hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1972.txt

Episode: 1972
Title: HPR1972: How I got into Linux
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1972/hpr1972.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 12:42:20

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This is HPR Episode 1772 entitled, How I Got Into Linux, and in part on the series, How I Found Linux.
It is posted my first time, though SM1 are a 0R5H4D35, and in about 20 minutes long, the summary is, my first podcast.
Be rambling about how I got into Linux.
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Hello everyone, Mirror Shades here. Today we're going to talk a little bit about how I got into Linux.
My first experience with Linux was seeing it running on my friend's computer.
I had just gotten my first new computer. I was about 2021 at the time, so I should probably mention that I'm 38 now, and I grew up in the 1980s and computers were very expensive back then.
It costed much of the car, and we could never get a Ford one, so the computers that I had growing up were all kind of junky, hammy down things.
So I was pretty excited. It was my first new computer, and I fell into it with a group of couple of friends that were really into computers.
I learned a lot from them. One of them was a good friend of mine, that we went high school together, and he had gotten red hat running on his computer.
I went over to his house one day, just to see if he wanted to go out and grab some lunch, and he was like, yeah, let me just finish this thing and mark it on.
That's when I saw his screen, and he was running enlightenment, E16, and at the time I was running Windows 98.
So if you want to know how much of a wow factor that was, just go to Google Images and look up Enlightenment E16, and compare the screenshots of that to Windows 98.
It's pretty sad, but back then we were all on dial-ups, so downloading ISOs wasn't really feasible. It wasn't practical.
Most of us just went out and got a little box set, and I can't remember. It came with four or six CDs, and it came with a big thick, dead tree manual that wasn't very helpful.
After seeing my friend's computer a couple days later, he posted some screenshots online of his desktop, and he would switch back and forth from enlightenment to write box.
And some of the screenshots just blew me away, and he pretty much had all the software needed to do what he wanted.
He actually just completely abandoned Windows and went fully to Linux.
And so my first personal experience was I traded some stuff to a friend of mine for an old computer that he didn't want anymore, and then I got one of my friends to come over and install Red Hat for me.
So I'm going to take a moment here just as an aside for you younger guys and gals, and anybody who's new to Linux that may not know.
So nowadays you have Fedora, and you have Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but back then there was just Red Hat Linux, and that was it.
And like I said, we, a couple of us had the box sets, the actual CDs, so I had him come over and install it on this old computer, and it ran okay, but I didn't have any real documentation, I didn't have any experience with Linux.
So I tinkered around with a little while, but I couldn't quite wrap my head around it, and at that time I just taken a job doing tech support for Helipacker, their pavilion line of computers, and before they let you out on the floor, there was like a two week training period that did a lot to fill some of my gaps in my knowledge that I had.
So someone gave me a Linux Mandrake CD, so again for your younger people or new Linux, probably I never heard of Linux Mandrake.
Linux Mandrake was kind of like the Ubuntu of its day back then, except it was based on Red Hat, but it had a nice slick graphical installer, a lot of little gooey apps that they wrote just for Mandrake to make things easier to configure and get running.
So between that, the training I received and somebody giving me the CD, I got a Linux Mandrake on my computer, and I started to really learn Linux from that, and that in ManPages, I read a lot of ManPages back then, because again I didn't have any other real documentation.
I had a couple of, at some point, and you won't see this probably ever again, but I was at a Walmart, and they actually had a Linux Mandrake box set, and it was only like 15 bucks, and I bought it, and it came with a couple of manuals, so I did get those, but most of the time they would refer to the ManPages or something.
So I started really using Linux almost, at some point, almost exclusively, the only reason I kept my Windows partition around four was to play a few video games I had, and at some point, my friends began to become unhappy with Red Hat, and they discovered Debian,
and after such a game changer in the Linux world, and they just jumped ship and went to Debian, and lived happily ever after, I guess, I don't know. Some of these guys I haven't seen in a lot of years, but they went to Debian, and so I should probably mention, and this is a difference in the way we, I guess, view computers nowadays, but when I was running Linux Mandrake,
while it was a great system, it always felt like I was running Linux with training wheels. It wasn't like I was really learning Linux, or understanding how it worked under the hood, which is kind of a trap, but I think there's been a lot of people complaining about Ubuntu, because a lot of the attitude nowadays is people just really don't care how it runs under the hood, they just wanted to do XYZ, and make it do this, make it do that, I don't care how it works.
And back then, it was just, I guess, a different time, but I was getting to the point where I knew my way around Linux, and I felt strong enough for my skills, that I don't need to stay with Linux Mandrake anymore, and my hardware was starting to show its age, and subsequent versions of Linux Mandrake that was coming out,
did feel, they didn't offer any real new features, my first version I started with, which I can't remember, I think it was something like Mandrake, Linux Mandrake 7 was plenty stable, I didn't notice any real terrible bugs in it, all the hardware worked under just fine, but each subsequent version that came out of Linux Mandrake seemed to get a little more bloated,
and it rained just a little bit slower, and a little bit slower, and that always hurt me a little bit, but of course, not that I had room to be upset by that, my hardware at that point was probably four or five years old, but I thought, well, it's about time for me to move on, because, like I said,
I learned my way around, I didn't feel like I needed the training wheels anymore, and so back then there was a couple of websites, I think DistroWatch was around by then, this was probably about 2002 or 2003, and there was another website which I believe was LinuxISO.com, and I don't think they're around anymore,
but I went looking and doing research trying to find a new distro to use, and I came across this distribution called IcePak Linux, which was, from Germany, it was completely independent, it wasn't based on anything, it was really nice, it was stable, it had a graphical installer, it wasn't quite as flashy as Mandrake's, but
it had plenty of software with it, it was just really nice, I really liked it, installed it, everything worked out of the box, I was like, this is awesome, I think by default it used Window Maker, and it stayed on my machine for about a week until the project announced that they were gone, they died, whatever, didn't exist anymore, so it went back to the drawing board,
and did more research, looked at a bunch more distribution, it's trying to find one that I liked, and that's when I came across Slackware, and in my reading about Slackware there was a lot of people saying there was a lot of people with good and bad things to say about Slackware,
a lot of the bad was just stuff like, oh it's hard to use, there's no hand holding, there's no easy way to do stuff, which was fine, I wanted to try to really get my hands dirty, so to speak, with one next, I didn't want to, something that held your hand, and showed you how to do,
basically nothing, just click here and click here and everything was configured, and it went that, and Slackware was, there was some things about it that really made me like the sound of it, it was the oldest surviving Linux distribution, a lot of people were saying it was really fast, it was really stable, very full featured once you got it installed and configured,
most of the complaints I saw back then were about the installer, because it wasn't a graphical installer, and when people were saying it was hard to figure out, or hard to use, they couldn't figure the installer, or how it so they gave up on it, and I thought well, I'll download the ISO and give it a try, and if it frustrates me too much, I'll just move on to something else, so download it and boot it up, and I didn't find it particularly hard,
I mean it wasn't graphical, but if you just read the text on your screen and followed the directions, you shouldn't have any problem installing it, and that's what I told people, anybody who bothered to ask me, not that there's a great deal of people around here, that Linux users in this part of the world, but I used Slackware for, I don't know, quite a few years, it served me well,
a lot of people mentioned things like package management, usually when they hear Slackware mention, but back then my needs weren't really, I didn't need a whole lot of stuff on my computer, and pretty much everything Slackware came with, it covered everything I needed, so package management really wasn't a huge issue for me, especially for a few years there, especially around,
between like 2004, late 2004, through about, geez 2007 maybe, I just didn't have internet access, so package management really wasn't an issue for those few years, but I'd been reading in some magazines and stuff, and I'd heard about a bunch of coming out,
and so when I finally did get internet access again, one of the first things I did, of course, was jump online, went to distro watch, and checked out a couple of new distributions, one of which was about two, and the first time I tried it, I really didn't like it, granted my hardware was old, but it did feel kind of, coming from Slackware, it felt really kind of slow and bloated, so it wasn't for me, I'm not trying to say it's okay,
I'm not trying to say it's horrible or anything, if you use Ubuntu, if you like Ubuntu, that's fine, not my cup of tea, I did try Linux Mint as well, before it got super, super popular, and I thought it was okay, which was really weird because it's basically the same thing, but for some reason, I had issues, even Ubuntu didn't want to install, the installer would fail, but Linux Mint would install just fine for some reason,
the hardware I had at the time, and it ran really well, it was really slick, I thought if I had a newer computer, this would be great, but I didn't, even today, I have a lot of computers, and they're all very old, I do have a newer computer now, a couple of newer computers, but by and large, I've probably got 10 or 12 computers here, most of them are old,
some of them are very old, so Slackware often still fills the bill, there's some things about Slackware that I like, like how vanilla it is, you can pretty much do what you want with it, it's not pretty configured, which for some people they don't like that, but the whole idea is just to make it what you want it to be,
which, like I said, for some people, that's what they want, for some, it's not, and since those days, after quite a few distributions, it really depends on what my needs are, but usually it'll either be Slackware or some Debian variant,
I used Linux Mint for a little while, and then I came across a distribution that I absolutely loved, it was called CrunchBang, and CrunchBang was a happy medium between something like Ubuntu and something like Slackware, it was pre-configured, which meant installing it went pretty quick, but it was kinda designed with that same sort of idea in mind,
you know, just, here it is, it's kinda plain Jane make it what you want it to be, and I really loved that, and I used it for quite a while, and then I decided I would start using the forums, I'm not a real social person, I don't do a lot of the forums and social media stuff,
but about the time I decided to create an account on the CrunchBang forums, probably a week or two went by, and then core nominal, the lead developer said, no, I'm done with this, and it ended, so there are a couple of projects that have kinda come up to sort of take the place, there's the community has picked up where core nominal left off, I guess, and has created a distribution called Bunsen Labs, and another guy,
and I forget his name, I'm sorry, I created CrunchBang Plus Plus, which, it's my understanding, there's a little bit of a stink about, because of the name, but, yeah, I don't know, whatever, but that was a really nice, I actually, I only, after discovered Linux, I only used it for a little while, when I came across CrunchBang, that's pretty much the thing I'll use on most of my machines, if I'm gonna run Linux,
or well, now, I've got a Bunsen Labs disc, and I'm not sure if I have a CrunchBang Plus Plus, I haven't tried that yet, so I don't really know, I can't say, for sure, which one I like better, I'm sure they both have their pros and cons, I don't know, but,
but still, it's the aesthetic, the idea, the concept that drove CrunchBang, I think, made it great, so really, I guess for me, right now, it's sort of a toss up between, you know, good old Slackware and something like CrunchBang,
I did, for a while, also, try OpenBSD, and I actually kind of like OpenBSD, it's kind of hitting me, it's on some of my hardware, I have some really, I don't know, I guess, funky, some of it's just cheap, or hardware, and some of it's not that bad, but, for the most part, everything works, nowadays,
I don't have as much time to put into getting my machine the way I want it, so having something that's a devian-based, makes it a little bit easier, just to get up and running, not easier, necessarily, just a little bit faster,
and right now, I'm working full time, and I'm going to school full time, and plus I've got a family and everything, so I don't have a lot of time to invest in getting my machine set up, and just tinkering the stuff like I want to, usually, and sometimes I just tend to get it up and running, so I can do X, Y, or Z, and that's pretty much it, that pretty much brings us to the day.
Well, that's about it for me, hopefully, my rambling didn't bore you too bad, and maybe next time I'll have something a little more productive to say.
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