Episode: 593
Title: HPR0593: My Linux Experience
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0593/hpr0593.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 23:38:34

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You
Hi, my name is Jared.
I recently heard a HPR episode asking for people to contribute, and I've listened to
a lot of episodes, so I thought I'd give it a whirl.
One of the suggestions was asking to talk about how you first got into Linux.
So I'll give that a shot.
Back in the mid-90s, I was in college at RPI, Rensler Polytechnic Institute.
I was majoring in biochemistry and biophysics.
Most of my roommates were engineers.
About half of those guys had their own personal computers.
Back then, nobody had laptops, and the school's computer network was Unix-based.
There were computer labs all over the campus, and to survive, you had to learn how to operate
in a Unix environment.
My freshman roommate, and some of my other later roommates, had played around with Linux.
Of course, this is back in pre-Windows 95 days, so I moved from Windows into playing on Linux.
First machine that I actually owned, I got in the late 1998, had Windows 98 on it, and
I had a version of Red Hat that I had dual boot, and I split time between both of those.
There was always some kind of problem that I was having, trying to get X to work right
on that cheap-ass machine, but I was able to use it well enough.
Second machine that I had was a dual boot with Windows 2000 and a version of Mandrake
that was out at the time.
First everything on that one worked very well.
For no good reason, I seemed to spend more time in Windows 2000 than I did in Linux.
Third machine that I have that I'm using now currently, I played around with a version
of Ubuntu called Super OS, and the Windows 7 Beta, which has since expired, but at the
time was free, and now I'm mostly using the Mint release of Ubuntu Linux almost all
the time.
Pretty much the only thing I can't do besides play-old games, which I wouldn't really be doing
anyways, is mess around with creating playlists on my Creative Zen MP3 player, because their
software is Windows XP only, and so I get that done at work anyway on a Windows XP machine.
Professionally I'm a scientist that worked at a biotech company called Veridex.
Years back, I was on a project for more than five years where we developed an automated sample
processor for a blood-based cancer analysis test.
That machine was Linux-based, Mandrake, something or other.
I didn't do any software, or any firmware development.
I wrote scripts on top of all that stuff, but we used the directory structure to keep
things organized, so we had descriptive path names and file names that were really, really
useful for keeping everything straight.
I had some basic command-line skills back from the Unix days and other ones that I had picked
up, and using basic text editors to write these scripts that made the instrument a thing
advanced.
At that company we also had a sample analysis instrument that originally started out as
Windows 2000, but was moved to a Linux platform, and I may give a talk or two about some
of the technology that was there.
Anyway, back to Linux at home.
Most of the applications that I use most of the time, I have it set up with just a typical
default GNOME desktop environment, use Firefox, Mozilla Firefox, for all web surfing that
I do.
All my email now is web-based, but I used to use Thunderbird in the past.
All the documents stuff, all the office documents that I have to deal with, I use Google Docs
for, but I've used OpenOffice in the past, which works well.
For pictures, I keep them on Picasso, Google Picasso account, and there's a good Linux
Picasso app for wrangling all the pictures together.
For keeping track of podcasts and other RSS stuff, I use a Sage plugin for Firefox, which
works pretty well.
There's a lot of manual stuff involved, but at least you know where things are going to
go when it's going to happen.
VLC and Movie Player for listening to music and watching movies, used a mirror a little
bit, just because they had different content, it had feeds for TED Talks and some other
stuff.
That was interesting.
I haven't used that in a while, but it is an interesting application.
I use Transmission for BitTorrents, G-Edit, and Edit for Simple Text File, Editing, XScreen
Saver pops up when I'm not here, and I use the Linux version of Skype a couple times.
Back in the day, when I was a little bit more creative, I messed around with using the
Gimp to start and screw around with pictures.
I used to make wallpapers and stuff years back.
I had run Apache and FTP servers on a machine at home just so I would have access and other
file sharing things mostly for pictures or hosting music files I could listen to remotely.
I definitely use Ubuntu, whatever it is, but the package manager for any software upgrades
and installs keeps things very simple.
I try not to install too much on my own manually, although every once in a while I have to do
that.
You know, TAR and ZIP and the whole deal there, figuring out dependencies, but I try to
stay away from some of that stuff.
This Linux and really Ubuntu in general handles USB drives and partitions very, very well.
The stuff like that is simple to use as a little bit of work when I pull pictures from
my camera.
I have a six-year-old digital camera, so getting pictures off of that is sometimes manual
and then it just figuring out the folder structure for how it stores them, but a little bit
of wrangling, a little bit of file name manipulation, and it squares all that away.
I don't have a printer or scanner, so I don't deal too much with peripheral stuff, but
I've seen in the past that stuff works pretty well.
I do have two monitors going with a graphic one graphics card and setting that up was
trivially easy, and I'm recording this with Audacity, so I was able to figure that out
hopefully.
Every once in a while I'll dig through the package manager list of applications and try
different things, some of them game, some of them interesting sounding applications, nothing
really life-changing that I've ever found, but I'm always up for interesting suggestions.
Some of the actual Linux skills that I use at home, every once in a while in application
gets hung up, they have to dig around, find the process number, and kill it manually.
That's fairly easy to do, like I said, Taryn Zippen, usually not for installing software,
but for old things that I have archived away from previous work, previous machines, I'll
collect it together, just every once in a while, I'll tell you some of the things that
I like about Linux besides it being free, and I don't really have the Linux as free
if your time has no value problems, some people seem to do, now if you're trying to stress
it a little bit more, I can understand that it's easy to run into problems, but boy recent
modern distributions of Linux are incredibly easy to run, even installing it is an over
my head, I can set up partitions, you know, have to pay attention a little bit, but it's
not overly complicated, and damn near everything that I do at home, I can, there's applications
for that I can run, you know, all the entertainment stuff, information, you know, whatever else
it is, is all right there, I also will carry around one of the, or two of the distributions
of Linux on a CD, and if my work laptop doesn't cooperate when I travel with wireless
or with whatever, I can quickly flip into a live Linux CD and everything seems to work
well, if I have my preference, I'd run it all the time, but it's not my machine and
it's not my network, so I've got to follow rules at work, and if I ever dig up all games
or play new games, I've just get a copy of Windows, make a new partition or get a new
hard drive and play, so if I ever get back into that, that would be the move, I've never
really converted anybody successfully into using Linux at home for real, I do know some
people who, when the Mac OS 10 came out years back that was more or less unique space
that some people flipped to that, I've gotten some people, some, some Windows people to
mess around for short time using Linux on home machines, but not all the way and definitely
not full time, about me, I'm not a programmer, I'm not an IT guy, a professional IT guy,
maybe have some above average computer experience, but I'm not an engineer, but I can handle
Linux well enough to be happy and sometimes it cooperates, most of the time it cooperates
with things that I want to do, I'm not really apprehensive about trying different stuff
or even really too nervous about losing everything that I have, which I think might be a sticking
point with some people, so I'm not afraid to try some of these things and get them to
work, anyway, there was a little about me, I said my name is Jared, if you want any questions
about anything I'm doing or other suggestions, please get a hold of me, I said I'm also professionally,
I'm a cell biologist, I was thinking about doing some talks on that, I used to do pet
and work, I'm a registered pet and agent, I was thinking about doing a talk about that,
I coached lacrosse, for some local teams, I was thinking about talking about that, and
I help high school kids build robots with the first robotics program, and I was thinking
about doing some talks about that, so thanks for listening and hope you enjoyed it.
So head on over to CARO.18 for all of the team.