Episode: 1472
Title: HPR1472: How I Found Linux
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1472/hpr1472.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 03:44:24

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Music
Hi everyone, this is C-Prop in North Carolina for Hacker Public Radio.
I would like to thank everyone at HPR for the great service that they offer and allowing
the community the freedom to report on tips, tricks, news, apps, and everything a hacker
would find interesting.
Today I'd like to talk about how I arrived to Linux.
It was in the summer of 1999 and I was invited to have friends for a frangfest and at that
term seems a little bit antiquated, I'm trying to set the mood here.
At any rate, I arrived the day before to help my friend get some stuff set up, the tables,
chairs, chocolate covered espresso beans, the essentials.
While we were setting up, my friend who was hosting the party started telling me about
an operating system that he was really getting into, called Linux.
After getting all the gear set up and the tables and everything ready to go, we ventured
into the world of Linux.
My friend's computer was running a dual boot up with Windows 98 and something called
Mandrake Linux and if the timing I would think that it would be somewhere around probably
Mandrake Linux 6, which was according to Wikipedia is what's called Venus.
When I first saw it, the look of it was incredibly fresh and clean and it was so eye appealing
and compared to the Windows 98 that I was running in that gray toolbar and those wonky
icons that were so looking back, it was just horrible.
Seeing Mandrake Linux for the first time and all of the sparkle was amazing and I couldn't
believe it.
So at that time I had just bought a new computer and it was probably maybe a month prior to
the frag fest and I was just starting to get digging into it and at this time the internet
was still really new so I was still on dial up and didn't have a whole lot of power and
I remember the computer that I had was at that time was top of the notch and it was probably
it was maybe a pinium 1 with maybe I'd say 256 meg RAM.
I do remember that it had an 80 gig hard drive and at that time I thought that was just mind
blowingly large.
So what we had done while we were there that night for the frag fest the next day we had
partitioned my hard drive, the 80 gig hard drive and we partitioned it and it started
to install Mandrake Linux and I don't remember everything that happened but I do remember
running into all kinds of problems.
There was something every few minutes it was like oh it didn't work oh it didn't work
oh and I was just standing by the wayside just like well make it work but I do remember
and the end my friend had to make a floppy disk for a boot.
So whenever I would boot I would just you know turn the computer off flop in the floppy
disk flop in the floppy disk flop in the floppy disk and boot the computer and it would
boot into Mandrake Linux and it was amazing I remember you know clicking on the icons
and stuff and it was just so fresh.
At that time I was like I said I would still on dial up so in the early 90s, late 90s
even modems and Linux just did not play well and I never was able to get it working at
all so I was never able to get online with Linux and so I would boot the computer into
Linux and I'd mess around for a while.
Another thing that I remember about Mandrake Linux at that time is that the right-click
menu the little context menu when you right-click on the desktop and you would look for the
features like you would look for apps or whatever showed up on that menu.
I remember that it would be a fly-out menu and it would fly out always to the right and
at that time the menu when you would fly out to the right if you were too close to the
edge of the monitor the menu would go off to the right because it didn't know to go
off to the left because it reached the xy coordinates of the monitor.
So that was really strange but you know I worked around it and whatever didn't really
bother me too bad.
So it was still really a downer that I couldn't get onto the internet and so I would just
like say I just boot into Linux and mess around for a little bit but then I would just
eventually just wind up booting back into Windows and go online and do whatever else I
was doing.
So that went on for a while, kept doing that and I never really upgraded Mandrake and
then a couple of years later after that I had upgraded the computer and had a larger
hard drive and upgraded to Windows XP and since I had a larger hard drive I decided to
go ahead and repartition and put Linux back on it and at this time I had met someone that
was also into Linux and he knew quite a bit about it and he offered to stop by the house
and install a different version of Linux called Slackware and you know it was really interesting
and you know I would download a package of something that wanted to install and I would
run the typical commands of configure, make, make install and it was really kind of nice.
It was like wow really get into this techy stuff on this computer now but after a while
it started to kind of get on my nerves because you know I would go through this whole process
of it's like oh I want to download this package and I want to install it and then I'll go
through the sole process of the configure and the make and then I'll send a bunch of
errors and it's like well now what I got to do and now I got to go find this other program
and I got to download it and do the whole thing over again and then you know I probably
went through this for maybe about a year and I just kept doing it anyway trying to run
something and trying to install it and see if it would work and eventually I would just
wind up booting back into Linux or booting back into Windows rather and then it was maybe
sometime around maybe a year later cable internet actually came through my area and when
I found out about it I was like hey I will upgrade my internet from dial up to cable modem
so I was finally able to get online with Linux and it was it was great it was just nice
to be able to actually use the same software like web browsers and stuff to get online
and check email and stuff like that and after a while of using Slackware I was getting
pretty tired of piling packages and just going through the whole three thing the three
command deal so after talking to some friends that I had made along the way they had talked
to me about Debian and Debian had this ability that had a repository of software that you
could choose from and it was real simple to install you just issued a couple of commands
and poof you had the software it was ready that you're disposal and it did all the work
for you and it was I was like wow I can actually get some work done and not have to worry
about oh well I don't have this dependency and I don't have this dependency now I'm going
to all right I'm ready to get a bit undone so after a while of doing Debian for a while there
was a new version of Linux coming out that was kind of based on Debian it's got a bunch
to it was nice it was you know it was it was very up to day and Debian was kind of you know
date for a while so I ran a bunch to for quite some time and I can't remember when it was but I guess
it was sometime around maybe hearty is when I started running a bunch to and I started using
Kabuntu because I like the KDE interface better why I don't know so I started running Kabuntu
well is around this time that I started running Kabuntu that I actually had a new hard drive so
I had two of them so talking with my friend again he said you know what would be even better
is that if you kept your windows on one computer or one hard drive and put Linux on another then
when you boot you'll have a menu option of which one you want to go to it's like wow that sounds
amazing so we set it up and after a while I started becoming really more comfortable in Linux
and such and so I think it was you know a new version of Linux had came out a new version of
Kabuntu had came out and I was like it's time to upgrade so I went and downloaded the ISO of the
new version of Kabuntu cannot remember what version it was but I downloaded it and popped in the
disk started going through the installer I chose my hard drive that I wanted to install it on
went through the whole process poof I'm good let's go on and play with this new version of Linux
so I turned the computer off pop the disk out blew it up the computer went right into Linux
hmm that's strange let's try this again so I went in and I unplugged the Linux hard drive and I
booted it up I'm back into Linux I was like what the world is going on here so I switched the hard
drives around booted up the computer I'm still in Linux what I had actually done was install the
Linux upgrade onto my Windows hard drive wow what a bad mistake and that right there was the
last time that I ran Windows and that was the last time that I did not make a backup of all my files
and that's how I came into the Linux and I've been running it ever since and that was probably
eight to maybe ten years ago and I have not looked back and every time that I have to go into work
and I have to run Windows I cringe at all the things that I have to do to make the stupid
computer to work that's it I appreciate everyone listening so far I hope you had a great listen
and again if you are a listener of hacker public radio I would greatly encourage you to be a
contributor thank you very much hope you all have a great day thanks
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