hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1604.txt

Episode: 1604
Title: HPR1604: How I Got Into Linux
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1604/hpr1604.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 05:42:53

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It's Thursday, 25th on September 2014.
This is an HBR episode 1,604 entitled, How I Got Into Linux, and in part on the series,
How I Found Linux.
It is posted my first time post go for, and in about 18 minutes long, feedback can be sent
to doffia.nix at e-mail.com or by leaving a comment on this episode.
The summary is, I sum up my experience with Linux from 0 to 1.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by an honesthost.com, get 15% discount on all shared
hosting with the offer code HBR15, that's HBR15, better web hosting that's honest and
fair at an honesthost.com.
Welcome, this will be my first show for Hacker Public Radio, and I would just like to
contribute to a great community for the great people, so this is how I found Linux.
Actually, my journey with Linux started in an auto way.
I fell in Linux because someone decided I had a friend in grade school, and he decided
to come over to my house one day, and he would come over and it was actually kind of how
I got into programming as well, so he would come over and we would start making bad scripts,
different things to admit sounds, open CD drives, you know, the kind of things you get
up to when you're about 12 or 13 years old, and he was a big unix and Linux lover.
So every time he'd have to come over and program on a Windows machine, he wouldn't be the
greatest participant, I would say, because he'd be like, well damn, I have to work, I
have to work on a Windows machine, and he was die hard, Linux die hard, open source software
now.
This was before I knew any of these terms actually, but he definitely was a big influence,
so he used to come over and then we used to probably hang up four times, four times
a week, and he'd come over and like I said, we'd write these little programs and different
things to do different things like that, and one day he brought over a distribution called
Lubuntu, you know, me being about like I said, 12 or 13, I mean, they're running Lubuntu
here, and I didn't know what this was, now I have a really old desktop, I mean this,
the thing we were working on, oh goodness, it was probably eight years ago, probably now,
yeah, I was about 11, so yeah, eight years ago, and so he,
eight years ago, he'd come over and he showed me this Lubuntu, and I was a really ambitious
kind of kid and child or whatever you want to call me teenager, so I said, well share,
let's install Lubuntu now, because of this crappy old machine, it couldn't run Lubuntu
worth a damn, so basically we booted it up and I mean, oh this thing, it just wouldn't,
it just wouldn't run, and so I broke, I technically overclocked the hard drive because it was
such an old piece of crap, old piece of crap or something, because the hard drive stopped
working, it was quite the problem with that whole thing, I don't think I overclocked, I think
that's actually the wrong terminology, I apologize, but yeah, no, we installed it and he partitioned
it, we lost all the data, yeah, we didn't overclock it, I don't know why I was thinking that,
but he partitioned it, and so we lost all the data, I didn't really know what I was getting
into, so it becomes my mother, and she's just an interesting person, and she really liked that
information on my computer, apparently, because she kind of lost it a little bit, she, well,
understandably so, because we lost all of her data and everything, and as kids, you know,
the things you get up to, so that was my first experience with Linux, now she did my mom,
just a side note is she didn't have to pay to repair that computer, so her version of what Linux
was was actually a little bit broken compared to what I was, so after that, obviously, I actually,
being so young, I actually, I couldn't, any computer I got, I got told that I couldn't
install Linux on it because of what had happened to the desktop, I mean, my parents were very
I mean, my dad's a PLC programmer, so he kind of knew what he was doing when it came to computers,
but I don't, he's very a Windows-centric kind of guy, so he wasn't all that, all that interested
in learning about Linux and learning about things like that, so I mean, there'd been times that I
would really want to try it, and I mean, I didn't stray too far from the Windows world,
I'm not going to lie, I didn't stray too far from the Windows world, but I definitely
I definitely wanted to try a Unix-based system, I thought it was really cool
the things you could do and different things like that, so I thought that was pretty interesting, but
as we as we continue down the lineage of how I found Linux, so that was my first experience
on that old computer, and then as I said, I was struggling, struggling, trying to install it on
different machines, I don't think my parents were too fond of the idea of me installing it on my
machines, so what I would do is actually I would any old computers that people were getting rid of,
I would take, I have a mask quite the collection of old desktops and things, and I had, for the longest
time, I had a gateway laptop to replace an old desktop that I got in my 2004-2005, it was
HHP Media Center or something I think, and I just scrapped that like last six months ago probably,
but I had that old desktop and no one was using it, so I thought, well, what the hell, so I figured
I might as well put it on there, so I put puppy Linux, that was my first forte into actual
Linux installation, now here's my quick opinion of puppy Linux, and I really, I mean, it's,
I don't know much about it, so I can't speak on it, but on that, I mean, I did a lot of research
right on on Windows machines, I did a lot of research of Linux and whatnot, and so I would try
to do pseudo app dash get install, but that would not work, and I'd be like, well, this is kind of
silly, and I didn't, the more research I did into it, it seemed like the only, the only package
manager puppy had was graphical, so I, I used that for a bit, I got some stuff, I installed it,
so I really wanted to start up a, start up a web server, so I used the, I think it was called,
well, I forget what it was called, but it was a graphical package manager for a puppy,
I think it was the universal puppy package manager, something like that, and so for a long time,
I used that on that old desktop, and then finally, my computer actually crashed, like my gateway
laptop, and I couldn't get any of the files off it, and I just, it blew screened on me, and I was
sick of it all, and it said that there was an error with it, and I went, well, this is,
this is ridiculous, I don't, I don't need to do this, like my main machine at this point,
I could make my own decisions, and I was 15 or 16, and I thought, you know what, this is just a
piece of garbage, I don't really want windows on my machine, so I, I installed a bunch of,
a bunch of, I think it was 10 point, I don't know, I think it was 11, I think it was 11,
a bunch of 11, the LTS, 11.04 I think, and so I installed that, and it ran really well,
and I was surprised, and I started to get more into it, and actually, while I was on windows,
my, my interest in programming had peaked quite a bit, so I would, I was trying to program in Python,
I actually, I think the first programming tutorials I ever watched were the, Google,
I don't know if you can YouTube search it, but the Google programming videos, Python,
Python programming, so those were pretty interesting, and so I got into it, and I just found
when I installed this a monkey system that my, that my programming skills increased 10 volt,
and you know what, I'm not, I'm not going to sit here and say that I'm a huge, I'm a huge,
I'm a good programmer, I haven't really built much, but I just, I liked Linux, as a whole,
I liked the fact that I could peek under the hood, you know, and see how things worked,
and I mean a bunch who's really a candy coated distribution, you don't have to get your hands dirty
at all, but, yeah, so that's basically how I started, and now at this time, with this
Ubuntu PC, I still had a Windows PC going, so basically that's what was happening, and
eventually I thought, well, I don't need a Windows PC anymore, so I had a friend who was
getting rid of a net book, it's actually the net book that I'm recording this on, and he,
he was getting rid of it, he said, Windows doesn't run well on it, and whatever, whatever,
and I thought, you know what, this is my, this is my chance to fully transition into a Linux-based
world, and so I did, so I made a negotiation with them, and I said, well, I'll give you 60 bucks
for an Acer Spy R1, and I did, and you know what, it's, it's really good, and yeah, so I picked
that up for about 60 bucks, and the next distribution I tried was CrunchBang, now CrunchBang was an
interesting distribution for me, because that's really where I learned the desktop customization
and things, and I was really interested in the tweaking aspects, and the fact that you could make
the distro, however you wanted your desktop environment, so on, and so on, and so on, and so basically,
what happened was I started with CrunchBang, and I used CrunchBang for about two, maybe a year and a
half, two years, something like that, and I used it through my final two years at high school,
and so basically I used CrunchBang, and I would customize OpenBox, I make it really nice, I made it
kind of tiling with PiTile, and I made it really, just really customizable, and it wasn't at all
like I started, and that's kind of when I started to get into tiling when those maintenance
and I just started to learn a lot of the configuration based around how it works, so as I progressed,
I started to research a little bit more, and my level of tweaking, like I said,
has really led me to find more things, it really led me to find Arch Linux, and Gen 2, and all
these different distributions that could really provide you a base to, you know, customize your
system even more than I had been, so what happened after that was the fact that I was pretty weary
of Arch, I'm not going to lie, I thought the installation was pretty brutal, but like not when I tried
it, but I just, I couldn't wrap my head around it because I thought, well, if I screw up my brick,
and it was really, I really stupid assumption, but I eventually, I moved over to Arch
because I wanted to try it, and I think that's just basically how I started, and honestly the
installation process is not, is not that hard at all, I mean if you have the beginner's guide
in front of you, and that's what I did, I had it on my phone, and I was absolutely fine, so
to anybody that's looking to try Arch, then feel free to do that, but yeah, so I installed Arch,
and this was, I installed Arch once, and I couldn't get it to work, and I was really frustrated,
and this was on the old gateways, I kept it around for a long time, I kept it around as a server-based,
I just asked the sage into it, and do whatever I had to do, kind of on my crunch bang, but I
decided to install Arch on it, and that, no, I was just horrible, couldn't get drivers loaded,
it was really, it was pretty brutal, but as I continued, I thought, you know what, this can't be
this hard, and I was really over-complicating it because I was, there's a, there's a parent in
the beginner's guide that says you have to load kernel modules, and it's after you connect to
the internet, but so when I, when I would install these kernel modules, I thought you had to do it
for, for your wireless card and everything, and I was really treating it like, it was,
Linux from scratch, basically, it's pretty brutal, I was like, well, I don't know how I do this,
I was, I was pretty naive when it came to the whole thing, so I gave it up after that, and went
back to my crunch bang, and finally, I recently, I just, I just, I, I'm going into college in
about a week, so I just graduated high school last year, and I, so I had some time on my hands,
and I said, well, you know what, I'm gonna try Arch again, so I put, I put it on the netbook,
and the installation process was a breeze, like I said, I mean, I had some issues
with, like, about the, I just wasn't over complicating it, so previously, I was over complicating
it, I was trying to do everything at once, but like I said previously, yeah, like I said previously,
the installation process is not that hard, if you have the beginner's guide right in front of
you're fine, and that's good, and right now I'm, I'm actually, I'm on the, I'm active on the
Arch forums, I'm on nixers.net, so I'm, I'm really kind of stepping up my game, I kind of feel, but
I'm also not one of those archa-ledists, everything, every other distribution sucks, I think,
Linux and Unix in terms of its core nature, if it works for you, then it works for you, I mean,
if you're a Windows user, if it works for you, it works for you, but for me, Arch works,
and that's all I have to say, thank you for your time, and enjoy the resting, whatever you
are doing, bye.
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