Episode: 2088
Title: HPR2088: How my wife's grandma got me into linux.
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2088/hpr2088.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 14:08:18

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This in HPR episode 2008 and titled How My Wife's Brand-Modeled Meantle Lyrics.
And in part on the series How I Found Lyrics.
It's been hosted by Nightwine and in about 33 minutes long.
The summary is, Nightwine tells us how his wife made a year old brand-modeled meantle Lyrics.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code,
HPR15, that's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at An Honesthost.com.
Hello Hacker Public Radio, this is Nightwines from Nightwines.com.
Calling in with the mandatory show if you're a regular host on Hacker Public Radio.
And that is the How I Got into Linux story.
Well, I'll give you some backgrounds.
I have been professionally active in computers since 1999,
which puts me at about 70 years of being an IT professional.
And in the years before I came an IT professional,
I already was a computer enthusiast.
I had the regular Commodore 64 and the Amiga,
like every kid my age had.
But after that, my interest for computers kind of waned away.
It came back full force as I was studying to be an educator.
I have a social studies background.
And in order for the courses I was taking, I had to write reports.
And for those reports, I needed a computer.
So I got my computer as a present for school from my aunt,
who bought me a Pentium 75 with, I think it was,
those are, you know, megs of RAM.
I think 16 megs of RAM or 8, I'm not really sure anymore.
A 15-inch screen, a laser printer,
a laser printer, an inkjet printer.
And I think that that was it.
And I can remember a 750 megabytes hard drive.
So that's how long ago it is.
I used my computer for reports, writing reports.
And I remember going to the computer shop nearby
and picking out a model and asking the guy who sold it.
That I wanted the computer as long as he could give me the background image
that they had on the computer in the store.
And that was really funny because the wallpaper on the computer in the store was a screenshot
of Deep Space 9, which was taken with a TV video card, TV tuner card.
And that was set as the background.
I never remember that thinking that that was so awesome.
I just had to have that.
So they pre-installed Windows 95 on there.
And I got the background, which I found fantastic.
And I spent the better part of the first half-year
of owning that computer playing around with it and messing with all kinds of things
and writing my reports.
Quickly, I got into this whole computer thing again,
and it really interested me.
And by then, I met my wife,
then girlfriend.
And I didn't know that at the time,
but her dad was really into computers.
And she told me this.
You know, my dad's really into computers.
And I thought like, okay, and this was like the first time
I ever set foot in her house.
And, you know, that was her dad.
And he looked very strict because he was a professor.
And I went like, okay.
Yeah, and, you know, the second or the third time I came around,
I kind of asked for him, asked if he could possibly help me out
because I got me one of these tuner cards,
TV tuner cards, and they didn't really work right.
And if you could help me out.
Sure, he said, you know, come back next week,
bring your little CPU tower and we'll go upstairs.
So I just, I fondly remember mounting the steps
to the upstairs floor at my girlfriend's house at the time.
And this door opening to my then not father-in-laws,
but now father-in-laws office.
And he had like 14 computers just lined up.
And it was like a wall haul out there.
And he had CDs and discs and gear.
And I didn't know what I was seeing.
So we ended up spending the entire evening tinkering with my computer
and reinstalling windows and getting the drivers of my S3 video
card, right? That is how long ago it is.
And the entire evening, my girlfriend just sat downstairs in the kitchen with her mom
waiting until her boyfriend came back down,
because her boyfriend and her dad were tinkering with computers.
And that was my first step into a world that would change my life forever.
Because for my father-in-law, he finally had kind of like the son-in-law
was interested in computers because he has three daughters.
And I found this mentor that wanted to teach me things.
So for the next couple of months, if not years, if I would visit my girlfriend,
he would be like waiting at the door going like, okay, okay, he's coming, he's coming.
And before I could say hello to my girlfriend, he would snatch me up and we was like,
let's geek out. And we would go upstairs and geek out and play with computers.
And that is how I learned. I learned to install Windows computers, I learned to install.
I Windows 95, Windows 98. He had all these wear CDs and it was awesome, awesome, awesome.
I learned so much. It came up to the point that the day that I graduated from school as an
educator, so that's actually kind of a loose translation of a caretaker who works with
mentally disabled people in the social sector. So the day I finished school,
I got a phone call from that computer shop where I got my first computer because
that computer shop was very good, my father-in-law was very good friends with that computer shop.
And he took me along on Sunday mornings to help out in the technical department to help fix
computers. So I have been doing this internship in the computer store on Sunday morning where I
could go and help out fixed computers because my dad-in-law would take me with him.
And that's how I got into computers. And the day I finished school, I got a phone call from
the computer shop. They rang me up and they said, do you want to come? I work here.
And I said, yes, why did the computers end up with back? It wasn't until 1999, I got a first
taste of Linux. I was then working as a junior network administrator, which was basically the
help test guy at a multimedia company, which had a video editing department, an engineering
department, and a games testing department. And I was the IT guy for all of these departments,
and it was awesome. It was really, really awesome. And I had all these geeky dudes that worked
there. And at a certain point, we were having an issue where we had to loan out software a lot
for people to install stuff, because it was all done manually back then. And people would come
borrow the CDs that the IT department wouldn't bring them back. And it was kind of a mess. So we thought
there has to be another way to kind of distribute this across the network. And I remember that we had
this big scusy tower, this tower of scusy drives. And you could hook it to scusy CD-ROM drives, sorry,
like 10 of them. And they were used to burn 10 CDs at once. But we could also use them to kind of,
you know, reach 10 CDs at once. So this engineering guy that worked with us, we got talking about
this, and he said, well, we could do this with Linux, because he was really into Linux. I went
like, what the hell is Linux? He said, like, it's like an operating system. And I remember that we
had some Linux lying around, because the first time I saw the command line was looking at the old
spark stations, the pizza boxes that they had there to do some video encoding. This was the
company, by the way, that invented. I kid you not. The department that invented the CDI,
the CD interactive from Phillips. These guys invented this. I shit you not. And if you know,
if you don't know what the CDI is, well, the CDI is the basis for an interactive CD-ROM
or DVD as we know it today in PlayStation and Xbox technology. That was kind of the first steps
in that technology. So they came up with the CDI. So that department worked there. They held
all these geeky engineers. And we got talking about making this DVD, turning this DVD tower with
these 10 CD-ROM drives, or CD tower, with these 10 CD-ROM drives into a software library.
And the guy said, yeah, we can do that with Linux. So I thought like Linux, like on the spark
stations, you know, I don't know anything about that. What is that? He said, I'll show you, I'll show you.
So he came now with this install CD, CDs. It was like a folder with about 10 of them.
And he came now with Sousa. And I thought it was Sousa 4.0 something. I can't remember.
And he would, you know, start the graphical installation. I went like, wow, what's that?
He said like, you know, it's an operating system and it comes with all these apps. You know,
these applications, it's all included. It's all for free. And I went like, what do you mean? It's
all free. It's all free. And it's all on these CDs. So you don't have to, you know, download it,
or buy it. No, no, no, no, it's all out there. And I said like, wow. So we did the first install.
And he asked me, he said like, you know, what do you want to install? And I remember distinctly
answering it, everything. So we ended up doing the first installation of that Sousa with everything.
Yeah, we went through the seven CDs and it installed every single application that you could get.
So we ended up with this. I think it was at the time a KVD desktop,
which when you clicked on the menu, it would just expand and expand and expand and expand
with applications that you could open. And I remember going through them all,
well, not all of them, but mostly all of them. I literally spent hours trying to figure this out
what this was. And that's the first time I ever saw Linux, because what we used that machine for
was as a CD-ROM library that people could access over the network. So he showed me how Samba worked
and I didn't understand. And then he showed me the command line I didn't understand that.
But I was fascinated by this graphical desktop that could do all these crazy things.
And that's how I got into Linux. So pretty soon, I started experimenting with Linux myself.
And I distinctly remember going to the computer bookshop and buying the box,
which came with that book. And I remember reading the book and doing the installs and trying
to get Linux to work. Now, hardware support at that time, because I was using this standard,
you know, PC tower with like, I don't know, a sound blaster and an Hercules video card.
It was very good. So mostly everything worked out of the box. Sometimes I had some trouble with that
and network card, but I got some old trichon or tree commas. We say, three-com network cards from
from my boss. Like, you know, use this one, these work. And I play around with it. It was
fascinating. But every now and then, I would just run into this boundary where, for example, I couldn't
get flashed to play or I couldn't get an MP3 to play. And then this wonderful system was like
not really working for me. So I started distro hopping as YouTube. So I think one of the next
distros that I found was Noppix, which I found amazing. Because it ran off of CD and it ran on
everything. So I played around with Noppix a lot. And then I came into one Linux distribution.
I added to Sheba laptop at the time. That would really start to work for me. And that was
college Linux. It doesn't exist anymore. I think it was based on Noppix, which was based on
I don't know, Debian or RPM. I'm not really sure. And I played around with college Linux. And I
could get an, it can't pre-packaged with, you know, software that you could really use. Like,
I don't know. It was like college software to manage your money and to do some text processing,
more processing and stuff like that. So I didn't have these cool names. It was called distros.
We're called like Darth Vader Edition, Skywalker Edition. And then it would, you know, start to
track when a new edition of Noppix, of college Linux would come out and install that on my laptop
and try to get everything working. And that was my first introduction into partitioning and stuff.
So yeah, it went on like that for quite a while. And then I got hold of Mandrake Linux.
Which was also pretty interesting because it came with all these applications. And it had a little
bit more support for third-party stuff like flash and stuff out of the box. It was kind of cleaner
than the first versions of Susa I played around with. And I remember installing that and playing
around with that. And I distinctly remember first trying to dual boot and then going back to
Windows all the time. And then, you know, sometimes really di-harding it and just wiping my drive,
putting Linux on it doesn't seem. I'm going to go for it. I'm not going to disrupt. I'm going to see
if I get this working and getting frustrated after a while and then throwing it off and throwing
something else on it. You know, how do you mess around with Linux? By then, I was very slowly
getting into podcasting. I discovered podcasting back in 2000. Let me see. 1, 2, 3 or something.
It was at the very, very dawn of podcasting. I remember one of the proto-podcasts that was out
there, the Daily Source Code. By Adam Curry was like an episode 40 or something. And I caught on
to it and I started hanging out with these guys and sending in feedback and starting to record
my first podcast in the car and stuff like that. So, yeah. And I remember one day listening to
a fantastic podcast that was called Slash.Review by Andy McKasky where Andy would read the headlines
from Slash. Every day. And it was so cool. I am so sad that doesn't exist anymore because that
to me was one of the greatest podcasts to stay informed to listen to on my way to work on my
first generation iPod. So, that was nice. And if he mentioned this Ubuntu or Ubuntu, I don't know
how he had he mentioned it a couple of times, Ubuntu or Ubuntu. And I thought like, all right,
this Ubuntu thing sounds interesting. So, let's give it a try. And I did. And I installed Ubuntu
on one of my machines that law and behold. What was that? It worked. I managed to get stuff working.
And then I found this online script. I thought a thing was I can't for the life of me. I can't
remember the name of it right now. It was this first auto install script that would install
the right codex and MP3 and third party software automatically. And I remember in the beginning,
people used to brief fire when you installed that. They said, like, it's bad. And the repositories
are not updated. And you shouldn't do that and this and that. And I went like, wow, this is
fascinating because for the first time, I had a system that I could actually use. So I started
playing around with this Ubuntu more and more and it became more and more a part of my workflow
because I started to notice that I didn't have to roll back to my Windows machines that often.
By that time, I also got my first Mac. And I was starting to hang out
kind of 50-50 on Ubuntu and on my iBook. And I found it really interesting and it was really
starting to work. Back then, we still had terrible problems with stuff like Wi-Fi
being supported and stuff. But we found ways around that by basically
plugging in wired network cards or PCM CIA cards that you knew were supported and there were
just a few. So whenever I got it working, I would be so happy. And that's how I kind of played
around with it. Linux played a pivotal role in Nightwise.com. Because by then, I started to
blog and posted some articles on the website that was kind of it. And one day, my wife's grandmother
who was like 76 at the time, or a little bit older, even. I think she's 83 now. She would be
so 77. Yeah, 76, 77 years old. And she had this computer because my wife's family was pretty
geeky. And she always had this little arcade video game, this handheld arcade video game tetris
that you'd like to play. And that broke. So my dad and law dove into his office and got out one of
these insanely old Linux laptops. Linux laptops. IBM laptops would Windows 95 and a couple of games
and gave it to her and she played patience on that and mine sweeper and stuff like that. And she
really liked it, but it broke. So we needed to find her new machine. And I thought like, you know
what? I am going to find an old laptop. I had one lying around. I am going to set up Ubuntu on it.
I'm going to install the games that she likes. And I'm going to configure it so that it's very
easy to operate. And I did. Pure out of an experiment because my grandmother and my grandmother
loved to play with computers. And I thought like, oh, there's Ubuntu. It has a lot of games on it.
You can, you know, work on that one. So I installed it. And it was an old pinium 3 compact laptop
if I remember correctly. And I think it was Ubuntu 60405050808. I don't know. Five something.
I installed it for her. I used the the special script that would install all of the codecs and
the extra software. And I just gave it to her. And I remember taking some screenshots
because I thought it was a cool project. And she loved it. She literally played all night
on this thing. She would, you know, we would go over on a Sunday and she would say like, man,
I've been playing hamburger time or burger time until three o'clock in the morning.
And I, and this tux racer thing is really addictive. So I suddenly had this 76-year-old
grand who was addicted to Linux. And that was cool. So I thought, you know what? I'll blog about
it. I've blogged about it. And I posted it on dig. I remember posting that on Friday evening.
I posted it to dig. And I thought, I forgot about the blog post. And on Saturday morning,
eight o'clock, I got a phone call. And it was my IAS, my hosting provider for my website.
And he said, dear Mr. Nightwise, do you plan on continuing the load on your website or
do the other websites that are also hosted on this share platform also get a chance to be accessed
by the internet today? Because quite frankly, the visits to your website are blowing our servers
away. Went like, what the hell is going on? Back then, I had like 10 visitors to my site
a day. You know, nobody knew me. I made it in dream weaver or something. I don't know.
So I thought like, what the hell is going on? So I looked at my stats and I thought, don't look
my stats, bro. Because, you know, yesterday it is, there's any teeny bar. And today there's this
big bar. And this big bar says that there are 9,000 visitors which have visited my website
overnight. I got to the front page of Dig with my article called Ubuntu for your grandmother.
And that kind of, you know, I got linked through by Debian, Debian.org linked to my website.
So that was like, my Google juice was immediately validated for the rest of my life.
And it was awesome. I went like, wow, what the hell is going on? And there were like comments and
articles and suddenly there was this big brew about this one article Ubuntu for your grandmother.
And that's where it took off. So Ubuntu became my distro of choice. And I have been using it
for forever. I either are using Ubuntu on PCs. And once I got a Mac, I thought, you know,
I can do Ubuntu on this. I started tinkering with getting Linux on your Mac. And I kind of
became a go-to guy for some of the podcast community when it came to that. So I played around with
running Ubuntu on my iMac, which looked awesome. And I didn't distro hop a lot. I might have,
you know, tried different desktops and played with mints, but I mostly, you know, stayed on
on Debian derivatives. Not because I'm a fanboy or anything, but just because it worked for me.
And that is my philosophy. Technology has to work for you. Instead, the other way around. So any
distro that would, you know, require you to spend hours and hours and hours and hours,
getting it to work is not something that I really like to use. I just need something I can really
use and I can play with. And that's how Ubuntu really started to work for me. First as a desktop,
then as a server, because I found out I could do things with SSH and with the command line.
And I could script things and I could find out all of these cool things. I got on IRC again,
met a lot of cool people there. And that's how I kind of got into Linux and have remained into
Linux ever since. So fast forward to today, where the number of computers I have has decreased.
I used to have like five or six. Now I only have like three. And the role that Ubuntu is playing,
that Linux is playing in my life has also significantly changed. It used to be an experimental
platform and I would use to try to do as much on Linux as I could, but if it didn't work, I didn't
mind. But that kind of changed when I got my own company. I started my own company two years ago
and I thought, you know what? I want to know if I can do this using some cloud software and
a Linux machine. So I got me a Lenovo Twist, ThinkPads Twist. It's all Ubuntu on it and started to use
it as my main machine to start up my company. And one year later, I was still using that laptop
and I had started up my entire company on a Linux machine. And that's when I started to see
that Linux had fundamentally changed for me, where it was no longer a hobby project,
with something that I would actually and really use. So that was pretty, pretty cool.
Because last year, I ordered my first, my first actual pre-installed Linux laptop,
which was my Dell XPS 13, which came pre-installed with Linux. That was also a big step for me.
And I have been using that laptop ever since for my job. So I have to rely on this crap.
So in that way, my journey to Linux is perhaps different than other people's journey to Linux,
where many of the Linux enthusiasts have the luxury of going like, yeah, we're going to do,
you know, we believe in free software and I believe in free software. And we believe in the fact
that you should only use free software and you cannot use binary blobs or stuff like that. Look,
I don't believe in that kind of stuff. Because for me, this just has to work. And if I have to use
a proprietary driver to get my video card to work, then so be it. I'll use a proprietary driver.
I'm still using a free operating system and I'm sharing my knowledge about that with the rest
of the world as I'm doing right now. And I don't care if it's not 100% stolen proof,
or it doesn't sit well with Jonathan Nado, with whom I've had the most delightful conversations
about this topic. I'm not a, not a pureist. I'm a pragmatist. I'm pragmatic. If it works, it works.
So I've also stepped away from all these discussions like, it has to be, you know,
this Linux distro versus that Linux distro. I don't care. As long as it works, you know,
I'm sticking to Ubuntu because I know how that works. I should play around with Red Hat or Fedora.
I can perhaps one day, but right now works for me. I think that getting Linux to do what I want
and spending time on that is to be far more important than spending time on trying out one certain
distro versus the other because there are, well, ideological differences between the Debian
and the RPM side of the pond. I don't believe in that kind of ideological difference.
I've never been one with these discussions that used to go on, like, yeah, you shouldn't
use the command line. You should only, you should use the command line. You can't use the graphical
interface. The graphical interface is for losers. You know, those kind of stuff, these discussions
that we used to have on, on, on, on, on, on, on, use, use net. Sorry. It's so long ago. I don't
believe in that either. I went like, does it work for you? Then it works for you. Do you want to
click 2,000 times? And is that more convenient than do it? Or do you want to write a script that
just repeats the same line of code 2,000 times? Whatever works. You know, my rsync backups, I do
them via the command line because it's easy and I can script them. But I am not going to resize
a single JPEG versus, you know, using the command line with a command that is longer than the first
three chapters of the, I don't know, the old testament just because I'm a command line kind of guy.
I love my command line, but if a graphical user interface is faster, I'll use that. I love the
command line just because of the fact that it's neat. It's not very destructive and you can run it
anywhere. So, that's my vision on that. So, I'll round up with where I am in Linux today.
Let me see. So, I have the Dell XPS 13 running 16.04. I only run long-term support versions of Linux
of Ubuntu because I don't want to distro hub all the time. As I said, I rely on this thing.
I can do my entire podcast production on Windows, on Linux and on the Mac. So, I can use Linux
as a full-time podcast production platform and run my company. I have an IT consultancy company.
I can do that all on Linux. I use OpenOffice software on all three platforms.
Instead of relying on Word, I try to have the word flaws of my company completely aligned towards
cross-platform-friendly software. So, that being LibraOffice. So, yeah, there you go.
I have two Raspberry Pi's, which one of them is kind of my remote in server.
I have a home server running Linux 14.04, which runs myplex, which runs my scripts,
which runs Sonor, and which is a very important part of my daily IT infrastructure,
which is an essential part of my home network. I have an Android phone. If that counts as Linux,
I have Windows Phone. Of course, I don't have a Windows Phone. Only four people have a Windows Phone
on the planet and not one of those four. I have Ubuntu Phone, First Generation, which I think is
an interesting item, but which is not ready for prime time yet. I had been thinking about getting
the Macyu tablet, but I'm thinking that I'm not going to possibly not going to do that.
And that's basically it. So, I try to play around with Linux a lot in VMs. I have come to a phase
in my life where I don't distro-hop anymore, and that saves me a lot of time and makes me very
productive, because I find out ways to do things with the tools that I have, and finding out to
get it done instead of switching from one distro to the other all the time, because cool kids say
you have to be on that, and cool kids say you have to be on that, so I don't really care about that.
And that is my journey to Linux. My journey to Linux has been going strong for 17 years now,
from my first encounters and very amateuristic efforts and florets into the tux world,
to a moment where I use Linux on a daily basis. My wife uses Linux on a daily basis,
not as a desktop. I did put elementary on her iMac once, and she liked it.
But as a, you know, I use it on a daily basis. My wife uses it on a daily basis as a home server.
We have some Raspberry Pi's at home, I use Android, and I have my Linux machine, my laptop,
my XPS 13, which I take to work with me to do my consultancy gig on, so it's really reliable,
and Linux has matured, both on the graphical side and on the support side,
just something that I really enjoy using. The community has grown up, and I'm very glad with that,
as well. I'm not a developer, I can't write extensive bash scripts, but I am some, I'm an advocate,
I'm not a religious advocate, an ideological advocate, I'm just a practice that says like,
if that works for you, then that works for you. So that has been my journey into Linux.
If you want to find out more about how I work in my cross-platform world, the philosophy of
the Nightwise.com podcast is haxtips and tweaks for cross-platform geeks. People who are on
Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Linux, or SunSlaris, or whatever, check it out, www.canithtwis.com.
You can subscribe and get the podcast that I do on a fairly regular basis on whatever
podcast you're using. Until then, let's technology work for you instead of the other way around,
and I will hope to see you again in the feed for Hacker Public Radio.
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