hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0737.txt

Episode: 737
Title: HPR0737: My Start in Computing and Linux
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0737/hpr0737.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 01:42:11

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Hello and good morning. This is Ergorn Strider recording on Memorial Day in the US.
I've been listening to Hacker Public Radio for some time now and figured it was time for me to contribute.
I thought I would discuss today how I got started with Linux and in computers in general.
When I was about eight years old, a good friend and mentor gave me a motherboard for a computer.
And my dad who worked in database administration told me that if I would go through and spec out compatible parts, processor memory, hard drive, case, all that stuff,
you know, the standard parts every computer must have in order to operate, that he would finance the project so that I could learn a little bit more about computers and possibly follow in his footsteps in software design.
I spent some time on the internet researching, grabbed an A-plus certification manual and did quite a bit of reading and eventually came up with a parts list, my dad reviewed them.
We put the order in to a couple of online retailers and built a computer.
That was my first experience actually assembling computer from scratch.
About a year later, he was able to get a bunch of computers that a local high school was throwing out.
And you know by the time a high school in the US is done with the computer, it's about ten years old.
So these were not special computers. Some of them were actually 386's and 486's.
I was able to take those and assemble working computers out of the miscellaneous parts that they were getting rid of.
After that, I was able to get some additional financing from my dad to build my first gaming rig.
And this would have been about 2002, shortly after Windows XP had come out.
And up until that point, I had been running Windows operating systems from Microsoft because my dad through his work had an MSDN subscription and had licenses available for development.
And as this was a learning and development experience for me, we were able to use those.
Then following that, I found out about this thing called Linux.
And I don't know who exactly it was that mentioned it, but it was probably through one of the take your child to work days visiting my dad's office.
One of his co-workers probably gave me the first not picks live CD that I've ever seen.
And tried that out, played with it on that gaming computer that I had built around 2002.
And I thought it was interesting. I did some digging around and heard about this thing called Slackware.
I dabbled in it a bit and found out that I was in way over my head because at the time Slackware was very, very involved to install at least the versions that I had found.
And so I started looking around for some other alternatives.
And I came across Debian and this would have been about 2004, 2005.
I actually installed Debian for the first time, side by side, on my laptop that I had while I was going to college.
So I started learning Debian and how to administer a Linux server, all the features thereof, got a little busy with school, sort of gave up on the effort.
And then a couple of years later, gave it another shot again, played with Debian, and found out about this operating system called Ubuntu.
So I've been using Ubuntu since, believe it, was 704.
So I've been using Ubuntu for a couple of years now. And it's turned out to be a pretty good operating system.
I've learned quite a bit from it. I don't use it on the desktop currently because I do quite a bit of PC gaming on the weekends with friends.
I host LAN parties for the guys at my office as well as some of the guys at the local hacker space.
And I host all of the games through a couple of boxes that I have repurposed and I will probably do another short episode about that in the future.
So I'm currently running Ubuntu 1104 server on three different boxes, I'm hosting various services such as Mumble, WesNoth, Minecraft.
We've dabbled at the last LAN party with a game that's in beta called Ace of Spades.
And it's a pretty fun first-person shooter with a building element similar to Minecraft.
Do we play anything and everything that fits our fancy and prefer free open source games as much as possible due to just the cost of having to buy 10 copies of some $50 game for everybody to be able to play together for those that haven't already purchased it?
So anyways, that's my history in computing.
I do network administration and server administration for the company I work for.
Management has made the decision that we're a Windows shop, but I'm looking for any way possible to fit open source software in from time to time.
As well as since we do a significant amount of Oracle hosting, I've been discussing the possibility of moving to CentOS for our database servers.
And that's sometimes an uphill battle, you know how management can be.
Anyways, that is a brief history of my experiences in computing and how I got started in Linux.
Thank you for listening to Hacker Public Radio. For more information on the show and how to contribute your own shows, visit hackerpublicradio.org.
Thanks for watching.