Episode: 1576
Title: HPR1576: How I got into Linux
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1576/hpr1576.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 05:13:54

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Hello hacker public radio listeners.
This is Inskis.
I'm going to tell my story of how I got into Linux.
But first I should tell you how I came into computing.
But long before I got into computing I got into computers, so I might as well start there.
The first computer I got into was some government run machine keeping track of the citizen of
Sweden.
Since 1947 we've had national universal personal identity numbers in Sweden.
In 1947 it's quite a long time before I was born and a time where there were very few
computers anywhere in the world.
Nowadays these identity numbers are used everywhere.
Basically they work as primary keys in databases and across databases.
Register yourself as customer in a shop or on a site and you just leave your identity
number and they usually can retrieve your address, check your creditability, etc etc.
There is no escape.
So I got into computers from a very early age.
Someone else did the computing though on my data.
The time I was born which was in the early 60s I suppose these different registers etc databases
were actually in computers to a large extent.
I'm not sure so I don't can't give you the exact year when I got into computer the first
time.
Incidentally a computer is not called a computer in Swedish but a datamafin which literally
means data machine though these days we call it datur but the name in Swedish does not give
any association to computing anything.
I think we are more than ever on this track of being computed by something or someone else.
Fast forward from my childhood I suppose I was a typical person growing up in the 60s and 70s
of course hearing about computers but hardly ever see in one except on TV and film.
I remember that in school maybe around 1975 we did a study visit to the local core factory
and saw their computer department.
There were machines with visible magnetic tape drives which was that typical look of a computer.
That you had seen on TV.
The guy working at the computer department also proud to display disk memories that were so fast.
That was understandable for us the analog teenagers since we had vinyl
LPs and singles and cassette tapes so we could understand the different access methods between
tape and disk.
The computers were big machines in cool rooms and compared to a factory workshop or an office
the computer room was kind of all the place.
I also remember seeing punchcard machines and tellx machines when I visited my parents' work
places but I've never used any of those older types of technology.
I remember my younger brother boring a pong console from a friend sometimes in the 70s.
I think and pong was quite fascinating but not that exciting to be honest.
I didn't think so and I don't think we saw it as a computer it was more of a gadget
connected to the TV.
And back then I didn't know anyone who had the early PCs like for example the Apple 2 or game
consoles. In Sweden there was a popular computer called ABC80 built by the
television manufacturer Luxor and they jumped on the fast expanding home computer market
though most people did not have a computer. I had no interesting computers maybe because no one
ever showed me anything fun or constructive to do with them. So I came into computing not from
an interesting technology or programming or anything but rather from utility and that is of course
was most people do I think. And back in the 70s and 80s it was people came into computing for
example for accounting or document processing. That was what brought non geeks to the personal
computer. So before I had a computer I edited my texts which were like essays or reports or
something the old fashioned way. I wrote by hand and literally cut and pasted together pieces
of paper in order to reorder the text so I usually started writing a draft with pen and paper
and when I rearranged them a bit and changed around they were all the messes so I wrote a new draft
with pen and paper. It was kind of a good way to edit because when I could spread out a large number
of notes and pages on say a big table and get a great overview. I don't think I can get
that great overview even on like a 22 inch screen today and those documents were about 5 to 15
pages long so they were not books and they were not letters. I never made the first draft on a
typewriter as I was not a good typist and to this day I still don't know how to touch type. I must
confess. So after all this cutting and reordering I wrote it out on a typewriter and we had correction
fluid I think is called in English. We called it after the brand that was everywhere at tipex
and we call it tipexing when we paste it over with this white fluid on the text and rewrote it
on the typewriter and maybe I even had to do another cut and paste and write it out on typewriter
one more. It was kind of awkward way of working and especially if there were footnotes and so
but if the text was okay and it was possible to photograph it and it looked nice for
handing out that seminars etc then that was the final version. In 1987 or 88 I got access to
a computer at the department where I was a student and that was helpful for editing text and lists
of references, footnotes were easy to create so that was my first time I used a computer
and I was writing a sort of thesis and I realized that the computer would help me a lot.
So that's how I entered computing, word processing and printing and I was a lousy typist so
I wrote the first drafts on paper, pen etc and then I borrowed the computer and wrote down
the latest version of a chapter or something on my own personal floppy discs. They were 540k
floppy those soft floppy discs. So I was kind of struggling between like old technology and new
technology. It was like transition time between writing by hand, typewriting and word processing
on a computer and I think many of my colleagues and friends did that just that back down. They
first wrote by hand and then they put it into the computer. The computer who met my department
back then had one or two IBM portable PC that was the model it was called and they also had a
few compact Macs, Mac Plus and Mac SE which was a Mac with two floppy drives and those were the
smaller floppies that was 800k. Person who showed me how to use a computer belong to the PC
there were like two camps even back then. So I was talked out of using Macs which anyway looked
like toys. Grown-up should of course use IBM and MS-DOS not toying around with those silly little
Macs. So I spent a few months at that IBM portable with two floppy drives writing in word perfect.
I learned to hate it. Jumping around in text with arrows was counterintuitive for someone used to
the old analog way of putting my pen directly at the place. I wanted to write or wanted to erase
something and I was also starting this IBM computer was quite annoying. I had two floppies and one
was a drive A, one was a drive B and I was going to give some commands to just get the thing started
and for a non-geek like me that was not fun. The paper I wrote or essay or whatever we
would call it may rest in peace. It turned into 70 pages including references so it was still way
better to write it on MS-DOS machine in word perfect than in writing by hand and typewriting it.
But it was still rather frustrating. I saw other students and faculty that shamelessly worked at
those toys called Macs and they seemed perfectly happy. The screen was much smaller but it was a
lot better. It displayed black text on white background just like paper and the I and MS-DOS was of
course black background and white text and a little bit of color and the Mac had a mouse and a
desktop as it was called. It made more sounds to me an analog minded person with no pretensions
of becoming computer savvy and the Macs also had those better floppies and the Mac users also had
an image writer too. There was a matrix printer that printed out the fonts. How awesome wasn't that.
Later that department I got a laser printer connected to the network so we all could get those
really fancy printouts and that seemed like magic almost and you could just write a letter and
it looked printed and maybe the content got less important than the looks I don't know.
Later that year it's still 1988 I bought a Mac Plus. It was rather expensive but students and
teachers could buy at half price but still compared to what we get now for the same amount of money
it was very expensive but I could do some work from home and bring a floppy to the department to
print out. I didn't have a printer. The operating system of that Mac Plus was system 5.0 and there
was no such thing as Mac OS back then. It was just called system and a copy of hypercard was
included with every Mac but I only had one megabyte of RAM so I couldn't run it and I used word
Microsoft Word 3.0 I think it was for word processing and it was a great application and I used
word for many years so from 1988 well apart from the word part I was one of those so-called
fanatic Mac uses that people that use dust and windows usually called us fanatic so I suppose
because we were just stubborn. I understood and worked at some mixed Macs windows places over the
years and there were always some who tried and also often succeeded in routing out everything
not windows. I've also seen that in the schools my children have attended and I suppose most of
you have had the same experience. I did not learn anything about free software in those years
but I learned much about the evils and the sheer stupidity of monopoly. There were of course
fanatic Mac fanboys but I often felt the windows uses were the more fanatic I never minded.
So my family was a Mac only household from the late 80s up until the mid 2000s and worker
school we all had to use windows at times. I used almost every Macintosh operative system version
from system 5 up to Mac OS 10 10.6 and they even got a copy of the public beta of Mac OS 10
which was the first version they issued which actually cost money and it was sent by on CD.
I still think I heard that CD and it cost money which was quite greedy of Apple but they were
still in all the direct economic straight spec then I think. It wasn't easy to be a Mac user by
the way there were very few shops who sold them so you really had to seek them out to get them.
The internet I didn't have at start of course but I first used it in 1994 I think but then only
as email at my work and I got internet access in my home in 1997 I think it was 33k modem
and that scape communicator was that the name of the browser back then? 3.0. I remember you had
buy that scape but usually you got it if you got some kind of contract with the ISP
and I even started doing some HTML that was not programming but it was kind of editing the
looks of text so that was what I've done even with a pen and paper in a sense a long time ago.
In the early 2000s I did some programming in Java which was fun but I sort of dropped out of it
so I haven't really coded anything in more than 10 years except HTML CSS a little for hobby or
helping friends with their sites and by this time in the early 2000 or late 90s I've heard of
this cool thing called Linux and now finally we come to the Linux bit of this episode and I was
a bit curious because I had Macs at home but I didn't know I didn't get or understand how to
install Linux or use it it seemed very puzzling and I didn't have any spare computer to test it on
either I'd installed Mac OS 10 on like I had an iMac the old ones colorful ones the little ones
and we had an iBook to the clamshell ones so they had came had come with macOS 9 but I had
installed 10 on them I also knew that macOS 10 was built on BST which also was something very
geeky stable advanced and well tested and finally in 2004 I think it was we bought a PC with windows
XP and why after all these years of struggling to have a Mac household and the Macs were coming
back then and they were getting more popular and easier to find so why get a Mac or get a windows
PC and I have to blame my children for that because they wanted to play games they wanted to use
MSN messenger etc etc and furthermore some websites did not work with Mac so we adults in the
family had to give in however I made a small partition on that computer to later try out Linux
sometime and I was tired of the cost of Macs and also there was like a growing Steve Jobs cult which
I found really sad and boring so I thought this free as in beer awesome geeky system called Linux
I could put it on standard hardware so much at grasp and it was very tempting to try it
because now I had like a PC not a Mac and I wasn't sure how to go about this with Linux I think
I had that empty partition or used it for other stuff for one or two years I'm not sure
and I read about Linux in some Mac PC magazines Mac magazines but it just puzzled me
putting a whole operative system on a hardware not specifically designed for the system
that sounds great but how well one day I saw in a newspaper shop the Linux magazine with the
DVD enclosed I think was a DVD this was the way to try Linux I bought the Roder Expensive
magazine and brought it home this was maybe in 2006 I'm not sure I was in luck and now is the time
to go full geek a bit late as my children were by this time in their late teens and I was way
post 40 but life is learning so it was time to learn something new and I really wanted to get out
of windows I had maybe a bit bad luck as the distro on the DVD was Gen 2 I had heard about Red Hat
and Debian and Susa but I don't think I had heard of Gen 2 and I didn't have any clue what the
difference were between the distros they were all called Linux so the different was probably
mostly cosmetic right I didn't know anything about window managers or desktop environments
now Gen 2 is probably probably not the best beginner distro I spent much time at home at that period
so I sat down at the PC in the morning and did some Gen 2 stuff while my children were at school
as it was mainly their computer and the Gen 2 it was very well documented and for the most
part I understood what to do but I had to compile everything and it took a long time I set the
computer to compile and see the rustle text on the screen and I felt like a true geek and while
that Pentium 4 PC was chugging along compiling I did some work on a Mac or did something else in
the house or something but I finally gave up this my first Linux experience because while it was
an interesting experiment it was not that interesting for me and it was just too complicated and I
have no clue that other distros worked in different ways so I thought maybe it's like this in all
distros but well this Linux thing it kept nagging in the back of my mind and in late 2008 I set
up as a goal to really get into this Linux thing again and since we had two pieces at that time
in the households and in the household and only one child still staying at home I could play at
being a geek again and getting out a window seemed like a very good idea and the Maxer were getting
a bit old and slow and so I had heard about Ubuntu so I downloaded it and installed it I do not
remember the version but it had GNOME 2 on it and I liked GNOME 2 I used Ubuntu bit but then I changed
to Debian I'm not sure really why but I did that I knew Debian was stable and the well aged
and established distribution and maybe it also sounded a bit more geeky I don't know but I also
like the Debian philosophy expressed in the Debian social contract I might add that of course Debian
is not the only ethically inclined distra out there so and I often begin to use Linux I also heard
about free software and I don't know if I heard about it I remember I tried the Firefox the early
versions of Firefox like maybe around 2000 or something it was called Firebird back then but I
don't think I knew what free software was but now I bumped into this free software thing so I
started to read about it and I realized it's very important and maybe my experience being a very
minority Mac uses in what for a long period was a practical monopoly on personal computers maybe
helped me as appreciate the fact and the principle of free software not that Apple is the most free
software company and I left Apple real years ago and I have for it I have some of my own Macs
still for nostalgia but I don't use them and they they make really nice computers but I really
try to keep out of that closed ecosystem in February 2009 I installed the brand new Debian version
5 Lenny or the brand new stable Debian I should say Lenny and since then I've always used Linux I
I kept a window Windows partition for a while for some application but I've used nothing but Linux
for years now three four years I always take with Debian as my main but I have sometimes tried
out other districts out of curiosity on my laptop I have at the moment Xubuntu 1404 which is a
distro I also like very much on my Debian desktop computer I use KDE well it's all about personal
preferences we have a tremendous amount of choice and one can go for easier distros to use
and install or one can go for some more demanding but maybe also configurable it's there are
distros and desktops and applications for every taste so I mainly just a desktop user I do not
sit in the terminal all day and well I don't sit by the computer all day either I think the
most important thing for me about Linux or GNU Linux is software freedom I use only free software
on my main machine and I recently installed open we are T open WRT on my router and if I buy
hardware I try to check if it works with free software and there are of course examples where
we have to use proprietary software like drivers for wifi cards or so on but I try my best to avoid
the proprietary world and free software is a fantastic ecosystem which gives power to the users
and just imagine if say governments and municipalities had skipped proprietary software
they could have saved money and put that money on developing and sharing free software
and it could also be part of the education system and professionals had been less tied into certain
proprietary systems it's win-win but without the win if I may make a little pun and one does
not need to be a geek or to be young to learn to use the basics of a free computer system it's not
that complicated so that's my personal computer history so far thanks for listening if you for some
reason want to contact me I can be find on found on inskuse.se I am SCIUS.se I'm also
inskuse on quitter.se which is an instance of the status net GNU social fediverse and I avoid
big centralized services so you won't find me on facebook as saying goes this is my first HPR
episode and I hope I will be allowed to contribute another one after this HPR is a great institution
and I feel proud to have contributed something little to it and if I can do it you can do it
use Floss every day and see you around on the internet
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