hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0928.txt

Episode: 928
Title: HPR0928: My Linux Adventure, Pt. 1
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0928/hpr0928.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 05:05:49

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Thank you very much.
I am Bob Wooden and this is my first HPR recording and to follow is the beginning of my Linux
adventure.
I started using a computer in 1994 at work that made me more efficient.
First computer that I bought was at an auction of a former employer who had recently gone
bankrupt.
This was about 1995 or 1996.
I was standing at the auction daydreaming and realized that the auction here was talking
about $160 for this particular computer and I knew it was worth a whole lot more.
Most of that I was there to see what they were getting for, whatever that was in the
building.
Curiosity.
Day off.
Nothing to do.
Just wanted to go see.
This design computer, as we referred to it, was a 386DS processor that had the math
co-processor built in.
Back then, the math co-processor was a separate chip you had to put on the board.
This is when they first built them in.
It had an 80 megabyte hard drive.
I don't remember how much RAM it had.
I believe it was a 14 inch monitor.
Included was a 9-pin dot matrix printer.
I don't remember the brand and it was loaded with DOS and it went us for workgroup 3.1.
More importantly, a test to the back of the computer was what we referred to as a design
key.
It was a small dongle, as it was called, that attaches to the parallel port of the computer
that allows some very expensive preparatory software to save and print designs.
We were designing kitchens and bathrooms and so forth and this was important to give
customers these documents that illustrated approximately what their new project was
going to look like.
The design key in the software is very, very expensive.
That's why when they were talking about $160, I jumped right in and bought it.
When the DOS satellite spent $250 and I had bought a complete working computer.
So I took it home and got to doing a little bit of research and figured out that just
a few years before, three or four years before, this was a $2,000 or so computer because
of the DX chip.
It was expensive.
Like Pentiums had just been released, the 46 process had been out about four years.
So essentially I had a two processor generation old computer but I could work at home and
that was going to be a big advantage for me with my work.
I could do more things and get more done.
I just used floppy disks to take designs back and forth to work.
Other auctions that I went to, different facilities at the same company was selling
off the equipment from the computers, about $6,800.
So I definitely found the buy that year.
Within a year or so, I considered building a newer and faster computer.
I had found a local computer supply store that primarily was selling one and two year old
parts that they had purchased the overstock from other distributors from.
They had reasonable prices.
You could go in and buy a parse by this week, a case in a couple of weeks when you had
the money, a motherboard processor, and as cash allowed, I kept buying pieces and storing
them.
And eventually I came up with pieces to build a new computer.
It was a classic Pentium, a 120 megahertz processor, of course I loaded it with my existing
DOS and Windows for Workgroups.
Windows 95, I believe, was due to be released pretty soon and might have been 98 I forget.
And it wasn't long before I had built two computers.
One was my main desktop.
It started life as a 160 megahertz, 166 megahertz, I believe, classic Pentium.
Later in life it grew to be a 233 just by changing out the processor.
It had a 1.2 gig by hard drive, as I recall.
The second machine was that original first build, that classic Pentium, 120 megahertz.
It had, I had changed it and swapped out parts.
I don't remember how much RAM it had, how big the hard drive was, doesn't matter.
Both machines were using Windows 98 at this point.
So I don't remember what year it was, but I remember doing this.
The 120 megahertz machine, I decided to make a firewall machine because there were issues
with getting viruses and so forth.
I purchased some preparatory firewall program that was $45 or so.
After I'd had it six months, they sent me a renewal fee for $45, so I could get the updates.
And then three months after that, they sent me a notice that if I wanted to upgrade to
the next version, it was going to be $30 more.
Three months after that, I got another renewal notice for $45, and I started to realize
that this preparatory stuff was basically legalized the extortion in my mind.
They sold it to me, and it's only good for six months, and if I want to keep going, I
got to buy more, so I got to keep sending the money all the time.
It struck me as very odd.
Constantly, I stopped paying for the updates, and sure enough, a lot of months later,
I got a virus, so I had to reload Windows 98 to fix it.
I had stopped paying for the firewall, so that was gone, and I began to look at Linux.
What about this Linux thing?
Reading that a user could try that CD thing, a live CD, I dug around and found a magazine
that I had bought, and sure enough, within the magazine was a not picks CD.
I put the CD into the CD ROM of my best computer, and figured out how to get it to boot to CD
ROM.
And it started, and there in just a few minutes was a geographical screen, icons like Windows.
You clicked if you did things, what's this, oh, a list of hardware, and it clicked on
the list, and it listed everything that was in the computer, the RAM, the processor, and
everything.
It was amazing.
And when I turned it off, I still had my Windows machine, so I was safe, in my mind.
One of the things that I started doing, oh, about them, because I was tinkering with so
many computers, is I began collecting computer hardware.
My wife and I went to a garage sale somewhere near our house, and there was a computer that
the person had for sale, and I got to reading what the little cart said it was, and it was
a Packard Bell.
It has 75 megahertz classic processor in it, classic pinion.
It was a complete computer, hard drives, everything was in it, just no monitor, and so forth,
and that was fine with me.
And I think I bought it for $20, or something like that.
This classic pinion went home and eventually got loaded with Redhead 6-point, something
or other.
I bought some CDs online from one of the economical CD-making companies.
At that time, there was two or three of them around, I think Chief CDs was one, I forget
the other names of the companies are all kind of gone now, and essentially you were paying
them for the cost of the CD to get the contents on it.
Now my internet connection was a dial-up motor, so there was no dial mode in the big
ISO image, and this was a cheap and convenient way for a dollar or two, or three per CD, I
was getting a copy of the current ISO image of, in this case, Redhead 6-point, whatever.
Using these CDs, I loaded in because I didn't have much loose, I reloaded, tried different
anticon of settings, that's the loader for Redhead.
It would lock up a crash because I had things set wrong, I'd reload it, except the defaults
and then it'd run for a while, and it was a way to play with software and see how you
could manipulate the settings and just loading it, how you could make it different, choosing
different file based, you know, EXT3s and EXT2, I think of the time as EXT2, choosing different
file systems and so forth.
Let's see what it does.
It ran KDE at the time, I'm pretty sure that's what it was running, yes, it was slow because
it was a pity of 75, but hey, it was my first attempt at loading Linux and it was fun.
Along the way, something had gone wrong with my Windows 98 desktop, it had become sluggish,
it would take a long time to start.
When you clicked on the web browser, it was slow to open, you get these recurring pop-ups
and occasionally lock up and quit, and I'd have to do a lot of what I would call hard
restarts where you press the power button and force it to shut down.
About late 2002 or early 2003, I had collected enough parts from my GANVY's garage sale machines
and so forth that I had some extra hard drives.
So I decided to pull the Windows 98 hard drive from my main machine, knowing that I could
plug it back in and go back to Windows if I wanted to.
On that new, different hard drive, I loaded Red Hat 6, whatever it was, 6.2, 6.3, I don't
remember.
It was interesting that Red Hat saw my printer prior to that, and I obviously wouldn't
see the printer, I had to mainly set it, so forth, and I had to learn how to do that.
Red Hat saw my printer during installation and set it up.
The only thing I had to go in and change was, I had to reconfigure it for a U.S. letter
size because it had done an 8.4 size.
So some minor configuration issues, and I had an operational Linux machine that could
print and do things that I wanted to do.
So I began to realize that I didn't think I was going to be needing Windows anymore,
and this is probably good because all the Windows machines I had were running the same
copy of Windows 98 SE, and as we all know, Microsoft doesn't like that, I didn't pay them
for both those copies.
Windows 2000 had recently come out, it was very expensive, as I recall it was $150 or
more per copy, and I was just uncomfortable given the money when they didn't give me
much.
It also needed an office suite, I don't know how much Microsoft Office was at that time,
it was a lot of money, several hundred dollars.
I always remember the presentation Bill Gates was doing at some Microsoft conference or
some event, as he was doing it in clicking Windows 95 or 98, whichever it was, the big blue
screen of death popped up behind him on the monster screen and the whole crowd laughed.
He thought it was really funny.
Those issues and my experience with the firewall program that was kind of felt like I was
being extorted as opposed to allow to use their software that expense there, it just kept
pushing me towards free software.
Why would you pay somebody over and over again to use their product when it's not very
good that puzzled me?
This preparatory design program that I had been using over the years had their own little
internal DOS and Windows org going on, they had been a DOS program for years and years
and years.
Remember, this is a design program that was expensive, $1,500 a copy I believe, annual support
was $400 to $500 a year and you got all the upgrades for that amount.
Again, you utilize the extortion, but if you're going to stay current, you have to pay
bill.
So, they had their own internal DOS and Windows org going on.
The DOS was better than they were never going to go Windows because you could see Windows
was unstable, blah, blah, blah, blah and they kept this up for a long time.
Loan behold, most of the computers that you could buy at that time were preloaded with
Windows.
You didn't have any of the choice and it had this huge bundle of software packages that
was just a big load of extra crap that they stuck on the computer because those were
the deals they made so companies could get their software out and expose to the world.
Problem with that is that this preparatory design program seemed to feel that they needed
to be the only program on that computer, conflicting things that would happen in their
program with crash, just the program, sometimes just the whole computer and so forth.
Now, about 2005, 2006, now history teaches us that that design program, it came out with
a version 6.0, interestingly, it was Windows based.
History has taught us, and there's been some hint of an admission that the company was
growing pretty fast.
They had a rather substantial R&D department, and within the R&D department, of course,
they're extremely secretive.
They didn't want to tell you anything about what was going on, but there were rumors
that they were working on a Unix-based version of their software that would run on some
form of Unix.
The wheel, the whole world talked and kind of assumed it probably Linux, didn't know.
I'd progressed to a point where I wasn't working at home much anywhere I wanted to leave
my work at work, and this allowed my computers at home to be Linux-based, and therefore that
was my final hurdle for no more use of Windows.
So my primary machine became a 100% Linux machine.
I had previously dual booted to that point.
I had now gone ahead and removed the Windows and set up the machine as a single Linux machine
that was all it was on.
This began the process of networking machines together.
I began studying networks, what was needed for wiring, what was needed for hardware, switches,
hubs, understood all that, and how could I do this?
It was an experiment, nothing more.
Spend as little as possible, try these things, and learn.
Luckily, I lived near a micro-center.
If you've never been to one and you get a chance, and you can go to their website, search
out, see where the stars are, and if you get a chance, go to one of these stars.
At the time I was working on networking things and trying to decide between a switch and a hub,
which was better.
I go to a micro-center and see how much I'm going to spend, get some wire, and get a hub
or a switch, and so forth.
I stand back and look at this point of sale that has ethernet switches and ethernet hubs
there, and 5 and 8 ports up to 48 ports, several hundred dollar switches and so forth,
and just standing back and the logic was, which one's better?
Switch or a hub?
As I looked, there were much, much more switches than there were hubs, and as I went elsewhere
and read and learned, I found that switches were kind of the new thing.
They were better than hubs for a number of reasons.
I don't remember the reasons why at this point it was research.
And I, of course, have forgotten that.
So to create a small network, I ended up buying a switch because there were only about
15 or 20 percent more than the same hub.
A five-port hub might have been $30, and a five-port switch might have been $40.
I don't remember the prices, but like that.
So not a huge jump to go to a switch, which was considered better for a LAN wire setup.
So I created this simple network at home so I could share my internet connection across
the LAN to my other computers, including sharing it to my wife's computer, which was a Windows
laptop that her work had provided for her.
One machine would automatically dial the dial up connection and start, and the internet
was accessible on the LAN system to all the computers at that time.
So if any of them requested internet connection, I could hear them the basement, the modem
dial it up and take in the phone, and connecting.
Of course, we had one phone line in the house, and if we used it for that, we couldn't
get phone calls.
This is about the cusp of cell phones taken off.
Part of this evolution at this time was an experiment with LTSP.
This is the Linux terminal server project.
It is the ability to have a faster computer, and it is faster.
We want a server to be very, very fast.
This computer functions as a server, in my case, at the basement, and ran by itself.
Remember that old classic Pentium 75 Packard Bell that I bought at a Grigisdale?
Well, it became a client to that server.
Linux terminal server project has no software on the client, accesses the PXE image or
boot image on the server to essentially send the signal to your client and have the client
act.
The exact same as the desktop does in my case, the basement or elsewhere.
Very small CPU load, all the work to be done by the server in the basement.
And the responses on the screen are as fast as the server is in the basement.
So essentially I am sitting at a 75MHz machine, and it is acting like a 233MHz machine because
that is the server that was running in the basement.
It was quick and responsive.
The CPU load was so small, and it almost didn't generate any heat.
I decided to make my client silent, so I opened the case up and I took the fan off the
CPU heat sink, which left just a heat sink and no fan.
And that turned out to be kind of a bad idea, as would be expected within 3 or 4 months
or 6 months, the CPU died and my client died.
But I had experimented with the Linux terminal server stuff.
It was fascinating.
I just think it could be done with a large server in a single location and feed 20 or 30
clients off of it at once.
Very, very interesting in my mind.
Somewhere in here I discovered Linux updates.
I had been running Linux for a year or more.
I didn't know and had to learn kind of the hard way that updates were free because it's
free software.
And as a result, I had machines that didn't run the greatest, they did run, but they
weren't cursed by any means.
Not understanding it at the time, Linux being so new, we didn't have to deal with viruses
and so forth, so it really wasn't a huge issue.
But at the time I was coming from Windows where you had to pay for everything and then
pay every 6 months for everything and then pay for updates and pay for everything and
pay and keep paying and pay some more as well, no.
And I never expected that Linux updates were no charge.
I was afraid that if I did updates that they would find me, they could figure out that
I was doing free updates and taking it and I shouldn't do that.
And so for a year or more, I did not, yes, I did not do updates.
And one day I was reading an article in one of my Linux magazines, I don't remember
which one.
They were talking about updates and how they were no charge and you just clicked like this
and this is how you did it and tell us that and it downloads and it installs it automatically
and your computer is current to the most current software that's available.
As amazed by this, I did a little bit of checking and finding another article about it
and went, okay, then I should do this.
Realizing I am still on a dial-up modem at this point.
So knowing that I can't and potentially might tie up the whole system with the dial-up
modem for a long time, I waited until before I went to bed and I went downstairs and clicked
on update and sure enough the little box pops up and it starts to download the software
and the computer is sitting there, turning away and it's a slow download but it's still
coming.
I decided that it was going to take a long time.
I really couldn't tell how long and I so I went to bed and actually did get to sleep
that night and woke up 4 or 5 o'clock next morning, trolley downstairs right away and
sure enough the download was done.
It was there waiting and asking me if I wanted to install it, I said of course yes.
It began the install process, not knowing how long that was going to take.
I at least had known that I had moved forward with the next step, went back upstairs with
the bed for an hour or two and got up and the computer was up to date.
The dial-up modem had been up all night long connected and that was fine.
I had done the updates and the computer was ran much better and it was faster and so
I determined that yes this was a good thing.
About the same time we were having desktop wars back then between KDE and Gnome 1.4, a
lot of media articles about which one was better, this one that one and so forth.
Typical arguments.
Gnome 1.4 had been around for quite a while, it was pretty stable, it hadn't changed much
since whenever it started. KDE was just new at that point, I believe they had come out with
version 3, I kind of forget which one it was.
It was new and improved in a different look, it looked very similar to the Windows products
with a start menu, if you go in the lower left corner, they were trying to attract Windows users,
obviously they wanted to have a similar GUI that people could move through and never
kind of comfortable with. This argument that was going on then is not any different
of the arguments going on now with 3, NKDE and Mate and Cinnamon and Unity, their desktop
managers there you are. You like what you like and you use what you use.
I remember upgrading the Red Hat 7.2, the reason I remember it was the first time I had
to order 3 CDs for a distro, prior to that was just a single CD.
I didn't have very much on my home directory so I burnt those contacts to the CD and I did a
complete fresh install and it was nice because it let me choose EXT3 file system, I'm getting
a new kernel 2.4.7 this time, good no, 1.4 was a desktop, K office was in there, a number of
other things that of course you could add load as you wanted to. I did a little checking just to
check dates of Red Hat 7.2 was released in October 2001. I had been out a little while when I did
the updates so it's probably sometime that mid-winter January February 2002. I remember that it was
snowing the night that I did the update fairly snowed in the next day. Somewhere a few months
down the road I upgraded the Red Hat 7.3. This time I just did an upgrade from 7.2 to 7.3. I had
been reading things and thought I would give that a try. 7.3 was released in May of 2002.
It had a 2.4.18 kernel. It didn't appear to be that much different from 7.2, visually it was very
much the same and it was primarily updated programs and so forth. But at this point I began to have
some dependency issues. That struck me as odd but still being new and not known I just kept going
because I didn't know any better. I was also trying some Mandrake RPMs on my Red Hat machine.
I've since learned that that might not have been the wisest idea. Some things worked. Some things
didn't but again this is all an experiment and I didn't keep a huge amount of stuff on this computer
for example a history of type letters to my parents. I didn't store those. I kept printing
them on paper and keeping those. It didn't keep a lot on the computer at that time. 7.3 is a little bit
I had my issues with software dependencies but I didn't get too excited about it because
everything kept coming along. Red Hat 8 was coming soon. So I just waited a long things.
When I did my install of Red Hat 8 I still had hard issues. The first updates of 8.0 didn't
help that much. I still had programs of crashing quick and go away and I couldn't tell for sure
what was going on. I began to think that maybe Red Hat was ignoring the consumer but I know now
that's not true. So I kept thinking about the software issue and how it might be
software related. It might be hardware issue. I don't know and I met my local Microcenter
wandering around one day just kind of thinking and looking at things and dreaming about what I could
buy in the future. Then I go down the software aisle and here there's a big sign next to a box.
It's MarkSus 9.0. It's on sale. It was a regular price at $40 or $50 and it was on sale for like
$20 or so and I figured for $20 why not. I mean let's switch distros and see if that makes
any difference. I had read that some people had good luck switching distros and things were
better and so forth. So I bought the Seuss box, the box set and taking home a couple books in
there. CDs. I installed it over Red Hat 8.0 and everything worked. It just out of the box.
It recognized everything and configured it. I stopped having those hardware issues that I'd
had previously on Red Hat 8.0. Now, history has taught me at this point that potentially I was
having a hardware issue with my computer and because Seuss does things a little bit differently
in configurations and so forth, it recognized some of the hardware where the hardware I had
may not have been compatible with Red Hat. So that wasn't really Red Hat's fault. That was an
experience on my part. The second computer had little used for various things. What I had learned
since I had left Windows was I had learned about Linux Thermal Server Project, the LTSP stuff.
As a result of that, I had to learn about NFS network file systems. DHCP, the assignment of
IP addresses to clients. I learned how to do some command line instructions to look at hardware
within the machine. I was reading online more and more to study what could be done with Linux.
One of the learning processes, one of them was an issue that I had at work. At work, I had a Windows
2000 machine for this expansive proprietary design program that of course, the company paid for,
that I used all the time. We were on a LAN system that connected to the Novel server and I would
get this little pop-up in the lower right corner next to the clock that said the LAN was not connected.
It would come around and go away and come on and go away and it was really a nuisance. It wasn't a
huge issue as with Windows, you tend to ignore some of the things that goes on with it. When the IT
people were there one day, I mentioned it to the guy that said I'm having this issue with this
pop-up and he said, well, we'll just reload the driver and see if that helps. He checked the server
to make sure that there wasn't any issues there. It came back out that he didn't think there was any
issues. They claimed to have fixed it. This comment was probably fixed, but we'll see. He was a
patient individual and I think that he was wise enough to know his stuff. He was pretty good
away. After all, this is the way he made his love that he started his own company. They'd
grown to a point where it was him and his son. The son had come through and carried on about
long-horn. Really, dad was more business-focused and taking care of his client and so forth,
but reloading the drivers and things they tried didn't fix my pop-up issue. It continued.
Finally one day, and I kept thinking about this over time, what could it be? Why would it continue
if they reloaded the drivers and so forth? I sat back one day off thinking about design and
sat back looking at the screen and I had to kick the LAN wire that was hanging under the desk
and the pop-up came on and I looked and the pop-up went off and I kicked the wire again. The pop-up
came on and I went, okay, this might be the LAN wire. That night at home, I made a new LAN wire
that was long enough because I was making them at that point. I wasn't lying. I brought it to work
and I switched the wire, plugged it into the little jack underneath the desk and up to the hole
and plugged it into the computer and turned the computer on and I never had that pop-up again.
The whole issue, the whole time, had been this mechanical device, this wire. It had a bad spot
in it somewhere. It didn't matter where, as soon as we figured it out, we threw it away and it was
the simplest mechanical device that needed to be replaced, this wire to fix this problem.
So I learned that. So this is the end of part one, the boring part. I realized I rambled
about some of those issues of memories. It's nice to go through memories occasionally and at this
time, you know, part two will become along later. It's where I'm going and I think part two might
be more interesting. I'm going to get into some of the stuff that came with a job that I took
after I left the bad wire place. So you survived the boring issue and I'm at the end and
thanks for your time. I'll see you in part two.
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