Episode: 905
Title: HPR0905: Akranis: How I got into Linux 
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0905/hpr0905.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 04:44:00

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Hello, my name is Mathidas, I also go in your handles hexagenic and acronis.
There's been a request for more how I got into Linux episodes so I thought I'd share
my story.
I can't remember the exact point in time when I first heard about Linux.
The earliest I can remember is when my uncle installed a Linux machine in my parents house
running smoothwall.
smoothwall is a Linux distribution primarily designed to be a firewall.
We also had a Samba server running on it to provide a central storage for the house.
Me and my brother didn't touch the server itself much because we didn't know how Linux
worked.
It was mostly administrative by my uncle, with me and my brother shutting it down occasionally
during thunderstorms.
At this point I did not know that there existed a distribution with desktops and had never
used a Linux terminal.
When I entered what we in Sweden called a gymnasium, sort of a college preparatory school,
a classmate introduced me to puppy Linux, which he had installed on a thumb drive.
At this point I still didn't know much what Linux was, but the thought of installing
a whole operating system or something as small as a thumb drive quickly caught my interest.
So I had him install it on one of my thumb drives.
I played around with puppy Linux for a couple of weeks until I learned about Ubuntu.
The friendly messages on the website, under inviting graphics, made me download and
burn an ISO, which I quickly installed on my school issue laptop, side by side with
Windows.
Ubuntu worked great out of box.
I had Wi-Fi, sound and graphics without having to do anything.
This is also when I first came into contact with a package manager, which was a concept
I now wish existed on Windows.
When I first started using Ubuntu, I avoided the terminal a lot.
It did not seem like anything I would be using very much, but a lot of the guides on
the web used it as part of some steps.
Eventually I started getting used to it and even started doing a lot of things in the
terminal, that I otherwise always did graphically.
I started moving around, renaming and deleting files in the terminal.
I even stopped using the graphical package manager and installed packages and updated
my system exclusively from the terminal.
Basically my interest in programming made me explore bash scripting.
At first I only did very small programs without any other purpose than to satisfy my curiosity
for a language.
But after a while I started using a podcasting client called bashpudder.
The client worked really well except for one thing.
If I ran it daily with cron, it would tend to fill up my podcasting directory with empty
folders.
Being as the entire client was written as a bash script, I set out to fix this.
I rewrote parts of bashpudder so it would fit my needs and used it like this for many
months.
I tried a lot of other distributions other than Ubuntu, like Fedora, Mandriva, Debian
and CrunchBang, many others.
Not often really stuck with me though.
Most of the time I just switched back to Ubuntu because it was the one I was most comfortable
with.
My final settlement is arch, which is somehow has that feeling of home.
When I run programs or edit configuration files, it feels like this distribution was designed
by someone who thinks a lot like me.
I liked the idea of having the system set up with a text files and bash scripts because
they are easily edible and copyable from system to system.
And because the base system has a few packages installed, it allows me to pick and choose
anything I want or need.
In the end, I don't use Linux exclusively though, as I still use Windows every day for
games and collaborating with other programmers, but I do wish more of it was open source.
Despite the need for Windows, I tried to do as much as I can on my laptop running arch
and my server running Debian.
And that's the end of the story of how I got into Linux.
And also the end of my first podcast episode.
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