Episode: 360
Title: HPR0360: How I found Linux 3
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0360/hpr0360.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 18:53:26

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Get ready.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Hacker Public Radio. How I found Lennox? Episode three. Enjoy.
Well, hello there. My name is AJ. I am from the Lennox Geekdom podcast over at LennoxGeekdom.com.
And this is my segment on how I got introduced to Lennox. I was first introduced to Lennox
actually by my co-host, Brian, and it all started when I moved out to the area I'm currently living in now
back in the summer of 2005. I believe it was in probably October and November, late fall early winter-ish
type time here in New York at least. And I had just gotten a computer from him that was
very reasonably priced. It was his father's old computer. And his father had a new computer and
I was like, I really wanted a computer and really needed one. And so, Brian was like, hey, I got
this one. That I was healthy of cheap. And it was like a hundred bucks straight up. And
it had three, six to five, 12 RAM regular DDR, ran off in NVIDIA 5200 graphics card with 128
megabytes of RAM. It had an AMD Athlon X-Somod processor that ran at about 2.1 gigahertz
single core. So, I mean, anything special? No, not by today's standards, not even close. It was
very, very obsolete. When we got it, it still had all this further stuff on it. And it ran
2000 professional. It gave me an idea of how old it was. But it worked. And at first, I had never
used Linux or even really heard of Linux. The whole concept of open source, everything like that
was totally foreign to me. But I've always been one who's been willing, hey, let's give a shot, see,
you know, well, why not? I'll try it. And so, as a result, he
decided, hey, let's load Linux on here. I mean, I wanted to, he'd mentioned we could do a Boo,
and then he wiped it and put Linux on it before he's like, oh, I have this X-Feedisk,
we could have updated it and that's ready to kill him. Because it basically wiped out any gaming
chances I had, but oh well, which is, which I am now running a computer, which has, which is
dual booting, and it is marvelous, much, much better. Four gigs of RAM and DDR2, dual core AMD
processor, which each core runs at about 2.8, 2.9 gigahertz, NVIDIA 9600, GTI believe, with a
giga-ram built in, I mean, so much better computer now. But anyway, so he wiped it and put Linux on it,
and I started off on Ubuntu, oh my god, how did I forget? Got to give it. Yeah, there we go. 7.10,
I am currently running Intrepid Ibex 8.10, and it was, it was just, I fell in love with it,
many people go into Linux thinking, oh, this is totally foreign. Look, I mean, they get used to
windows with the bar on the bottom and all that. But me, it was, I was just, I had, I always kind of
had interesting computers, but had never had a real way to get involved with it. So as a result,
I had never really been able to feed that interest and really get going. But when I met Brian,
when I moved out to this area, it was, he was kind of the fuel that fed the fire. I was kind of
a smoldering ember, and he really fed that fire and got me going. And, but like I said, when I got
started on Linux, I loved it. I loved the idea of not having to pay for anything. That was the
thing. When your only source of income is mowing lawns and snow blowing and maybe very, very,
irregular gifts from families or family, things like that, you're working on a limited budget,
free, totally free, freeze and beer, freeze and speech, all meetings of the word, sounds pretty
good in that kind of instance. So I really loved the idea, snatched it right up, and I've been running
it ever since. I've always run it for, oh, let's see, going on three and a half years now.
And I'd also like to give a shout out to the going Linux guys, because they are also people who
help get me going. So when I move to Linux, I spent the first couple of years, or I'd have to say
that at least the first six months to a year without any internet, which made it very, very difficult,
because I couldn't even do some of the most basic things, because I couldn't play MP3s, because
it didn't have the format, things like the org file or anything like that were totally foreign to me.
I was still very much in a Windows type mindset as far as formats went. So it was always trying to
get Debbie in files that I could install, that I could put on my flash drive, and that just was
absolute nightmare. But once I did get internet, it just opened up the world, and it was like
holy cow, that is amazing. And I've just loved it ever since, and so that's basically how I got
started on Linux. And I've used it, and eventually through different means, I just kept learning
more and more. I'm still learning. So anyone who out there who might think you've got a great tip
or anything, email me at going or at Linux Geekdom, excuse me, at ajatlinuxgeekdom.com, that's Geekdom
as in G, E, E, K, D, O, M, like Kingdom, but Geekdom, and email me and listen to my podcast. I mean,
it's a pretty simple straightforward type podcast. We joke around a lot on there,
where I'm 16, Brian's, I believe 18, I'm 16 and a half, he's 5 by 18 and a half. So I mean,
we're not old, but we try to bring a newer, fresher perspective to it. And we don't have a ton of
experience, but hey, that's why we're here, we're here to teach you what we know, but also learn
from you what we don't. So anyway, that's how I got started on Linux, and if you haven't,
yes, at least given Linux to try, I would definitely recommend, and I would definitely go with
you boon to it. So user friendly, the community is wonderful. So give it a shot and see how you like
it. And if you, if you like it, stick with it because it is definitely worth it. Well, anyway,
I believe Monster was the one who is putting this all together. So thanks for having me on the show,
and I hope I can contribute in maybe later episodes, and hey, anybody just dropped me a line,
and I'll be happy to do my share with whatever. So here's AJ signing off, talk to you later.
Hello again, ladies and gentlemen, and everyone else. This is 330, and a month's
rewintered me to record a little bit about how I got into Linux. Well, my buddy got me into Linux.
He, uh, because he had to leave school due to some medical stuff, his mom bought him the red hat,
seven Bible, and a 286 laptop, and figured it would take him the entire semester to get it up and
running. Well, seven pots of coffee and 24 hours later, he's got it running. He shows me, it's
console only because it was on a, you know, old crappy 286 with a serial CD-ROM drive.
So I wasn't impressed, but I had heard the word Linux. A couple of years later, I get a laptop,
and it was one of those, my mom had bought it off of somebody, and thought she was buying more than
she did. Couldn't get it to work, and basically told me, look, if you can get it to do something,
you can have it. Well, I got it to work, and it had Windows 98 on it, and
it's messed around trying to get it to play more than one MP3 at a time. Windows media player,
for some reason, just would not make a playlist. So I, you know, not really thinking about it or
anything. I installed college Linux, which is a, a slackware variant. I think the only reason I
installed it was because I was a freshman in college and thought that it was going to help me
with my being a college student. Now, you know, now thinking about it doesn't make a whole lot
of sense, but it did then. So I went ahead and installed it. It being slackware, I had to set
up a whole bunch of stuff myself, which, you know, being new to all this wasn't very easy. I learned
how to mount CDs and things like that. Had a real fun time with CF disk for some reason. It just
didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. But I got it all installed and everything, and
then started playing with, you know, live CDs and everything else. About four years later, I,
in a reinstall of Windows XP, which I had done several times, found out that my key was no longer
valid because I had installed it on, I had installed at that point about 80 times on about 15 computers.
So yeah, my key was no longer valid, and I was to call Microsoft to buy a new key to which I
had a long string of explosives and decided to just run Linux. So I've been completely Windows free
for about five or six years now, and I've become the free software zealot that you all know and love
today. Hey, everybody, this is Nathan from the productivelinics.com blog and podcast, and I'm
here talking about how I first got into Linux. Well, basically it was 2003, and I was in college,
and just getting really tired of all the Windows headaches. I was getting viruses and pop-ups,
and all kind of trouble. And every time it seemed like I would try to fix something, something
else would happen. And I was just getting so frustrated with the whole Windows experience that
I was seriously considering buying a Mac, but I didn't have any money. So naturally I started
looking at free alternatives, and there just aren't very many free operating systems out there,
except for Linux. And of course, there's BSD and stuff like that, but at that time I didn't
know about any of it. I had heard a little bit about Linux, so I started doing some research,
and there it was, and I downloaded Red Hat 9, and I installed it on my computer.
Not all of the hardware was supported out of the box, had a lot of trouble with sound,
had a lot of trouble with printing that kind of stuff, but I kind of stuck with it. I do
booted for a couple of years, and I just started learning as much as I could about Linux, and kept
on with it, and then I was really enjoying myself, but I always do booted for quite some time.
And then finally, the Linux kernel had come far enough to where it's basically supported
all of my hardware, and so I was able to actually do a Puppy Linux full-time, which is a really great
distribution, because I had a really old Dell laptop that I was using, and it just worked
really well, and that was a lot of fun, and I did a lot of cool stuff with Puppy Linux, but
as I got more and more into music, and into what would eventually become my career path as a
composer and as a career musician, I needed a little bit more power and a little bit more package,
diversity in order to do the kind of music production and stuff like that that I wanted to do,
and basically I wasn't really willing to spend all the time needed to compile all that stuff
for Puppy Linux, so I decided to jump on the Ubuntu Bandwagon, because I had tried Debian
before, and I knew that there were just a lot of packages, and that it was a solid system,
and I knew Ubuntu was based on Debian, so I decided to give it a shot, and I've basically
been using Ubuntu as my primary distribution ever since, and I guess that was in 2007,
when I finally jumped over to Ubuntu, and it's still going strong, I'm really enjoying it.
One thing I love about Linux is that I'm able to do all kinds of stuff in my field as a musician
at a much lower cost than I would if I was a Windows user. Of course, the downside is some
industry standard software doesn't run that great on Linux, but right now I've been pretty blessed
because I haven't had to use very much of that, and I've been able to do almost all my graduate
work in music with free and open software, so that's been great, and so I'm super appreciative to
all the opportunities that have been afforded to be to me by Linux, and I like to so much that
actually started a blog called productivelinics.com, and I like to post there about just different
cool stuff that I find that helps me get stuff done on Linux, and yeah, I guess that's out,
I guess that's it, I'm pretty much just a regular dude, and I like computers, and I was able to
get into Linux, and I'm sure I'm glad that I did such a great operating system. All right,
well, thanks for listening, take care. Hello, this is Verbal from Chicago, and I first started
using Linux in 1991, and I found out about it from an article in PC World Magazine,
the article was written by John C. DeVorek, and it was actually, he was actually talking about a
version of Agressio Linux, which was a live CD way back in 1991, and I didn't continue to use Linux,
I stopped maybe for about three or four years, because back then I was using that other OS,
but after those four years I went back to Linux, and I started using Slackware, I think it was
version three, and I've used a lot of other distros like, let's see, there was freeBSD, I used for
a while, and my first version of Red Hat was version 5.1, so that's how I began using Linux. Take care.
Hi, I'm Charles Olson from Mintcast, the podcast by Valenix Mint Community for all users of Linux,
you can find the podcast at Mintcast.org. This is how I found Linux. At the time I had been
using Windows and was mostly happy with it, but a friend of mine kept pushing me to try Linux,
he kept telling me it was better, it's faster, it's free, and finally he gave me a Linux CD,
so I partitioned my PC for dual boot and installed Linux, but it really didn't go well at all.
I kept running into problems, and if I needed to get something done I would just have to reboot and
go into Windows, but I slowly made progress with a lot of help from Google, and I finally reached a
point where I decided that if I could make the printer work, I could make a serious effort to
switch to Linux. At that time I had a Canon 3-in-1 printer, it was a printer scanner and copier,
I went to Google and did a lot of searching and finally found a driver that said it mostly worked
for that printer. I downloaded the file, extracted it, and read the instructions, but I didn't
understand a word of it. The instructions were written in what I like to call Linux tongue,
very heavy on Linux jargon. So I sent the file to the friend who had pushed me to try Linux,
and I asked, what do I do with this? He wrote back and said, read the instructions.
Now to be fair, I had not told him that I'd read the instructions, but I still found his
RTFL answer to be very discouraging. I felt like this was everything I needed to know about
Linux in one lesson. One, it doesn't work, and two, I'm on my own. So I booted back into Windows,
and I did not boot Linux again for at least ten months, maybe a year. But two things happened
that persuaded me to give Linux another go. One, Ubuntu happened. My friend told me about Ubuntu,
I went to the Ubuntu home page, and read about how it's designed to be easy, and it should
just work. That sounded like exactly what I was looking for. But the other thing,
more important thing that happened that persuaded me to try Linux again, Vista happened. I had been
reading articles about Vista, and how it had significant increase in hardware requirements,
and also read about the digital rights management, or DRM. If Vista wasn't sure if you should do
something, Vista would just disable it or degrade it. For example, CDs and DVDs, it played fine in
Linux, or even an XP, might not play at all in Windows Vista. So I tried Linux again. I like KDE
better, so I installed Ubuntu and started trying to switch over. I'd already been using OpenOffice,
Firefox, and Thunderbird in Windows, so those were an easy transition. And once again, I reached
the point where I considered the printer to be my milestone. At this time, I had an HP LaserJet
2605DN printer. It was a color and duplex, very nice little printer, and I didn't realize at that
time that HP had Linux drivers for their printers on their website. I could have just gone and
downloaded it. I went to Google, and spent a lot of time searching, I was having trouble finding it,
but I finally found a post in a forum where someone basically said, just plug it in. So I tried
that. Plugged it into the USB port, and a window popped up that basically said, hey, I found a
post script printer. You want me to set it up for you. So I clicked yes, and about a minute later,
the printer was set up. No CD didn't have to go download anything, it just set it right up.
Color worked, duplex worked, the printer was working flawlessly. So at that point, thanks to
Microsoft and Windows Vista, I was now a Linux user.
Hello, I am Jeremy. And I'm JD. And we're the host of the distrocast podcast, which
I could only describe as a bizarre mashup of the now defunct source trunk podcast mixed with
heavy doses of forechan and profanity and general social and acceptability.
Pretty much. You might know us by our former name sourcecast. Yes.
I first found Linux on DARPA net when I was talking to Linus over my private fiber drop over
the Atlantic in 1994 at Hilt from New York City, the Helsinki Finland. Okay, or I could have gotten
a new computer that was preloaded with Windows Millennium Edition. And to prevent me from destroying
it in a flaming pile of rubble, I had to do something, anything, to get rid of the most,
I could only call Windows Mee and the operating system abortion. You got a better term for it.
That's not bad.
But anyway, and so I ask my friends at the time, you know, hey, there's got to be something else
nearby. I was like, well, you can use a Mac and like, yeah, I've been no. And somebody finally
pointed me to Mandrake. And at the time, it was like Mandrake 7.0, 7.1. It was late kernel 2.4.
And I loaded up my machine and almost everything worked. I had some problems with my
Autogy sound card, a few other things. But I slowly progressed. I stuck with Mandrake up until around
10.0. And then I got a TV tuner card with the hopes of setting up Myth TV, at which point I found
out that really is a painful thing to do in Mandrake and Ubuntu and a whole score of distros,
really. And at that point, I went to Gen 2 for over a year. I still use Gen 2 on some of my
production come get some servers. But then I met this flaming pile. I mean my co-host JD,
who pointed me towards Arch Linux. And I have been using that exclusively on all my non-server
machines ever since. And it suits my needs well. I sort of describe it as Gen 2 with 90% of the
benefits without 90% of the hassles and general pain. And that's pretty much my condensed Linux story.
And so now I will turn it over to my flaming still. I mean co-host.
Yes, wait. I first got started in Linux around 1999. In 1999, I was big with experimenting.
You know, I was taking apart programs. I was coding a little bit on Windows. And you know,
being on IRC or wherever the hell I found out at the time, I, somebody mentioned to me,
Linux. So I decided to try it out. My friend actually burnt me a copy of Roughly,
Red Hat 6.0, suits the 6.0, I think. And I played with them, I installed them,
and simply put, I absolutely hated them. Because at that time, I was a complete noob. And the internet was,
well, perhaps not the internet so much, but everything was like, use them. It's so amazing
what perhaps Vi at that time. You know, use EMAX, use, you know, this was the time of No 1 and all
the stuff. And it was just so horrible. And then I found ManDriever as well. And that was a
little bit more enjoyable because back in the day, ManDriever had a GUI Control Center for
everything. And after that, I gave up for a couple years until I found Debian. And you know,
when I found it, it was the early days of apt. And it was just great. And I've been pretty
much using Debian ever since, probably, 2002. And, you know, currently I use Debian, I use Gen2,
I use Arc, I use the BSDs, I use, if it's a distro, I've used it. And that's pretty much the
simple version of my history with Linux. And see, there we go. We, how easy was that to record
for Hacker Public Radio? I mean, how hard could it be? Don't say that! To listen to JD and I,
review distros on a regular basis from the big ones like Ubuntu to the little ones you've probably
never heard of. Visit our website at distrocast.org. Who knows, we may even say something factual and
worthwhile in between the profanity and laughter. All right, episode three. It's been pretty cool.
I hope there's an episode four, but I need some more audio clips. I just record one, sent the
monster bee at Linux Crankside Info. Check the show notes for more information. And it's been fun.
And thanks for listening to Hacker Public Radio. This is monster bee signing off. Have a good one.
Thank you for listening to Hacker Public Radio. HPR is sponsored by Carol.net.
So head on over to C-A-R-O dot-E-C for all of the team.