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Episode: 671
Title: HPR0671: How I Found Linux
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0671/hpr0671.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 00:41:02
---
Hello everybody and welcome to HPR. I'd like to take a few moments of your time here to make a few announcements
First of all on apology to today's host I missed his show on the FTP server and as such
There was a slight scheduling delay, which is seeing his show come out today instead of late last week. I'd also like to
Make it clearer that we're actually having a HPR booth at two of the Linux Fest upcoming Linux Fest
First of all on the second of April
We're going to have a booth at the north east GNU Linux Fest
And on the 30th of April to the first of May we'll be having a booth at the Linux Fest north west
And both of those boots are looking for people to come over and assist
Supplying equipment or just come over to say hello
If you're going to be at those Fest walls feel free to snag some interviews for HPR and send them on in
And while I'm taking up some of your time
I've got an email from some of the guys who are putting together a book review an audiobook review
And the first book because it contains some spoilers that like the listeners to go and listen to the book themselves
And the book is available on audiobook format from polyabooks.com
forward slash title forward slash badge dash of dash
Imp for me if you want to join in with the fun and games
Go download that book and have a listen to it and now back to your regularly scheduled shows
you
Saludos and Saludos.
This is Reclaudio Montalban, brother of Ricardo.
If you are like me, you enjoy the finest things in life, like cars, Corinthian leather and
Linux fasts.
Join Indiana Linux fast, one of the finest Linux fasts as they begin their marches to
freedom, from the 25th to the 27th, events include LPIC exam cram class, LPIC and PSDA certification
exams, Fedora activity day, as well as the second Drupal Camp in the community-driven
talks, plus performances by dual-core, shamers and left hand.
Keynotes speakers include Teres Baylogg of OpenNMS and Bradley M. Kuhn executive director
of the software freedom conservancy.
They are also still looking for volunteers and sponsors.
Also, if you are interested, go to indianalinux.org to learn more, that's indianalinux.org.
Now that is what I call fine Corinthian leather.
Hello, this is D.O.D.D. dummy and this is my first HPR episode entitled How I Found Linux.
I thought this would be a nice easy topic for me to start with.
So here we go.
I'll start off by a little explanation of my nickname D.O.D.D. dummy.
It comes from the kind of a pun of my last name, God and the mainframe JCL syntax D.D.
dummy, which is basically the mainframe equivalent of DevNull, the bitbucket, circular file,
what have you.
So that's what D.O.D.D.D. dummy means funny for mainframeers.
So I started my computing career.
I didn't really, I wasn't in the computers in my younger days, not so much because I wasn't
interested.
I didn't have the resources and I never, some reason it never occurred to me that I could
have computer at home.
But even just to give you an idea, I got my first Atari 2680, so it's kind of late to
the game there.
For whatever reason, we didn't get a Commodore 64, a trash 80, many of those computers from
that time frame.
And my first real exposure to a computer, I guess, wasn't until high school and I had
a class in, I believe it was my junior year of high school, maybe my senior year.
And it was Rascow.
I believe that was the language, but basically we were using a form of Pascal, but it wasn't
Pascal.
That was an interesting class, but I didn't have a computer at home, so I only got to play
with as much as I could at school and I didn't have spare time, you know, just hang around
school like I didn't some years.
But I made a video game that basically two space ships and you had a very simple obstacle
course that you had to maneuver around.
And the first ship that maneuvered the course and went to his old landing site one.
And at the end, I had a sort of a little cutscene that I don't remember what, but anyway,
the aliens talked and they were in a garage and a garage door came down.
But anyway, I remember that kind of specifically because my teacher said in front of the class
that she wished everybody had an imaginative mind like mine, so that was kind of a slightly
embarrassing and proud moment kind of all mixed up together.
But then I didn't, let's see, I was probably 90, that was probably an 83 or 84, I didn't
really have any other computer experience until, probably nothing to speak, I had a friend
who had a computer in the, I guess the late 80s, early 90s probably and I played around
a little bit with that, but mostly just playing video games and no real work.
I guess in around 90, not really remember what year, sometime in the early 90s, we got
a database for and together we, we volunteered to run a chess clubs, basically membership
database.
We used Debase for that and the USCF had, you could buy, I don't know if you had a buy
it or they gave it to anyway, they had on disk, they had their database and so we played
around with that.
And I remember it was back then when I guess we had a 286 or 386 and their database had
about, I want to say somewhere around 60,000 entries and it was set up toward you couldn't
easily, well no one I knew could figure it out, but you couldn't, it would take a long
time to process that many records and you couldn't just delete records because they had some
sort of integrity checking and I remember that was my first hack that I figured out how
to, how to trick it so that you could delete records and only how the records that were
in your area so that reduced the number of roles and they got like three or four thousand
and it was manageable, I remember the feeling I got when I figured it out.
I think if I remember correctly what I had to do was, I took the key that was on the
last record other database and I just copied it over to the key of the last record did or
maybe I, maybe I kept the last record and deleted the rest, but anyway that was kind of my
first hack, I still didn't have a computer and I still only got, you know, very little
computing time, oh I didn't have in college too, I forgot I had to pass out, two hour
pass out course in college, that was fun, I don't remember how well I did, I remember
I took a long time, spent more time on that class than any of my other classes, so that
was, let's see that brings me up to around 1997, 1998, I was working on the mainframe,
the mainframe programmer and Coball, mainframe Coball and I heard that we were going to start
using Unix, actually convert over to Unix and around that same time I heard about the
free version of Linux or Unix that I could run at home on my PC and so I looked around
and found at the local library they had a red hat and so I checked that out and I tried
installing it but I never, I couldn't get anything to run and but I still was interested
so I kept reading about it and I looked around on the internet and I guess it was a few months
later but I came across Sousa at Best Buy retail box and so my main focus wasn't saving
money, it was being able to have a similar computing environment at home that I had at
work so that way I could play around because by that time I had my first computer that
was my own and I didn't have to, you know, it wasn't a friends I had to steal from or
steal time from so I bought that retail box, I think it was about 60-70 bucks, took
it home and I could get most things installed with it, I didn't use, I don't remember if
I had X or not but at work, by that time I got Unix at work and at work we only had
it was only command line, actually I didn't know it but we did have CDE available to us
but for no one on my team used it so we were all command line users, so what I got
and working from Sousa was the command line and so I was kind of happy, went through the
Unix programming environment by Richie and Kernahan and so went through that and that
was great and then I don't remember exactly how but someone told me about X and then I
tried to get it, I knew about X but I couldn't quite get it to working so I was only at the
command line but I don't know, for some reason I didn't really realize it was broken because
like I said I didn't know that, I don't know how I didn't know but just for a while I didn't
realize Unix even had a GUI, so anyway somehow I found out about that and I was trying to get
X to work and I couldn't get it to work and then somewhere in there I finally got high-speed
internet connection so I took a weekend and I downloaded, I want to say about 12 distributions
over that weekend, live CDs mostly or I don't know if they were live CDs but anyway I think
it ended up being about 30, 25, 30 CDs that I downloaded and so I tried installing all of
those CDs and it was going terrible, I guess I would four or five distros in and nothing,
and I couldn't really get anything working and I thought was suitable and finally like
I said I guess about halfway through the distros, I got the Mandrake and it installed
and almost everything worked on it, had GUI had X up and run in and I don't remember
it's K, E or Nome at that time but anyway I had a graphical environment that looked
more or less what I was familiar with in the Windows world and so I was kind of happy,
the only two things I remember that didn't work were my printer which was an HP I believe
and my joystick through the sound card and that was kind of disturbing so I still had
to go back to Windows and I kept trying and I remember it took me about six months to
finally get both of those work and I tried pretty much every weekend and the main thing
that was messing me up I think was the kernel had just switched and something about how
you load the, I don't remember now, but something about how you load the drivers changed
right then and I was basically getting reading old documentation and I couldn't find it
took me forever and finally I found one little paragraph on the site that told me I was,
I remember thinking man I'm so stupid it was pretty easy I just had to type that in and
things worked fine so I was going along pretty happily with Mandrake it really was pretty
helpful because I got to test out a lot of things at home and that I really wouldn't
had a time at work to play around with so it got me into when I finally got officially
I had Unix but it wasn't officially my work assignment for a while and then by the time
I finally got where I was actually working with Unix the time I'd spent at home on Linux
I was pretty much at home I remember I did a couple of nice scripts I think one still unused
that that place basically they were processing all their airports air messages manually from
their batch cycle and I just wrote something that stored them and reported if it was the
same air or if it would have already been logged in there all their trouble system in but I don't
know if it's still in use or not but it was as of a couple years ago I guess the interesting
question in my mind regarding why people switch to switch from one operating system to the other
isn't so much the reason you tried it but the reason you stuck with it so for me there were
a couple things one at least stick out of my mind one is I thought the command line environment
it was much richer in Unix then in DOS now I know they're add-ons and they were probably around
at that time for example I know that I run corn shell in DOS but it was just built into
Linux so there wasn't anything special so that was one reason the other reason was there were
things that you could do in Linux that just came with the system that you had to buy in windows or
it was hard to find in windows or you had to get some free copy or pirate or shareware just
for example at the time I could not figure out how to mount a CD image is an ISO in windows
I know there was some product that could have bought for 20 bucks but in Linux it just came with the system
and I think there was not too long ago I read some way of how to do it in windows and it supposedly worked way back
then but it was hard also compilers it was hard to find compilers for windows that were
free and open source free was hard as well and I don't really have a lot of money to play around with new tools
and so the fact that there were quite a few free in Linux was it was another reason I stayed
I also didn't like more and more I didn't like some of the things in windows for example
I didn't really like the registry that always bothered me
I had to always install stuff and windows was kind of driving me nuts
I like the package management system in Linux that I kind of like that method of installing software
and kind of have one place to go for things
but yeah I guess that's one of the main reasons is it's just seem to be some tools that were just part of Linux
or very easy to find in Linux that I didn't have in the windows world
I don't know if it was I'm sure that was partially my ignorance but I don't think wholly
I'd say that's the main reason that I stuck with Linux is that I just had tools that I could use better
and now I mean at some point in time I just came I like Linux better and I thought it generally works better
but I guess starting off and it really was mostly I just had tools and Linux that I could use better
from the tech side and then I came to also know the whole Unix philosophy
sharing and helping people out in collaboration and all of that seems to be more appealing in the Linux world
than in Windows so that's a that's a reason I stuck
well I guess I'd about wraps it up for for this episode on how I found Linux
I just like to give a warm thank you to Okin Fallon and everyone else who has put in a good effort to keep hacker public radio going
I know I've been listening since well I'm pretty sure since day one I remember I don't remember who
but I remember some discussion before hacker public radio started that maybe right when it started
but that they were going to put the show together by the people for the people and everyone can contribute
and so I remember thinking man this is great and so I think I've listened to every episode
I listen even the episodes I don't like I listen to them all the I guess the only little bit of cheating I do is I listen to it on
on device that has rock box and I speed up the if I don't like the show I played on about 150 speed
and then slow down the pitch to 96 so I listen to it a little bit faster than the normal
but I do listen to every show and I appreciate all the hard work that the people put in
and whether it's talking about chickens or wood screws or how I found Linux
what's in my bag dumpster diving I find it all interesting and I appreciate everybody's work