hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1881.txt

Episode: 1881
Title: HPR1881: My road to Linux
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1881/hpr1881.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 10:43:49

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This is HPR Episode 1881 entitled My Road to Linux, and in part on the series How I Found
Linux.
It is hosted by Klackit and in about 15 minutes long.
The summer is.
I'm so old I actually installed Watchtower on Amiga, and I reviewed 22 years of Linux distribution.
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Hi everyone, I'm Klackit and this is My Road to Linux.
I'm recording this on my phone as I'm working to the bus and vice from my experience last time.
I'm holding it like you would when you make an actual phone call.
So I hope the sound quality will be better this time.
Also this time I'm not going to do a proof of concept and try to do everything on the phone.
I'm going to record it now because I'm available.
I have the time slot but I'm going to do the rest of the stuff on the computer.
And I'm actually going to verify the sound quality before I commit this to the upstream.
So my path to Linux, my road to Linux started.
I guess you could say it started when I got my Amiga.
I was an Amiga OS at the time of course.
But it was about the same year that I started engaging in Internet stuff.
It was 1992 and I had dial-off to a Linux account in a small town, a couple of miles north of where I was living.
In those days you had to care about what area code you were calling because there were different rates depending on the area code.
So I couldn't dial the dial-off too far away.
So they were using Linux and I was using the command line just like I would any of the BBSs I had been using before.
But after a while I started to feel limiting and I knew there were Amiga applications that could use the real TCPIP connection.
And the way you did that back then was you still dialed into the dial-off and then you started a command on the command line that would start sending and receiving a PPP traffic.
I think it was PPP, maybe there was some other protocol used at the time as well.
Anyway the application was slurped with an eye and so you had to write a sort of chat script on the Amiga side to dial in and connect.
Or maybe I used my normal terminal to dial in and connect and then once you were connected and you had run the command then you switched over to the TCPIP stack to talk to the serial line from that point on.
So this became kind of tedious and there weren't that many programs available for the Amiga.
So I started looking into running the same operating system on my side which was running on my modem upstream.
So I found Linux M68K and I think that Linux actually at least compiled on Motorola 68000 but it didn't work too well.
So Amiga, or sorry, Linux M68K was a sort of fork of Linux that had a lot of patches that made it run better on that platform.
And the distribution you used at the time was watch tower and it wasn't a distribution.
It was a tower ball and you just untard it to your good petition and boom you had the binary spare and from that point on if you wanted something more you had to download the source code, compile it yourself.
And this was when I first saw the term Debian because some some commands or programs that I wanted it was difficult to find the original source or that site was down at the moment or it was too slow and then it was usually another source available.
There was this hierarchy of packages and they were called weird things like command-version.orig.targizet and I didn't really care much what this was about.
I just, okay, I can get the source from here so I can load it that.
What I didn't know at the time was I could have just switched over to Debian for M68K because that actually existed at the time.
But I went on and I compiled that stuff from the Debian source even though I wouldn't have had to if I hadn't done it.
And the Amiga was also my path into a little bit of kernel development although we never upstreamed it.
During high school friend and I did SR, we had a sort of species project at the end and what we did then was we made sure that the serial drivers for PC serial would work on my Amiga because I had a bridge card so we was possible to access an Isabas on the Amiga.
So we patched the kernel here and we patched it there and we just, in some ugly way, defined the way some of the commands that in the original I386 case they were actually processor instructions in assemblers to directly access the ports of the CPU.
But we made them into functions instead which made some memory rights because only Amiga everything was memory mapped including the Isabas with the bridge card.
So we did that and we had my Amiga running in the basement of the high school as a terminal to the PC which actually had a real Ethernet connection.
Coax, of course. To the Internet, I think the high school had a 64 kilobyte line and we connected over the serial port to the PC which shared that 64K line with some of the high schools computers.
And during this project I also learned about Linux on the PC. I installed a Slackware 96.
On the PC I got at a time so by this time the Amiga was more of a special interest. I kept it because it was working and it was fun to play with but my primary computer was now a PC running Slackware.
And that computer kept running Slackware until I found Debian for real. Not just this mysterious name that ended up in certain source code, parables but actually this is a distribution you can install it.
And so I did and it was awesome. Coming from Slackware was great. It took care of a lot of stuff for you and it had a more, it imposed some structure on the wild and an arctic Linux flora.
And the packaging system of course is what everyone loves about Debian. You could have to get it and it would pull down dependencies and you could remove packages and it was all great.
But then the speed of the Linux ecosystem started to accelerate and the Debian system couldn't quite keep up so started running testing and then some packages were still not in the version I would expect.
So run a lot of app spinning and an unholy mix of stable and testing and unstable and then finally just giving up and running an unstable and that was working out okay but there was a need for someone to go in and put some polish on this.
So the idea with Debian was that any kind of package that does solve problem X, that package would be in there and then it would be up to you to pick whichever package you prefer that sold X in the way that you liked it to.
So then I think it was Bruce Perens who said okay this is all great Debian has everything but how about we focus a bit and we try to not have everything but instead make some choices for the user like we're going to have a gnome desktop.
We're going to use cups for printed drivers we're going to have ABC for problem XYZ and we're going to use post fix for mail server or whatever and focus on getting those selected components working well together.
So he tried to gather together a couple of different Linux distributors and tell them that hey if we all cooperate we start with Debian we create a focused effort based on Debian and then everyone can deviate from that and create their commercial Linux distributions with some additional focus on solving some specific kind of.
But that didn't quite turn out and it all all petered out but then Mark Shuttleworth sold his certificate authority for a couple of hundred million dollars and he figured hey I built this on Debian and that was great and I want others to be able to do the same thing.
So I'll do what user Linux couldn't and I'll hire people to do it.
So that was all great and you got the Debian unstable versions up to date with all the software but it was produced as sort of a hole and integrated to work in the best way together.
So the first Ubuntu version was released in 2004 and I jumped on it immediately and it was awesome.
Of course things have changed since then Mark hundreds of millions of dollars are starting to run out and is trying to find some way to make this work in the long term.
And that has led to some really diplomatically I would say unfortunate choices.
So a lot of people including me are seriously considering or have already moved back to Debian because there's not that much difference between them anymore.
Everything done in Ubuntu of value has migrated back into Debian and some of the not so good choices that Ubuntu has made has stayed out of Debian.
So Debian today is a pretty good choice but then again if your computer just works and you like tinkering with your computer when something is stable and it just works then it's time to move on.
So now I'm looking into the new hot thing in my world at least which is GUIX and GUIX doesn't yet have a GNOME desktop so it is coming soon.
So I'm not running this on a physical computer yet but my primary VMs on my work computers are now a NICSOS which has GNOME and is the similar philosophy as GUIX and also the basis that GUIX derived from.
And then I'm running GUIX as a package manager on top of that system.
And I think that sort of runs it up from the start to where I am today. See you next time I get something done.
My name is Clacket and you can find me on the social federation on the pump IO network microcast slash Clacket that's microca with Cs.st slash CLA CKE and on the GNU social network at quitter.se slash Clacket that's quitter.se slash CLA CKE.
See you on the federation.
We're listening to HackerPublic Radio at HackerPublicRadio.org.
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Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by an HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast and clicking our contribute link to find out how easy it really is.
HackerPublic Radio was founded by the Digital Dog Pound and the Infonomicon Computer Club and is part of the binary revolution at binwrap.com.
If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly, leave a comment on the website or record a follow-up episode yourself.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a created comments, attributions, share-like, 3.0 license.
You've been listening to HackerPublicRadio at HackerPublicRadio.org.
We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday.
Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by an HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, you've been listening to HackerPublic Radio at HackerPublicRadio.org.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is.
HackerPublicRadio was founded by the Digital Dog Pound and the Infonomicon Computer Club and is part of the binary revolution at binwrap.com.
If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly, leave a comment on the website or record a follow-up episode yourself.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a creative comments, attributions, share-like, 3.0 license.