Episode: 918
Title: HPR0918: How I Started with Linux Part 2
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0918/hpr0918.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 04:56:19

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Hello, this is Frank Bell again with the second and last part of the story of how I came
to use Linux.
At the end of the last part I had successfully installed Slackware 10.0 with KDE 3.2 on
an IBM PC 300.
That was a, at the time, a 10-year-old first-generation Pentium computer.
And I was playing about with it, learning about the file system, and things like that.
But I didn't have any direction or any goal for using this.
Even if the direction would have simply been to surf the internet.
My workhorse computer at the time was my laptop.
And I was stuck with having windows on it because I needed it for work, and my work was
definitely a window shop.
The next step on my Linux journey came about a month and a half later I was on a business
trip to Chicago.
At the time I worked as the technical trainer for a company that manufactured security hardware
and software.
And my job was to train the technicians who were installed the system for our network
of authorized dealers.
The range of students could be anywhere from a wire polar who used little or nothing
about computers to advanced ubergeeks.
In this particular class out in Chicago, in a hotel near Midway Airport, there were
one fellow who I hit it off with real well.
We ended up spending lots of time together during the breaks just chewing the fat.
And he was definitely in the ubergeek category.
From the course of a conversation, he mentioned how he hosted a website from his home using
a WordPress blog and the no-ip.com dynamic TNS service.
This caught my attention.
This I thought would be a fun thing to do.
So I said about doing it.
I had an existing website at amembers.al.com address.
Indeed, the only reason I still had an Al account was because of my website.
Broadband had come to my home several years before.
So this sounded like something that would be fun to do and also allow me to save my
$20 a month or whatever it was costing about that time.
I remember checking my ISP's terms of service because I had heard that could be an issue.
And they did not ban having a web server.
They banned providing web hosting services.
Now, I think as most of us would interpret it, a web hosting service would be one that
would provide web hosting to third parties.
Not having one's own little server.
At least that was the position I planned to take in case I ever got noticed.
I also talked it over with my boss at the time, another uber geek.
And I remember his looking at me and saying, Frank, you're not the kind of person they're
worried about.
So I decided to proceed.
I knew I was going to need Apache, Massql, PHP, and Burl.
I was so green, I didn't realize that Slackware came with Apache, Massql, and PHP.
I had stumbled on the Burl and the midst of exploring the directories on the computer.
So I said about to install them.
I certainly duplicated some effort, but it was fun.
And I learned a few things along the way.
For example, I learned that when you install PHP, you have to configure it in such a way
that it knows where Massql and Apache are located, or else it's just going to lie there.
It won't be able to talk to them and they won't be able to talk to it.
Fortunately, I found a website where the site's author had written, if you install Apache
and Massql in their default locations, use this command to install PHP.
And I did.
And it worked.
It was like magic.
I felt so proud of myself.
I got out my backup copy of my AOL website, copied it over into the document root for Apache,
pointed my browser at localhost and bingo.
There was my web page.
Just the way it existed out there in AOL land.
The next step was to get the dynamic DNS working.
My friend from Chicago had recommended noip.com.
That's n-o-i-f-n-i-p.com for their service.
He had had great success with them.
So I just followed his lead and signed up for a free account.
And when you got the free account, you really didn't have much say over what your domain
name was.
You weren't registering a domain.
Your domain would be your noip username dot n-o-i-f-n-i-p dot i-n-f-o dot info.
So I got this address and the next step was to install the noip client application, which
came in flavors for almost every major operating system.
So I downloaded the Linux tarball, decompressed it, and followed the instructions to install
it.
And then I set it to start automatically at boot in the Etsy slash rc dot d slash rc dot
local file.
Basically by entering cd path noip2, which was the name of the application n-o-i-p and
the numeral 2, and cd rebooted the computer to make sure that worked and it did the application
started up.
The noip website had told me they could take a couple of hours for the address to promulgate.
So I impatiently waited for two or three hours, went to another computer in the house,
and entered my noip address, username dot noip dot info, and bingo, there I was.
That evening I called Opio on the phone and he tested it from his place in Illinois,
and he saw my website too.
I thanked him profusely for the inspiration, and the next day set up a redirection page
on mymembers.al.com location.
I then renamed the index files in the three directories in my website to something
other than index dot htm, because I wanted to keep a fallback position until I was sure
of the reliability of this.
I put a redirection page up on that site, so after 10 seconds we automatically redirect
a visitor to my own little server there in my guest room, tested that out, and it worked.
That was my first foray into actually using Linux to do computing as opposed to just
playing with it.
Subsequently I had some number of other learning experiences.
I decided to use this little server as also a file server for my house.
Now Mark did I do not keep any sensitive financial data on my computer.
My finances are just not that complicated.
Sometimes I wish they were, but they're not.
I just, you know, backup pictures, documents, and things like that.
So I ordered a second IDE hard drive and slapped it into that computer, formatted it, which
led me into my first hands-on experience using MakeFS.
I was just blindly following directions, but I got it right because I know how to follow
directions.
I had to enter it into F-stab manually because that version of Slack were used to 2.4
kernel.
There was no auto run of anything.
And then I had the pleasure of trying to figure out SAMBA to get this shared to the other
computers we had in the house.
And for SAMBA I will recommend the best reference I found with SAMBA by example.
I cannot recommend it highly enough.
It's a lot easier to understand, and about half the size of the SAMBA manual, it starts
with a very simple network and moves progressively into more complicated ones.
Since all I was doing was a very simple network, I found the configuration files that would
serve my purpose before page 20.
I'll have the link in the show notes.
I also hooked up my CD burner.
I had an USB external CD burner.
I love external CD burners because of the flexibility they give you to move around from
one computer to another.
I had an old ILMEGA external USB CD burner, and I hooked it up to this Slackware computer
so I could back up my website on a regular basis to external media.
Because one thing I had learned working for a company manufacturer software is if it's
not on external media, it is not a backup.
You have no protection if you think backing something up on the same hard drive is a backup.
It's a copy, it's not a backup.
So I struggled through making that work, and they eventually did, and started a long
love affair with K3B, which I still consider an excellent burning application, the best
in the Linux GUI world.
And I got a printer working using cups, all steps on my path to becoming what I would
now classify as an intermediate Linux user.
A summary of the rest of my path in Linux about two years later, I put Linux on my personal
laptop.
Again, it was Slackware because my company had decided to provide all of us in my department
with laptops because many of us traveled from time to time, so I no longer had to have
a Windows laptop to do company business.
And from that point, I have not looked back.
Now I have two laptops running Slackware, one of which dual boots for Dora, just for
the fun of it.
I have a netbook with Ubuntu on it from that short window of time when Delmaid it relatively
easy to get a machine with Linux on it.
The wireless has kept working, so I just kept Ubuntu on it because it has Broadcom wireless,
and I just haven't felt like the struggle that Broadcom can sometimes be.
But frankly, Ubuntu is headed for the dustbin pretty soon, I'm not happy with the direction
that's headed in.
I do have one win 7 computer because I think it's a good idea if you want to try to make
your living doing stuff with computers to have a Windows computer available because customers
will want things in native Windows formats and virtual boxes are all well and good, but
I like to keep it simple.
Some things I learned in my path towards Linux, the search engine is your friend.
It also helps tremendously to add Linux, or in the name of your distro to your search string,
and it almost invariably narrows the results so that you'll find something useful on the
first or second page.
My other primary resources, because I knew no one using Linux except OP who was my friend
who was half a country away, the Slackware Wiki at LinuxQuestions.org.
LinuxQuestions.org itself was a wonderful resource, and I got a lot of help at the Slackware
News Group, which was all.os.linux.slackware.
Extremely active then, it's still quite active, even though news groups seem to have been
going into decline over the past couple of years.
I must say I never encountered the holier than the RTFM Linux user of legend.
I may have existed somewhere, but not in my experience.
With the notable exception of two or three internet trolls on the news groups, trolls are
part of news groups.
Much like bones can be part of your fish polite.
I did, however, have some guidelines from my days using bulletin board systems or BBSs.
You almost could not join a BBS with getting a welcome page that contained these warnings,
so I'll pass them on simply because they served me well.
If you're considering posting a message to a forum or a news group, or in the old days
a phyonet conference lurked before you leave, read a few days worth of postings to get
a flavor for the environment.
Use clear descriptive subject lines.
Help is not a good subject line.
If you want support, always tell people what you've tried and what happened when you've
tried it.
This didn't work.
It's not a good problem description.
Don't be a leech.
Make sure you've tried something.
I tried searching for this on Google and I couldn't find anything.
Can someone point me in the right direction that it at least shows you made some effort?
And one thing to do when all you're lurking before you're leaping is to identify the
trolls and don't feed them.
You notice I left out the part about getting my blog working.
I see on the hacker public radio website that how to set up a blog is one of the topics
on the wish list.
So I thought I'd make that at least my little piece of knowledge about that my next topic.
Oh, and a final word about my website.
Eventually it I grew that old PC 300.
I migrated to Opinion 3 and a couple years after that to Opinion 4.
In the process I got my own domain name and now the website exists out on a hosting service
on the internet and the Opinion 4 I am using as a file server running devian squeeze.
Thank you very much and I'll be talking to you again.
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