy 1000 HX, and those came out in probably 1983 or 1984.
I didn't get mine until 1994. I founded it at a garage sale, and thought it was really cool, went ahead and bought it with some money that I had saved up.
We didn't have a lot of money growing up, and we didn't have a computer for that reason.
And I lived in a semi-rural town, at least it used to be. It's not all that rural anymore. It's a pretty bustling little town now, but at any rate, at the time, we weren't much of a town, really.
You look left, you look right, and you've seen the whole thing.
So there wasn't a lot of technology here. In fact, up until about 2000 or 2001, even the telephone technology was well behind the times.
And a lot of the BBS text files I found about messing with phone lines still applied in my area was still able to mess with the phones in the same way that the freaks before me were able to.
So that was a lot of fun. That's a bit of a digression.
Suffice to say that I got a 10-year-old computer in the early to mid-90s that I founded a garage sale, and that was my first computer.
Now, it ran some sort of DOS that came with it. I don't believe it had a hard drive. It ran off of floppy disks.
And I have tried and tried and tried and tried to find information about this, but I swear that machine had Minix floppy disks, M-I-N-I-X, the operating system.
Now, I can't find any information online about the 1000HX running Minix, but I'm almost 100% certain, unless I had some kind of fever dream, that it had Minix.
Because I remember having Minix floppy disks and booting them up and just puttering around a shell, I wasn't able to do a whole lot except for read some help documents and run a couple of very rudimentary commands, but I exhausted the list of commands that I knew were available.
And I say that to point out that Minix planted the seed for Linux for me, if only in the way that it sounded.
I can't think of another computer I had around the time of that 1000HX that would have run Minix, and the person I bought it from was sort of an eclectical man who had a technical background.
But I don't know. I'm almost completely certain it was on the 1000HX. If anybody has any information about that, I would love to hear it, but it's possible I'm conflating that with another machine.
The bottom line is my first memory of anything Unix like was Minix, and I didn't do much on it beyond type in a few commands here and there and read some documentation, but I found it to be useful.
So if we fast forward a couple of years at another garage sale, I found a 486DX2 with a math code processor.
It didn't come with any operating system on it, and I wasn't real sure what to do when I bought it, but I bought it and I bought it with an acoustic coupler, which was pretty cool and had a monitor and a keyboard for it, no mouse.
And so I started trying to make it work, and I was really confused as to why it wasn't working, and went to the library and I picked up a book on basic computers and realized that had to have an operating system.
And that's when I first started learning about operating systems, and I knew that the previous one had DOS on it, and I tried to find a copy of DOS.
Couldn't find one, wasn't sure where to look. There were different stores that had floppy disks and stuff with different software on them.
And I do remember finding some desktop type software like Office products, and they were really expensive.
It wasn't like the shareware games where I could buy a floppy disk for a couple of dollars that had a shareware application on it, but I found that it was really expensive.
So I figured if something as serious as Office software was extremely expensive, then how much could an operating system possibly be?
Well, I remembered the word Minix, and somewhere along the line, it must have been in a computer magazine or something of that nature.
I found FTP.CDROM.com, and found a reference to Walnut Creek, and I saw, and I wish I knew where I first saw this, again I'm sorry the memories are a bit fuzzy, but I remember the address, the mailing address, for Walnut Creek, and you could order a pack of Linux.
And I remember that the word Linux sounded a lot like Minix to me, and it was something like $12 for six or seven CDROMs, and I thought that was just a bargain.
And there were six or seven of them, and I thought for sure one of these had to work.
So I wrote them on a piece of notebook paper, I wanted to order whatever product it was, and put $12 cash and an envelope, and mailed it to them, fully expecting to lose my hard earned allowance.
Well, lo and behold, several weeks later I received a stack of CDs in the mail, and they had Red Hat, and Mandrake, and Slackware, and Debian, and FreeBSD, which is not Linux, but it's a thing, right, it's Unix-like.
And I feel like there was more on there, maybe Mandrake wasn't one of them, sure feels like it was, whatever came before Mandrake, I get Mandrake and all that confused.
At any rate, so I just started popping CDs in, and trying to get it to run, and after a lot of trial and error, the one that did eventually work was the Red Hat CD.
And it came with a ton of documentation, so much documentation. Before I ever dialed into any BBS, is there anything like that with it?
I was, I just absorbed everything I could, it was so amazing, I learned Pearl, and I learned how to navigate Bash. Eventually I got a graphical environment running, I think it was TWM or VTWM, but I didn't have a mouse.
So, that didn't do me any good. It was just super cool, I had so much to learn, so much to do, it came with some games and other things.
And, I hope this is editing its finest, we had a brief in our interruption, so I'm going to get back at it here, pardon the bump in and moving around.
I'm putting the recorder back, and hopefully this all stitched together fine.
So, I was using Red Hat and learned as much as I could about it, it was an early version of Red Hat early to me anyway, it must have been, I'm going to say it was nine something, but it may have been earlier than that.
I really should have looked up these version numbers before then, but I learned so much.
And through a couple of library books and through some friends that I knew, I managed to dial into a few BBSs with this, with that acoustic coupler.
The details on that are pretty fuzzy for me as well, because I had a friend help me set it up.
And, I just remember it being very, very slow, you know, would watch text scroll across the screen and that sort of thing, and it was pretty rough.
But through those BBSs, I learned more about the internet, and some of those, you know, I've mostly played door games or whatever, and run up my parents phone bill.
They got very angry with me, but they had door games, and they had some BBSs that I was on that would let you acquire credits by posting and being a good citizen.
And then with those credits, you could get access to a text-based web browser, or maybe as a text-based go-for browser.
Anyway, it was my first introduction to the internet, and I thought, wow, this is pretty amazing. I need to get this.
So, I started looking at ISPs in the region, once I learned what those were, and found that it was quite expensive for us, and you had to have a modem to make that work.
My acoustic coupler setup wasn't going to work with it, and I was a little disheartened, because I was just a kid, found this cool new thing, wanted to do it, wasn't sure my parents could afford it.
So, I just kind of gave up hope on that, and in the meantime kept acquiring just piles of garage sale computers and installing different Linuxes on it with my CDs, and eventually found CC Linux, which was Cosmic Chaos Linux.
I really loved that. It fit on a single floppy disk, and let me check the recorder.
This has got to be the worst episode I've ever done. I don't know how to edit any of this out, but it looks like we're still recording.
Anyway, I found Cosmic Chaos Linux, and that was really cool, because it fit on a single floppy disk, and it just installed everywhere, and had most of what I needed.
And if it didn't have something I needed, I could use telnet from there to get into some of my other computers that were on a little hub, and so I was learning about networking, and it just really accelerated my computing knowledge using Linux like that.
Well, we fast forward a couple of years from here, so I spend a good two or three years, so this must have been 96 or 97.
At this point, two or three years just mostly offline. There was some BBS time, but I got in trouble running up the phone bill, so I didn't really get to spend as much time on the BBS as I wanted, but I would absorb so much information about Linux from those boards.
And then from there, would spend time just reading documents and absorbing every single file on every single CD, and I found that I could load up the other Linux CDs, and read their contents while I was running a different version of Linux, and of course we all know you can do that, but at the time, that was mind blowing for me, that I could view that stuff.
So I begged and begged and begged and begged my parents for a computer that could connect to the internet, and eventually they caved and it must have been, I don't know, 96 or 97 at this point.
They bought an HP pavilion, and I don't remember what model number it was, but I remember it had speakers on the side of the monitor, and it was running Windows 95, and also whatever HP's custom GUI was.
They had their own little window manager that ran on top of it, it was called personal page or personal, something or other, anyway.
I found that I was really frustrated with Windows, I didn't like the way I interacted with it, I found that it didn't have as much software on it, I couldn't program on it that I was aware of, I could make Linux do all kinds of things,
but I couldn't figure out how to make Windows do anything, and so I just kind of ignored that computer until for a couple of months until my parents finally paid for internet access.
We had dial up and it had a 14-4 mode a minute, and I'm sure some of the older folks here are groaning at me getting these details wrong, but that's what we had, and we used TCP winsock to connect to the internet.
So the only thing I ever used that computer for was reading news groups, which of course brought me further into the world of Linux and Unix, and looking at web pages, and also downloading updated Linux distributions, which was amazing, because I could update the software that I had, and now I had so many more features, it was very cool.
Well, I decided that I wanted to put Linux on this computer, and I wanted to do it without my parents knowing, naturally, right?
So I got up super late one night after they thought I was asleep, and I took the family computer out, and I grabbed one of my Red Hat CDs, and I installed Red Hat on that dude, and I got everything running, and I put FVWM95 on there,
so that it would still look like what they remembered, and this was shortsighted thinking for me because it had a win mode a minute, and suddenly our internet access didn't work anymore, and I didn't understand that.
So in the middle of the night, I pick up the phone, and I was a regular habit of me for turning off all the ringers in the house at nighttime, because my friends and I would call each other, or we would dial around and call weird numbers and three-way calling and stuff like that.
So I picked up my phone, and I called my friend, because I knew that he did the same thing and turned everything else off, and I asked him for help.
I didn't know what was going on, and he said that I needed a modem that I could use with Linux.
So I told my parents the next morning that the computer was acting funny, but I would figure it out, and I would have it done after school, and they said, okay, no problem, they trusted me.
So when I went to school, my friend actually brought me a modem that would work with it, and I went ahead and plugged in the modem and got that all configured, and sure enough we were able to get our dial-up networking working with it.
And my parents, I don't know that they ever noticed that I had changed it, but if they did notice, they probably didn't care, because they had little interest in actually using the computer.
Every now and then, one of them would get on there, and I really don't know what they were doing, playing solitaire or something like that.
So there it was. We had a computer running Red Hat with FVWM95, and I would do all of my Linuxing and interneting there, and it was great.
And I could use that to connect to my other machines and run all kinds of stuff.
So at that point, I went on foreign exchange to Brazil several years after that. So this was 2000, so three, four years after that.
Naturally, there were a lot more garage-so computers, and I tried tons of different distributions, and just kept learning and learning and learning and learning.
So when I was going to go to Brazil, that little pavilion with its 90 megahertz processor and 16 megabytes of RAM was hardly much of a computer.
So my parents bought me this E-machines laptop.
A little gray laptop, I don't remember what model number it was, but it was pretty cool, had an integrated CD-ROM and floppy drive in it, had an integrated modem.
And it was just wonderful.
And naturally, I wanted Linux on that as well.
And the only one of my piles of Linux disks, I neglected to mention that at this time, I had repeatedly ordered updated disks from Walnut Creek, because it was eating up a lot of floppies for me to download Linux images, Linux floppy disk images.
Well, I put Slackware Linux on it right before I flew down to Brazil, and I was going to be there for a year, and didn't touch it at all.
I just put Slackware on it and went from there.
And then when I went down to Brazil, I managed to get a dial-up account that was pretty cheap, surprisingly, because I was living in a really big city, and it was a community ISP.
So I got a really cheap internet connection, and I managed to get that paid for out of my stipend, because it was a way that I could communicate back home.
Well, the windmodem issue cropped up again.
I didn't realize that this machine had a windmodem on it, and I didn't bring any Windows disks with me.
So I went downtown and got a bootleg copy of Windows ME in Brazilian Portuguese, and I installed that on there to get some driver information.
And again, the details are fuzzy.
At the time, there was a project that would make windmodem's work, but I needed some driver information or something of that nature.
So I took the bootleg CD, got all of the necessary information, maybe even pulled a driver off the system, I don't really recall, and got Linux back up and running, and managed to get the windmodem software functioning, and then I could use the internal modem.
I was all geared up to have to buy a modem, but I managed to get the internal windmodem working on that, and then I could connect to the internet.
And that's the machine I used that entire year while I was down in Brazil, worked out really well.
I was one of the few students that had a laptop with them, but I found it to be invaluable, because it was my lifeline home.
It was cheaper to have that dial-up connection and send emails back and forth to my parents, and be able to post pictures to a website that the exchange organization provided for me than it was to call them.
So really, I only called them about once a month, but I got to email them every day, so that was wonderful, and it was all done with Linux, and it was terrific, and I loved it.
So, about the time either when I was down in Brazil, or just before I went to Brazil, I discovered SDF, the super dimension fortress, and I'm still a member there today.
And that was my introduction to BSD, so here's some bonus information, right?
So, for those of you that don't know, the SDF runs, and that BSD, they're currently the largest net BSD installation that I know of.
They advertise that on login, and so I was learning about net BSD at that time.
So, when I got home, the Slackware distribution that I was running on my netbook goodness on my E-machines laptop was kind of out of date, and I wanted to try something else, and I was using a lot of the resources on SDF, because it was much more powerful than my little laptop, so I thought might as well try and install net BSD on it, and that worked flawlessly.
Everything worked. I didn't need the win mode anymore, because we had a little network at home, and a computer with internet access, so I just had a little PC card that plugged into the laptop, and I could, I think it's PC, MCIA, maybe, card.
You can scream at me in the comments if I'm wrong, that had a quartz branded ethernet adapter, and I could connect to my little switch at that point, no longer a hub, and connect to the other machines on my network.
So, I had net BSD on there, had it all set up like I like it, and then I had net BSD on an NEC Mobile Pro 770 at that time. So, this was probably 2001 or 2002, and it's this tiny little VHS tape sized laptop, and I thought it was a cool thing ever, managed to unpack and put net BSD on a compact flash card, and ran it on that.
So, I ran those for a long time, and then it was about time for me to go to college, and I needed something other than that, slow at the time, e-machines, computer, or my NEC Mobile Pro, and about that time OS 10 was super popular, and I knew it was BSD based, so I went out and I got a power book G4.
And dealt with OS 10, and I found that I didn't really like Aqua, I enjoyed that it had, you know, Darwin under the hood, or BSD, and I wasn't really into it, so I built myself a desktop, and I ran free BSD on that for a long time, and I would use the power book for school related things, but all of my real computing I would do on that free BSD machine.
Somewhere along this point, we ended up getting broadband, and I don't remember quite when that happened, but now everything was properly networked.
A little while after that, I switched over to Mandrake, and I don't really remember why, I think maybe I liked the default window manager better, which is a terrible reason to switch, but it's just something that I opted to do.
So I went back from BSD into Linux, and on that same desktop I had Mandrake running for a long time, did all my normal stuff, my programming, my games, documents, so on and so forth, until about 2003, and I got a job with a small municipality.
And it was here where I had to manage a lot of things, but one of, you know, pertinent to this discussion, one of the things I had to manage was a set of servers, and those servers were running both Red Hat, an old, old version of Red Hat, which I knew very well, because I spent so much time with old Red Hat, and at least old to me, and then free BSD, and I knew free BSD, so that was great.
So they were running mail servers, and file servers, and all kinds of network services, and that was really cool. I got to work with those.
That eventually evolved in the same location into supporting Novel. They wanted to move away from Windows, for authentication, and for email, and moved into Novel, and at the time, Novel had ported their groupwise system over to Susil Linux Enterprise.
So we started using Susil Linux Enterprise Server, and then I started using Susil Linux Enterprise Desktop at work.
And we needed some features included in those, and they were a little bit behind OpenSusa, so I joined the OpenSusa project, and spent some time helping out the OpenSusa Genome team with bug bounties, and that sort of thing, as well as the OpenSusa Accessibility team, A11Y, and just had a blast during that time.
I installed OpenSusa on all of my machines, and Susil Linux Enterprise, when I was at work, was wonderful.
And everything worked great, until we got a little bit of BitRot or something, and then they started using Ubuntu on some of the servers.
And at that point, I sort of fell into using Ubuntu regularly, and I feel bad about it now. I don't really like Ubuntu. I don't like the direction that canonical is going.
This isn't really a space for that conversation, but my point is, I did fall into Ubuntu for a good long time, and it really frustrated me.
Once I figured out what they were doing, and once I did, I rediscovered the concept of free software, and I have a couple of episodes where I went into, I think it was called a Year of Freedom,
and it's where I ditched all proprietary software that I possibly could for an entire year, just to see what's going on.
And I did that because I remembered that my early time with Linux was all free software.
I don't think there was any non-free software involved at all, and I really loved those times. I was nostalgic for it.
And at this point, I had moved into software development as a career, and was concerned with the ethics of it all, and jumped 100% into free software, and at that point, I was using Triscoll regularly, constantly.
The thing I didn't like about Triscoll is that it was based on Ubuntu. Now, that is not a shot at Triscoll. I think Triscoll is a wonderful, wonderful distribution, but that bothered me a bit.
So I tried to jump to Parabola, found it to be cumbersome to use, and I had some update that really just trashed my system, and then I said, forget it.
I know that the free software foundation does not endorse Debian, but it's free enough, and I can always run the RMS utility to see if I'm running any non-free software.
So I just switched to Debian, and for everything, all my servers, we ran Debian on the, on Liburnil.net, which is now the manner, there's still a couple of Debian servers on there.
It was Debian all the things, and I loved it. Debian was really great, super stable, little behind the times, but it worked out really well.
Until one day I was watching some videos on YouTube by this gentleman, OH-8STN, or Survival Tech Nord, I think his name is Julian, he does ham radio videos where it's all completely manportable.
He happened to be using a distribution called Antics, ANTI capital X, and I noticed he was running it on some very low-powered hardware.
So I went and I looked it up, and I discovered that Antics was a pretty great little distribution, and it was based on Debian at the time, still is, and it was just good on low-powered machines, and at this moment most of my machines were underpowered, and some Debian things were getting a little slow.
So I figured I don't have anything to lose, it's Debian based, so let's give it a shot, and I loved it, and I ran ANTIX for a couple of years, really happy with it, and then discovered that they had a distribution for medium-weight computers as they put it, or it's a medium-weight distribution, this is called MX Linux.
Currently, that's where I'm at, I'm using MX Linux on everything with the exception of a couple of Debian servers, and of course my SDF account.
And I'm loving it, I really enjoy it, it has same defaults out the gate, no system D if you're into that sort of thing, I don't really care either way about system D, but wonderful little distribution has everything I need, nothing I don't, and yeah, that's where I'm at.
I'm using ANTIX on my lower end hardware, and MX Linux, which is a successor to the MEPIS project, I believe, and I never got the chance to use MEPIS, but if this is any indication I'm sure it was a good distribution.
So, yeah, that's where we're at now, who knows where we will go from here, I do still have to use Ubuntu for my programming work, all of my virtual machines at work use Ubuntu because it just works, it's what they standardize on, they use Amazon for everything with Ubuntu images and Docker and all that garbage.
So, I do professionally have to use Ubuntu, but all of my personal computing at this moment is either ANTIX, MX Linux, or I run things on the SDF.
So, there is my long-winded poorly recorded, how I got into Linux plus my full Linux history.
There are lots of other computers, lots of other distributions that probably don't deserve honorable mentions, things that I tinkered with, these are just the things that I used the most heavily, and how I got to where I am now.
So, with that, I guess I'll hang it up, and we'll say thanks for listening HPR, and happy hacking.
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