Episode: 752
Title: HPR0752: My Path to Linux: Knoppix
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0752/hpr0752.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 01:54:03

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No, no.
Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. It is Mr. Gadgets and the next installment of
my path towards Linux. And some of you might be saying, who is actually going to get to
running Linux? And believe me, it's been a long path, but this is the one where I actually
start running Linux on a regular basis. I was looking out there while over at the barf
you enjoyed to pick up some stuff for dinner. And I looked out on Mr. Gadgets.logspot.com,
which is also linked to Mr. Gadgets.com. And that's my blog, which I have been running since,
I don't know, 2003, at least, I guess, or something like that. I didn't go back to the
very beginning, but I did look for, so the specific thing, and the first entries that I could find
out there, was March of 2004. Back then, I was carrying around a work lab top that was an
IBM think pad. They were still from IBM back then. T20. And that was getting a little long in
the tooth at that particular time, and in terms of the dog years, that are computer years.
But that was my work machine. And it was having some problems that I blogged about in this,
March entry of 2004. And I mentioned that what was I going to do to actually recover the data
on this because it had thrown a blue screen of death. And I was going to get a new machine ordered
in the process here. And I was using the first Linux distribution that I started using on a
regular basis. And that was graphics. So sometime previous to 2004. And I don't know where I found
out about graphics. This is the very first, you know, early days of podcasting. So I didn't
heard about it on a podcast, or it could just be on a website and things that I was looking at
things out there. But somewhere along the line, I found out about this new live CD. And this
is a totally new concept. Instead of going through the installs, which I tried back into the 90s,
and I was always doing this on laptops. And laptops have always been more difficult for Linux,
at least until more recent days here. But back in this time period, laptops were really difficult
for Linux to get everything running and everything working, you know, as it should be. And supposedly,
this Mopix thing would detect hardware load what it is that they needed to run. And it was supposed
to be just the best thing to supply spread. So I tried it. I don't know whether I got a live CD,
you know, from a magazine, which, you know, since not all of us had high-speed data, you know,
to the home and all that kind of stuff, it was still a lot of the sources of these things.
It might have been in a maximum PC, you know, a CD that was included or an actual Linux magazine,
but somewhere along the line, I got a copy of Mopix and I stuck it in the drive and I booted it up.
And it was golden. It was like, oh my gosh, you know, it detects and it runs. And it's got the
graphics running and I didn't have to do anything. And it even figured out Wi-Fi and got the Wi-Fi
connected to my home Wi-Fi that I had. And I was just clever guested. I mean, this was this was
easy as pie. I mean, this you didn't, you didn't have to do anything. It just ran to the point
that at this time when I was having this problem in 2004. So it's sometime previous to that
that I had started using Mopix. And at this particular time and there's some subsequent things
there over the next few weeks when I used the blog, okay. Before podcast came along and started
taking over my life, I used to blog back in the day. This was a timeframe when I was still blogging
on a regular basis. And I had several entries there about the machinations of getting my T20
rebuilt by the IT people at work. And then there was a new machine because I could say this was
getting a little bit old. And so the new machine was going to be on order and I was seriously
considering. And what I ended up actually doing was using Mopix as I referred to it as a virtual PC.
I would log on with Mopix with the live CD. And this was back to the time frame where you couldn't
really install it from the live CD, right? You could just run the live CD. But the live CD did
everything I needed it to do. And what I would do then is I wouldn't store anything on the hard drive
that was internal to laptop. What I would do instead was I had various USB drives. And I even had
a PC card slot drive and I had a micro drive, which was this little compact flash card size drive,
but it was a real spinning hard drive. And those came out initially in the megabyte range of
340 megabyte when I know I had at one point. And I think I had upwards of a five gig. I think that
was the biggest one I ever had. The micro drive. And then the micro drive was cool because it would fit
into my Axiom, my Dell Axiom 50X. That was my last of my Windows, you know, my Windows Mobile
based PDAs, if you will. I carried that around for quite a while. And it had a PC card slot,
but it had a compact flash slot in that. And so I had five gigs of storage. And in fact,
I would do a little bit of the supposed podcast of my podcast that never gets started. And I was
recording live to my drive. And I was driving around with that in my pocket and recording. There was
a guy who did a very interesting podcast back then on his drive time. And he worked at
Silicon Graphics. He worked at Industrial Light Magic. That's it. And he was a very interesting
podcast for a while. And he did his to an Axiom. Anyway, I was recording live to micro drive. That
was going to be my signature phrase. So I had that five gig compact flash card. And I think
it was readable by Nopics too. Anyway, I had various ways to store data. And so what I would do
is go online. And I was, you know, doing all my web surfing and everything like that. And I
actually started doing that for all my personal stuff. I just saved things out to a USB stick.
And I would go ahead and do things there with the Nopics disk. And so that was my initial
foray into using Linux. And it was very functional. In fact, I have a part of those posts that I
have from back in 2004. That was back when my oldest daughter was still in school. And she brought
home during her break from school. She brought home her laptop. And I was able to borrow her
laptop. And the interesting thing about using Nopics with that was not to recover data or anything
like that. But rather, it was a problem with her XP and the wireless drivers. At this particular
time, we were still using, and I mentioned this on an earlier podcast, which I think got recorded
properly and played in that 90s timeframe. I had a airport, which was actually initially being
used with its crossover of the modem that was in the original airports. I think looked kind of
like a miniature flying saucer. It was this round thing. It actually ended up with a PC card,
wireless B card that was in it that provided the wireless portion of things. And this was late 90s.
And then it would dial in to the AT&T dial-up account that we had because we didn't have a cable
modem yet. So we were sharing the dial-up account and I had it set up to dial in. Well, we were
still using that. Now, by 2004, we had the cable modem in. But I was still using that old wireless
router and plugging it into the Ethernet and using that to provide the Ethernet, I mean, wireless
to the house. And XP just didn't want to stay connected to that ancient old airport
router. But it worked fine when I went over to my best friend's house and the router that they had.
So something about XP's wireless drivers did not like the old airport and refused to maintain
a connection to it. But when I slapped Nopix end there and booted up on it, it stayed connected fine.
And so the live CD that Nopix was the first one and everybody's used to them now. But man,
that was a revolution. Detecting the drivers that it needed, detecting the hardware,
automatically figuring, I can't think of a machine that I slapped that into that I couldn't
get it running. And I continued to do this kind of virtual laptop until eventually some of the
other live CDs came out. And that next step was going to, and I discovered it, but that will be
the next in my path to Linux. And there's some things that I learned and things that I started
doing that are part of this continuation of virtualizing my laptop at work and not doing anything
with the work machine except using the hardware platform to run my own operating system.
But that will happen the next time, because I'm home now. So be careful out there not only
driving the streets, if there's what is the ones I'm on now or out there on the electronic
frontier. And as always, I'll be blazing the trail ahead of you. Until next time, this is Mr.
Katzips, signing off from Kansas City. And we'll talk to you again soon. Bye now.
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