hpr_transcripts/hpr0348.txt

Episode: 348
Title: HPR0348: How I Found Linux 001
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0348/hpr0348.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 17:01:03

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My name is
Wiris.
I've been thinking a lot about how to use a machine.
We use the machines again.
Yes, we do a good job.
What's happening?
Hey everyone, welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
Today's show is How I Found Linux Episode 1.
I'm recording this at work on my triple EPC, I'm on my lunch break, so there might be
a little bit of background noise.
I'm about, probably about 15-20 feet away from an air compressor, so this thing will not
shut off.
But anyways, if you would like to join in and let us know how you found Linux, I'll
give you the information at the end of this show.
For now, enjoy these clips.
Hello, I'm Little Miss 64, I just wanted to tell you how I first started using Linux.
Daddy put Linux on every computer in the house, and the first computer I started using
were mummies and daddies, so the first game I played was Talks, and I also got some games
on my computer, so I play them a lot, and the games are called Frozen Bubble and Matato
in the card game, I got some, and I don't know what they're called, right, um, Talks
Racing.
One game that I really like to play is a team game, where me and Jordyn Lindsey keep hurting
my dad and Terry, and there was very fun because Jordyn Lindsey is a good fighter, and
I got this thing where it explodes every single round, yeah.
And I also have a thing where you can get this thing, and you can jump, and I got it,
and I kept throwing up with Daddy and I wanted to be Terry, um, I kept flowing them up with
the one where with the explosion, that explodes every single round, yeah, I was exploding
everybody until someone dropped me, and Grandpa got me a computer that runs Linux, I got
it at Christmas Club, and it's an 888 PC, and I can play lots of stuff in it on Linux,
and it has a camera in it, and I use the camera for Skype, and I call grandma, and if it's
not going, I just go down to the little camera picture, and then it tells you if you wanted
to put it on or not, and I can see grandma as well, because she's got the same camera computer,
and I also go on the internet, and I play, and Daddy got me heaps of games on the internet,
so that's it, so thanks everybody for listening, bye.
How I found Linux.
Well that's a good question, but I suppose the first question is, who am I?
Well I'm Peter from the Linux Cranks podcast, I certainly don't use Linux in my day job,
I spend most of my time at home on the bloody thing, and now Monster Beast asks me how
I found it, and you know I really have to sit back and think about that, because I found
Linux, well originally he was back, I know, with Mandrake 8 I think it was, and I just played
around with it for a little while, it was modelled in music by it, back then I certainly
didn't, didn't format the drive and get rid of Windows, that's for sure, then I know
I dabbled with Mandrava, I think it was a 10 series, and started to get a little bit
more serious about it, and I'm not quite sure what that year, what year that was, I do recall
playing with it and trying to get an internal modem going, I had no trouble getting an external
modem going, I wasn't able to share the modem like you could in Windows, you can share
the internet access across several machines, so it really, at that stage wasn't really
a alternative to Windows, and I think the software on it was pretty good from what I recall,
although I'm pretty sure Open Office wasn't around in those days either, but when did
I really get serious with Linux, now that's a good question, now it must have been back
about 2,000 and 3, I think, when this 9 came out, and I was in a news agency and I'm
the front of a computer magazine, I saw that this operating system they were giving
away for free, and I bought it home, well I'm behold actually installed it at the time,
I think I had an internal modem with Made Roller chipset on it, and when I'm behold it was
actually supported by Zeus, which certainly gave me encouragement and I started playing around
with it, and it was about that stage where I started to realise that Linux could certainly
be a viable, well not just alternative, but a replacement to Windows, you know, I was actually
sick of Windows by this stage for numerous reasons that I don't need to go into because
I think just about everyone knows what they are, and on a second, the question was when
I found Linux, it was where I found Linux, what have I been talking about, I found Linux
a magazine, a computer magazine, I think that's where I got my original Mandrake this,
it's certainly where I got my Zeus 9 disc, so yeah really that's it, that's where I found it,
that's what months to be wanted to know, don't use it in my job because I may lawns on a golf course,
and the speed of golf courses, I believe next audio clip you're going to hear is from David Abbott
from the Linux crazy podcast, who just happens to work on a golf course as well, so David all
handed over to you. I was getting some older computers and trying to get them to work,
so I needed some parts, and I went down to the local computer store and as I was at the
local computer store, I would dream about a certain laptop or the newest desktops that
were out and just look around the store, maybe I needed some RAM for one of the old boxes
that didn't work, or I wanted to upgrade the RAM or a hard drive was bad, and I went to the
store for that initially, but then as I was looking around, there was this book and it was
called Red Hat 9 for dummies, so I started looking at it and I thought wow, this is pretty
interesting, I was already having trouble with windows, I'd always kind of played with windows
even and to play with the registry and try to make it go faster, and because of that or just
because of the nature of windows, it was always having problems, plus every time I turned around
somebody wanted some money if it wasn't $10 for this or $20 for a video player, so I got the
Red Hat 9, and one of my old boxes that I had, I put it on and installed fine. Right
off the bat I started having some problems as far as getting stuff to work, I had an old
Lexmark printer, so I went to Linux Questions, and it's a form, and there it was almost like
an adventure of trying to get this hardware to work, and along the way I would learn a lot in
each little mission of trying to get something working, and I really enjoyed it a lot, and one of
the big things I enjoyed too was the community, right off the bat everybody was real helpful,
wanted to see me succeed as much as I did, and it was a lot of fun right from the beginning,
and still is today, I started out with the Red Hat 9, then I moved on to devian,
enjoyed devian a lot, moved on to slackware, really like slackware, and eventually moved on to
Gen2, and really enjoyed Gen2, so that's how I got started in Linux, see you all
later, bye.
I was looking at the computer, and I was looking at this program called QuickSilver, which is
exactly like HeyRunner, or GenomeDo, so I was looking at that, trying to come up with a new way
to interface with the computer, couldn't find it obviously, but I got as close as I could without
actually realizing that there was something like Enlightenment or Foxbox, which really did
do just things completely differently, or just using the terminal a lot, which was a lot different.
And again, around the same time, I was also realizing I was looking around my apartment and
all these computers, and I realized that I've got all these old computers, and they're all
contributing into my little video projects for school and stuff, and I was like, man,
all these old computers, it just feels like they're too, they're a lot slower than they should be.
I know that there's a lot of power here, but they're going so slow, because I had to upgrade
this OS in order to get this application on it, it just seemed like so many resources were
being wasted, and I had the sense that that was the case, but I didn't know what to do about it,
I didn't know how to fix that.
Somewhat separate, but also somewhat related to the whole Mac OS X, and getting curious about
Unix thing, was that I started reading up a lot about the terminal, how to use it,
stuff like that, so I started poking around there, and eventually I stumbled across
stuff that you couldn't really find through the graphical user interface of OS X,
documentation for EMAX specifically in the slash user, slash share, slash EMAX,
slash docs, slash whatever, stuff that you just couldn't find otherwise.
So I was really getting fascinated by some documentation that I was reading, written,
a lot of it was written by Solomon, and I read the GPL version too, and things like that.
So my eyes were opened to all those ideas, and I eventually dug deeper and found
the FSF, the free software foundation website, and I was reading it, and it was like,
it was as I fell all my life philosophies were culminating into one thing,
except instead of being related to society or the way to live your life,
they were being directed in the way that you compute and the operating system that you use.
So it was really, it was a major discovery for me.
So once I found out that there was such a thing as a free operating system that was
written by the users, and it was written for the users, and it was good and powerful,
and it had this great Unix philosophy behind it.
I was really excited about that, and I went and got a book, it was a green book,
I don't remember what the title was, but it had a mandriva demo disk in the back cover,
so I popped that into an old computer that I found on Craigslist, and it barely works,
but at least it gave me the experience of, yeah, you can put a disk into a computer
and boot into a completely different operating system than what you're used to.
It was epithelial. I continued reading up on Linux and eventually discovered Slackware,
found that would probably be the way to go for me, and then I did something really crazy.
I did one of those online scans, you know, the things that you should never do,
like view a thousand ads or whatever, and find out for them, and you'll get a free computer,
you know, something like that, and I did that, and I would find out for everything,
and then I would cancel the next day or whatever, and finally they actually sent me a Sony via,
a free Sony via, I was shocked.
That was my main computer for a long time running Slackware, and then I would do a boot
with whatever distro of the day there was, you know, Ubuntu, mostly Ubuntu flavors,
Fedora, Debian, I don't know, mandriva, random things, whatever distro Linux format
was sending out that month for their magazine.
And I was listening to a lot of chest griffin, of course, that helped me get started,
and aside from that, just using it, reading up about it, listening to lots of podcasts,
that got me into Linux.
This is Lost in Bronx.
I'm a relative newcomer to Linux.
I played with my first live CD only about two years ago.
It was Puppy 2.14, I think.
I read about it on Lifehacker or some crap, I don't know, and it sounded cool,
and it was free as in Beer, which I value highly, being the original cheap Yankee.
So I tried it, and I liked it, I liked it a lot.
And I used it on an ancient Dell laptop for nearly six months,
still as a live CD environment, before finally learning how to do a hard drive install.
That's how steep my learning curve has been.
I was on Windows for maybe ten years before that, and a sworn Luddite before even that, a real technopop.
But I'm still embarrassingly ignorant about computers in general, and Linux in particular.
But I'll tell you, I learned more about both those things in that first six months of Puppy than I had in the entire ten years on Windows.
So I'm nobody's idea of a geek, but I've come a long way, baby.
Currently, we have four machines in the house, running Debian Edge, Ubuntu Hardy, or Derivatives,
and a slightly out-of-date DSL on a greatly out-of-date HP desktop box.
We are Windows free, and that feels very good.
No, I'm not a free or open-source software evangelist.
I find tambourine shaking of any stripe to be personally offensive.
I don't tell other people how to live, and I demand that respect and return.
But I'm rabid in my way, and I'm quick to bring it up and tech-related conversations.
See, in the end, I may whatever works kind of guy, and for me in mine, Linux works.
This is Dewek. This is Hacker Public Radio episode on How I Found Linux.
I don't really remember or can't tell you exactly how I found Linux.
I do remember some of the what, and the why, and the when, I found Linux.
In 2002, I had never had a computer in my home.
I had worked pretty extensively with computers at work, both Macintosh and Windows.
And I decided I wanted to buy a home computer, and furthermore decided I wanted to build it myself.
And I was not in any way knowledgeable about the workings of a computer.
So I probably spent about six months just researching hardware.
And that was the sort of the beginning of my plunge into geekery.
So as I researched hardware, I put everything together, I made the place the order,
and then I started thinking about software, and I suppose sometime during that research, I stumbled upon Linux.
And so I do remember, well, actually before I say, I ordered a copy of XP Home Edition with my hardware.
I think it cost about 75 bucks, which was a little irritating.
And so I remember about that time going to DistroWatch.
And I had no idea what Linux was, and I remember seeing this information on ISOs, ISOs, and I was like, what the heck is this?
And you can download this and burn it to a CD and pop it in my computer? Wow!
So curious, I tried it out.
And I remember just downloading a couple distributions to sort of pick some randomly.
I think ArcLinux ARK was some distribution out of, it was based on Slackware, and I never could get that one to work.
And the other one I downloaded at that time was JMD, JAMD, which was a Red Hat 9 derivative.
And that, I still have the notes from when I built my computer, I kept some copious notes.
JMD was the very first distribution that went on there. I multi-booted the thing.
I partitioned the hell out of the hard drive and put a couple other distributions on as well.
But JMD was my very first Linux distribution.
So for about a year or two, probably, I was fascinated when I first saw the KD desktop, and it was KD, I believe.
Yeah, I'm sure it was. Even though it was Red Hat derivative.
And I was fascinated. I'm like, what is this? Wow, this is awesome.
And further plunged into Geekery.
And now right now, I'm probably at the depths of Geekery.
But that was the beginnings.
How I found Linux through DistroWatch at Downloader and ISO, I got to pause.
So anyway, for about two years, I messed around with various distributions and Spring Windows as well.
Finally settled on a Mandrake 10, I believe it was, and ran that exclusively for a while.
Dumped Windows eventually. No more Windows. Debian.
And well, you don't want to hear where it's gone from there.
Similar to probably all your experiences. But that's where I found Linux.
All right. Enjoy. Bye.
Hi, my name is Ken Fallon.
And today I'm going to tell you about how I first got interested in Linux.
My first install of Linux was back in the 90s. It was on the same PC.
And at the same time, I was testing Windows 95.
And it was on a 4-8-6 computer.
It was the first computer we had that I had a CD-ROM in it.
I remember spending weeks trying to get the correct vertical and horizontal resolution
by a monitor to get an external up.
Eventually, I did get an external up.
But I sat there looking at the screen on the small applications.
I can actually do nothing with this as the days before the internet.
So my interest in Linux remained relatively dormant, which was something that I had on my radar.
Until I started working in the UK.
I removed the UK shortly after that.
There are some of the engineers who are using Linux.
And then when I moved to the Netherlands, we were working for a satellite ISP.
It was really there that I began to see the beauty and the power of Linux and open source in general.
The solution that they had was providing the ISP services over a satellite.
So you have a dialogue modem.
You dialogue with a PPTP tunnel.
When you requested some traffic, it would go over the PPTP tunnel to our platform,
be terminated there, and the reply would be sent back to you.
And instead of the MAC address of your PPTP tunnel, we would change it.
And we would send it to the MAC address of your DVB card, which is a digital video broadcasting card.
Your packet would be sent back out to the satellites, come back down, be picked up by your dish.
Your dish would go back into your computer, into your DVB card.
So to say, yeah, this has got the MAC address for me.
And one packet is the packet and sends it back up with the correct IP address of the PPTP connection.
And passes it back up to the stack.
And as far as the operating system was concerned, this was the answer to the packet.
So it didn't really care where it came from, it just miraculously did.
So all of that was done using Linux servers.
PPTP demon squid for some caching, NIP tables, and basically a power script wrapped all things together.
I struggled with all concepts of that for a good while.
And then as I became more and more involved in the platform, I became to realize how powerful Linux was.
While I was there, I actually put my back out and was laid up in bed.
So I had my laptop with me and I had an internet connection.
So I resolved at that stage to download every Linux distro and start a play with them.
The first one I tried was Linux for scratch.
And I went through that manual and learned as much as I could.
And then I went through Gen2, Red Hat, Debian, all the various different versions.
So that's pretty much how I got into Linux since then.
I've been using it at home exclusively for the last.
I've been using it since then as my main desktop.
I've been using it exclusively for the last three, four years at work at home.
So that's it. Hope you found that interesting.
Oh, this is Wayne.
Some of you know me as asthma from IRC and the Linux Cracks podcast.
The question is what brought me to Linux?
I could answer that very simply, but we'll make a long story short or make a short story long.
Take your pick. I'm kind of an old gray beard.
I started in electronics in the 60s.
I worked on my first computer in the late 60s.
It wasn't anything like what people consider computers today.
But it was binary.
Now one of the first things I found was that I enjoyed electronics as a hobby.
A lot more than I did working at them.
Though I started my working career as an electronics technician.
I branched out, let's say, to things I enjoyed more for working and kind of kept electronics to play with.
I got started all back in with computers again in the 80s with TI-994A.
I had a lot of fun with that machine.
It had the basic on it.
No disk drives of any kind.
I used tape drives for storage.
But I learned basics of programming on it, which I did just for play.
Nothing really spectacular there.
I just made it do what I wanted it to do, and that was good enough.
I've been an amateur radio operator for better than 20 years.
I still have a valid ham ticket.
I'm not as active on the ham bands as I used to be.
I've still got the ticket and still have the equipment if the mood strikes me.
But I guess the question was how did I get started in Linux?
Well, as an amateur, I ran a bulletin board on the packet AX-25 protocol.
I ran all through the 90s.
Out of the 80s and end of the 90s, I kept an amateur bulletin board going.
Actually, a lot of the packet would remind you of IRC if you're not familiar with it.
You feel right at home there.
In the early 90s, I was exposed to some Linux fanboys who quickly turned me off on it.
They ticked me off bad.
I had no use for it all at the time.
That was just because of the way it was presented to me.
I imagine some of you may have had similar experience there.
But as far as my active use of Linux, that would only be about three years ago.
My accountant, after he did some work for me and saved me a whole bunch of money.
As I was going out the door, he handed me an Ubuntu Dapper Drake disc and said,
go play with this, tell me what you think of it.
I did.
That's the beginning of my forte into Linux.
It's been enjoyable.
I learned a little bit all the time with it.
It did take me about a year playing with it before I finally got rid of Windows altogether.
But I've been very comfortable the last couple of years with just Linux machine around.
There's nothing I want to do on a computer.
Linux won't do for me.
My computer usage is strictly a hobby now.
And hobbies are supposed to be fun.
That's why I use Linux.
That was really cool.
If you would like to join in on the next show, just record an audio clip on how you found Linux.
It could be in any format, it could be a wave, a hog, a flag, or even an MP3.
The e-mail it to me at MonsterBee at LinuxCrank.info that will be in the show notes.
Or if you have a server or maybe a Dropbox account, just send me the link so I can download it.
And I'll add it to the show.
And it doesn't matter if you're at work, like me, with all those background noise.
Or if you're a frying eggs like Asmuth, just send them in.
Alright, thanks for listening and I'll talk to you next time.
Thank you for listening to Haftler Public Radio.
HPR is sponsored by Carol.net, so head on over to C-A-R-O dot-E-T for all of us need.
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