Episode: 627
Title: HPR0627: From OS X to OS Whoredom to Linux
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0627/hpr0627.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 00:07:18

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Hello, this is Reggie. I'm sitting here outside at 114 am. There's water trickling down
the stream. Yeah, so I am recording this to discuss how I got into Linux. It was
really after I finished college that I really got into Linux and I started with
Mac OS 10 actually. I grew up with Windows for the most part. For the first two
years of college, I had a Dell PC desktop computer. Hard drive was crashing
constantly. I got several viruses, more than several viruses. I got a lot of
viruses. A lot of issues happened with that desktop and I didn't really care
that much about computers at the time. I had had some experience programming
basic and I used DOS box to wax nostalgic about old DOS programs. But other than
that, I wasn't really that into computers. We did have a computer lab at my
college in the arts department which I was a part of and so that's how I learned
to use Macs really. I had had some exposure to Macs in elementary school. The
Apple 2 or probably something later than the Apple 2's in the 90's but I
wouldn't really count that as hardcore computer experience. I really started
learning programs that I still use to this day of Photoshop and Final Cut Pro
in college when we had the Apple computer lab with Mac OS 10 Tiger I think is
what those computers were running and eventually my friends Sophie
convinced me to get my own Mac. An iBook and I really started fiddling with
stuff then. I guess I would impart to the person who convinced me to get an Apple
in the first place. It didn't take that much convincing except for the price
factor that I was kind of hesitant about but I didn't regret it. I was very
happy to switch to a laptop. Those running Mac OS 10 after having that really
crappy Dell computer running Windows XP. I loved the iBook and after that I got a
MacBook got even more into tweaking it, downloading free Apple applications and
stuff because I was on a budget I was poor. I'm still poor and that factors into
this because I was always searching for free software. That was maybe the first
time that I really thought about the difference between shareware and
freeware. This is before I knew anything about open source, GPL, all that. So
most of the things that came across online when I searched for I don't know
free art software or things like that. Outcome across free downloads. That was
kind of the tagline that I came across very frequently. Free downloads then it
didn't take that much time for me to figure out that a website advertising free
downloads. It was often sort of presenting a false advertisement and that
yeah the download is free but the program itself is not. You download the program
and then you're gonna get a nag screen or it's gonna say well we're glad that
you downloaded this. Now you have to give us your registration key and things
like that. So I quickly became aware of the fact that I should avoid
advertisements for free downloads because that wasn't actually what I was
looking for. Then I realized okay freeware. That's the key term that I should
search for on Google in order to find software that is actually free to use
however I want. So I was happy for a while. I found a lot of good freeware in my
search for macOS 10 freeware. I found Hyperengine AV which I realized now
actually is open source but I didn't know at the time I didn't know what the
difference was. I just knew it was something free that did something or other
that I movie didn't do and I didn't want to pay for Final Cut Pro at that time.
I was living on my own instead of in the dorms and college so I was looking for
something that I could use on my own computer rather than that was in the
computer labs where I could accomplish some cool video editing stuff. I realized
and I realized for a while how easy it is to pirate software but I feel more
comfortable using software that is legitimately free. It's actually intended to
be free by the developers and this is kind of how I started feeling this even
before. I knew about open source software. It just seemed more kosher I guess and
something seemed weird about using software that wasn't intended for someone
of my economic stature. I would prefer to use something that accomplished what I
needed to accomplish or the developer did not expect me to shell out hundreds of
dollars for it. I felt like I was more legitimately a user of that software. I
think using expensive proprietary software is also buying into that paradigm
even if you're not buying anything it's still supporting paradigm. You're
saying hey your software is worth a lot it's worth so much that I'm going to
steal it because I can't find an adequate substitute and I really prefer to
find the adequate substitute or find something that at least would accomplish
the same thing with a little bit more work in my part maybe or using several
different programs to accomplish something that one expensive proprietary
program could accomplish. I felt good about supporting the developers who made
free software programs or freeware at that point is mostly what I was looking
for. So eventually my quest for free software that did what I wanted it to do
led me to FOSS free and open source software. Also I'm not sure at what point
exactly I discovered the Gimp and Inkscape but I know that there was definitely a
period before I really got into open source software where I was running the
Gimp and I was running Inkscape on my Mac computer and those were probably the first
two major programs that I really got into that were free and open source and
that used the X Windows system to run. I was using Apple's implementation of the
Xorg server at a MacBook and that MacBook I think came pre-installed with
Leopard. So after my iBook died forever and ever got a MacBook it had one gig of
RAM and I thought it was great at the time that I first got it but eventually
eventually it just did not have enough memory to support what I was doing with
it but I'll get to that later. As I was always on hunt for new software somehow I
came across Fink and Mac ports. I don't remember exactly what led me to those
discoveries probably Wikipedia or something. Eventually I started just using
Mac ports completely. I think it had more packages that I wanted than Fink did.
So with Mac ports I discovered the abundance of Unix software that was
available for Mac OS 10 and I got really into using the terminal for
everything and this kind of had to do with the fact that my computer had one
gig of RAM and I was becoming kind of a power user I guess. I just was doing all
this stuff at the same time and my computer was so slow whenever I was running
things with graphical user interfaces. So I just tried to do everything that I
could in the terminal and I kind of just like doing it in terminal two. Like I
listened to music in the terminal I tried music on console MP3 blaster,
Harry, whatever was available. Harry was ultimately the console music player
that I stuck with and I still think it's great. I learned links, LYNX, I also
learned links, LYNKS, links 2, E-links, got really excited about console
browsers and see midnight commander use that too. For a period of maybe six
months or so I just got super excited about everything that I could do in the
terminal that I didn't know I could do before. EmPlayer of course with AA-Lib
Askeart library. So I play movies and Askeart and then LibKaka and Color Askeart.
I thought that was really cool. I would show that off a lot. I guess I still show
that off a lot to people. Yeah, guilty pleasure. I guess I came to realize that a
lot of the software I wanted to run was it was originally meant to be run in
Linux and it is kind of awkward running X applications in Mac OS 10. And so you
do have the environment in there with X 11 or X quartz, the alternative
implementation of X 11. So it wasn't that bad but it was still like every time I
ran a Unix application that used Unix-based graphical libraries. I'd have to
open up this application X 11 or X quartz and just that opening up on its own
was it just seemed like its own separate thing. It wasn't integrated into the
operating system. And if I had I swam running, I swam no manager. And that was one
of the ones that I would use lightweight with new manager just because I
thought it was more interesting with the the window decorations than the default
quartz window manager was. So that would interfere with the Mac OS 10
dock. And it was just it was kind of messy and I didn't really like that. So yeah it
became increasingly obvious that a lot of this stuff I was trying to run would
just run way more smoothly if the operating system I was running was actually
built to handle these things. I guess this was really a gradual realization that
I had. I remember I didn't even know what Linux looked like. Like I had known
people who used Linux and I knew that it existed. I knew that it was another
operating system like Mac OS 10 or Windows but I hadn't given it that much thought
except I knew that it had something to do with the X Windows system. I knew that
X 11 was some way of porting Linux applications to Mac OS 10. And I guess
maybe I had this misguided idea that they all had to look as crappy as they
looked in X 11 and on Mac OS 10. At some point I installed through Mac ports I
installed some KDE application. I think it was it was conqueror when I
installed conqueror all the dependencies installed as well. And so I ran
conqueror at some point because I was thinking I really want a lightweight
browser. I'm sick of Firefox taking forever to start up. I'm sick of well I
never really used Safari at the point anyway because it was just Safari is
better now but when I was running leopard Safari was very slow and it didn't
have add-ons so I just I always used Firefox because it was just better for my
needs. And I just I wanted a browser that would just be faster. I guess when I
ran conqueror for the first time my Accentator C file was edited automatically
and then KDE became part of it. Or actually I might have added KDE to it later.
I don't remember right now but in any case KDE opened up unexpectedly for me. I
didn't really know what it was. I just noticed all of a sudden there was this
environment that opened up when I started using X 11 and I wasn't familiar with
it but it was really exciting to me because there was this new menu bar and all
this stuff that I hadn't seen before and it was really it was a very monumental
occasion for me and I just thought wow what is this where did this come from
wow I must have installed all this stuff with Mac ports this must be what Linux
actually looks like. I must have installed some mysterious stuff and is now
looking just like Linux and eventually I found out about KDE and GNOME and XFC
all the other window managers desktop environments but this was really the
first time that I was exposed on my own computer to a Linux desktop environment
and I realized wow there's all this cool stuff and it's very customizable and I
had a whole bunch of fun playing around with KDE 3.5 and I loved it and I
remember having dreams about it and that's very nerdy I guess as of the rest of
this isn't so I played around with a bunch of the themes and I found it very
exciting I think once it gets into the terrain of customizing your the look of
your desktop that's what really gets me into something new at that time in
2007 or 2008 that's what got me really really really excited about the idea of
Linux and then I thought maybe I should figure out a way to emulate or
virtualize Linux on my computer because I was realizing a lot of the
applications that I wanted to use were Linux applications and wouldn't it be
cool to just run a Linux environment so I got virtual box I started virtualizing
a bunch of different Linux distros I just became complete operating system
horror I downloaded whatever operating systems I could get my hands on free
DOS HIKU Mona OS DexOS whatever not limited to Linux at all just a bunch of
stuff and I kind of still do that to a lesser extent because I think it's fun
before I really got serious about Linux I was just I was more just playing
around I was excited about the different looks for the operating systems I was
excited about the fact that there were so many free operating systems that I
could easily access you just look up open source operating systems and
they're all over the place I guess around that time I discovered the
significance of GPL with that meant so I had like 20 to 30 different operating
systems installed in virtual box they were taking up pretty much my entire
hard drive at the time I took a lot of time to experiment with mostly
Linux distros because with Linux you there's just so many different choices so
most of the operating systems that was coming across were Linux distros so I
tried mandriva I tried open sisa Ubuntu I was excited that Ubuntu had free
shipment of CDs I thought that was really cool so I ordered some Ubuntu CDs
what else? Slackware, Slack, Woolfix, Cnappix, Black I mean that's not even
approaching the total list of operating systems that I was playing around with
I did like live CDs but actually I found it more fulfilling to get a non-live
city or live city with an installer and just install it in virtual box and have
virtual hard disk and everything because I felt then that it was more really mine
and I know that if you if you have a live city and you're using it in virtual box
you can pretty much do whatever you want with it and you don't have to worry
about losing data because you can save a snapshot but I still I guess I I was
into the idea of making it as realistic as possible in terms of hardware
installation so I would just install things all the time I'd install like five
different operating systems a day just for the hell of an most of them I trashed
because I couldn't figure out how to open up the graphical environment or the
install would fail or something but a lot of them worked and I would keep them
around for a while at least long enough to take some interesting screenshots
then I would trash them when I ran out of hard drive space so the virtual
machines that I really stuck with for a while Mindreva was one of them because
it was just very easy to use it worked well with virtual box the cursor was not
trapped in the box of the virtual machine which I liked so I did favor
distros that were more integrated with virtual box eventually I bought VMware
because I thought I would probably have more support for file sharing with the host
and things like that and it did for windows it worked better when I was
virtualizing windows but in most of the operating systems that I chose to
virtualize it didn't really make a difference because most of them were just so
obscure that VMware didn't have support for them any more than virtual box did so I stuck
with Mindreva for a while I used Ubuntu Studio for a little bit but I guess as I
became more aware of different Linux distros I felt like I need more of a
challenge and so I began string away from things that were Ubuntu based simply
because I just wanted more of a challenge and I have nothing against Ubuntu at
all except that it's very user-friendly and easy which I think is great but I
wanted things that were complicated and harder to get into so I stopped using
Ubuntu Studio stopped using pure dine I was using dine a ballad for
multimedia stuff for a while but that is no longer under development as far as I
know it's been replaced with pure dine and pure dine is Ubuntu based so as
much as I was complaining about things that I thought were too easy I was still
pretty unfamiliar with most of the workingness of Linux so I wanted something
that was kind of easy but that still had a lot of room for learning that kind of
forced me to learn some small things I came across to be in Linux and I learned
that that was Ubuntu based and Ubuntu itself well I did play around with the
live DVD but I still felt very intimidated by it because of mostly just
things I read about people spending days and nights on an installing
Ubuntu and I thought wow these are really experienced Linux people who are
doing this so I figured this was just well beyond my abilities but why not
try suban so I tried it and it was my longest running virtual machine by far I
had a virtual machine with suban going for like six months or something I
guess towards the end of that I just thought wow this kind of sucks because it's
really slow in the virtual environment eventually my my MacBook died I got
the hard drive fixed and everything but it was I could not handle all this
virtualization and everything else I was doing with one gig of RAM so I gave it
to my sister I got a new computer MacBook Pro with four gigs of RAM and of
course I still went back to virtualizing a bunch of Linux sisters I was really
excited like the the most exciting thing about getting my new computer was
that I could run more operating systems at the same time I really wanted to
install it on my hardware but I didn't want to mess with the configuration that
I already had with my new MacBook Pro everything was working fine eventually
everything was not working fine I had several kernel panics in about a week's
period and then I got the the ever dreaded message this disc needs to be
repaired I was actually pretty excited about it I had all my stuff backed up so
I didn't really need to worry about anything I was kind of like wow good I'm
glad that this moment has finally come now I have an excuse to reinstall
everything and I can partition my hard drive and install Linux for real very
exciting I just erased it and I guess I I partition the drive I think after I
installed macOS and I believe I use disc utility to partition the drive I made
a partition for Linux I done my research so I knew you have to install
refit or something like that in my case I I chose to install refit as the boot
loader so I did that and then I installed Debian on my Linux partition at first
because I wasn't quite sure which Linux distro I wanted to install in that
partition I just knew that I wanted to have a dual boot thing going on with
Linux so Debian was the first thing I started with but ultimately it was too
challenging because I could not get the audio card to work at all and the
end I just thought okay well what on I just wipe this partition and install my
old standby suban Linux which I think I I'm ultimately a lot happier that I
did that I like obscure distors I wouldn't have installed something completely
like if I could go back in time I wouldn't have installed something completely
obscure like hi ku I'm glad that I installed something that has a lot of support
and is under very active development and is based on one of the classic
distros gen 2 it did take some tweaking to get the audio card working to get the
internal speakers working the Wi-Fi had to install a driver I had to change some
things to get the trackpad working properly but it was a lot of fun and it wasn't
too hard it was pretty much exactly the right amount of challenge that I was
looking for and this was about a year ago I think that I installed suban Linux to my hard drive
I'm trying to use Linux as much as I possibly can I still keep the macOS 10 partition around
because there are some programs that I just can't part with like Adobe InDesign I really need
that for my work so I got to keep that around and Photoshop is not quite as indispensable
because I find that GIMP accomplishes everything that I need to do in Photoshop
but the integration within design is pretty useful in macOS 10 so I keep it around it's pretty
much just for the Adobe suite that I keep it around and iMovie I use that too occasionally
with Linux the video editing situation still needs a lot of work I would love to just completely
move to Linux but I find that all the video editing solutions I've tried in Linux are either too
simplistic or just too buggy and crashy and sinalera I know is supposed to be good for a lot of
advanced video editing functions but every time I use sinalera it crashes so that's a no go for me
right now since I just want a workflow that is going to be effective where I can actually edit a
video and do it to completion I usually do like two to ten minute videos so it's it's pretty
problematic when something crashes even with a very small file it's frustrating so I use macOS 10
because it doesn't crash when I'm using the software that's built for it kid and live I think
is a really solid video editing program it's the most solid other ones that I've used I mean open
shot I also I think that's maybe the one that's crashed the least on me but it's still lacking
some features that I think are important in video editors certain effects chroma kitty things
like that so kid and live is like when I try to do video editing in Linux that's ultimately the
thing that I'll go to but it still crashes more often than I'm happy with so I go back to macOS 10
to do that and to use in design and a lot of this is just stuff having to do with interoperability
of file formats and things Adobe file formats specifically editing PDFs things that the Adobe
Creative Suite is built to handle but that are kind of more difficult than Linux so just to get
work done I'll use macOS 10 but other than that I definitely prefer using Linux most of the time I
think the ethics of the Linux operating system and most of the software that works with it are
highly preferable if I didn't have to worry about doing design work that's best accomplished in
design I would totally switch to Linux full time there's actually a period when I was very
strict with myself about only using open source software for pretty much everything and it got
very messy when I was trying to use it for video and design work for some graduate classes that I
was taking in book publishing we used in design in the classroom because that's the industry standard
for page layout and the publishing industry but when I took projects home to work on them I tried to
do everything using open source software there's this one project I had for a book design class the
project was to design a mock children's book and in class we were using in design for it and then
I went home and tried to work on it and scribes I don't remember exactly why I didn't quite take
to scribes but for some reason it just wasn't working for me then and maybe it's partly that I was
just feeling masochistic because then I decided to learn latex use that to lay out the book I had this
pile of library books about latex and tech but ultimately I did not have enough time before
the project was due to learn a whole new market language so I only got so far as doing the copyright
page in latex though I did end up using true type and open type versions of latex fonts for the
rest of it to my credit for that same project I also did a bunch of the graphics in pauvray and I
was learning as I went along pretty much so a lot of it was just me plugging in random numbers to
see how that would change a scene description file and I ended up rendering some pretty interesting
abstract scenes though I can't say I knew what I was doing but some of them were cool looking
this resulted in a lot of sleepless nights of me trying to make things look good while not
really knowing what I was doing so it wasn't very practical though I'm glad that I learned a lot
about pauvray and latex and time management and I also was doing a video project for one class
when I was doing that video project I did not want to use any proprietary software so I did a lot
of command line conversions with ffmpeg I um let's see I used I believe the application is called
stop motion I use some kind of stop motion application for linux and I used the gimp for all the
stills since that project involved talking animated characters I used festival to synthesize their
voices that was pretty cool but I never actually had time to finish it according to the to my
original plan as awesome as it was to be using open source software to make a really cool video
it was very time consuming and now I'm I'm kind of more relaxed with myself because my workflow
with open source multimedia isn't streamlined enough to handle everything quickly and efficiently
I hope that in the not too far future I can make the complete switch and be able to accomplish
anything I want to efficiently in linux and using only open source software all the productivity
applications that I would use in any other operating system I have found viable alternatives
in linux so I have no problem with using open office over microsoft word or anything like that
digicam is really awesome replacement for i photo it does more than i photo does I actually just
started using digicam recently I was using fspot and then I was using shot well for keeping
track of my personal notes I sometimes use tomboy just for very immediate shorter notes for notes
that I want to store for longer I use g-edit the sessions plugin I could go on and on forever
about the applications that I use in linux and which ones are my favorites but I'll save that
for another podcast and I'll just leave you with that as my story of how I got into linux and
I'd like to add a shout out to some of my favorite podcasts that have really inspired me to do my
own hpr of course also gnew world order from leanon as to that apples the command line retro bits
linux link tech show thanks everyone if you want to find out more about me you can get a check out
my website at regic.net that's r-u-j-i-c.net and if you happen to be interested in screenshots
I have a section in my photo gallery that's just full of screenshots mostly from different random
operating systems that I played around with in virtual box there's a subcategory of glitches and
air screens so if any of that sounds interesting to you at all you can go check out my gallery at
supposedly dot regic.net slash look what I can do again that's supposedly dot r-u-j-i-c.net slash
look what I can do I'll put that in the show notes now to wrap this up I'm going to leave you with
some music by my friend russian paul this is a song he did called predator drone and he does a
lot of experimental folkies sometimes black metaly stuff if you like it you should go check
them out at myspace.com slash russian paul band I'll put that in the show notes too
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I hope you liked the song.
Again that was Predator Drone by Russian Paul.
Check them out at myspace.com slash Russian Paul Band.
Thanks Paul.
Thank you for listening to Half Republic Radio.
HPR is mounted by Carol.net so head on over to C-A-R-O-DOT-E-T for all of those of you.