Episode: 1318
Title: HPR1318: How I found Linux
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1318/hpr1318.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 23:29:10

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Hey, what are you doing?
This is something I'm one delivering another episode for Hacker Public Radio.
This is actually my fourth such episode.
I kind of did this in reverse as it is that I had been a guest of the story of science
some time ago and I had done asterisk revolutionary telephony platform at the astericon and I figured
I'd come back and do, finally do a Lennox, how do I have found Lennox or how I got into
Lennox.
Here it goes.
I came late to the PC game.
I am not a traditional computer person per se.
No computer science background.
I am an auto-dick deck which is in a few words someone who learned by doing it.
Many of you probably are.
I found my first computer or rather got a hold of my first PC in 1995.
In 1994 I was exposed to the internet via NCSA Mosaic web browser and of course the
very robust, venable Unix operating system was the introduction or at least for me it was
the internet and for a lot of other people as well and so having come in contact with the
Spark 1, Spark 5's of the Sun OS fame.
The now defunct Solaris, excuse me now defunct Sun Microsystems Corporation gave us those
hardware platforms which really stoked my interest in Unix and as I mentioned earlier it
was the internet and at that point the wide world web which caught my fancy and I really
needed to have a lot more or really want to get a lot more experience with the Unix
operating system so I needed to learn about file system management, ownership, file permissions
on your copy things to dock route of a web page and in those days everybody had to
tell the user name which is how students at school were able to have their own web pages.
And so once I got my feet wet, if you will, in Unix operating system I figured out that
I needed to have it at home and in those days having a Spark at home was prohibitive back
in the circa 90s would have it very expensive so they had to be some other way and someone
said hey you know what you may want to consider using Linux and I guess before I made that
choice and it was introduced me and I had PC at home in 95 finally was able to get my hands
on one and the PC was of the windows for windows for work groups 3.11 which was as important
to know that in those days the windows operating system was not a network the operating system.
The company Microsoft had no clue that networking was important the internet for that matter
was important they were trying to put everybody in some sort of proprietary container like
prodigy and those other people were doing at the same time and of course the AOL community was
also doing at the same time so there wasn't a lot of hope for me with windows for networking
windows for windows for worker networking 3.11 and so I just went ahead and took the advice of
someone I was working with and picked up a book called Linux Unleashed. Linux Unleashed was a fantastic
awakening for me because it had the Slackware CD in there the version 2.00 I believe it was with
the 1.2.13 kernel as I mentioned before up until that time my only way to work on a Unix based
operating system or a Unix-like operating system was to do this at school and I would have to say
that I experienced a Linux or rather the Unix Renaissance at my alma mater a foyer university in
Tallahassee and it was there that many of my fellow classmates, fellow hackers if you will got their
feet wet as well in the Unix and I learned a lot from many of them that were there and as a consequence
then stoked my interest in learning Unix at home and to do that as I mentioned before the only
way to do that at that time was getting yourself into Linux so I got the book Linux Unleashed
opened it up and I was the the one geek walking around with a fat 360 page maybe 400 page
document looked almost like a dictionary I had it on my arm and walked all over the place with that
I read it I've got involved in it immersed myself in it the most difficult thing for me at the
time to learn was interpreting chat scripts the chat script in those days were used to communicate
with the dial-up modems that were prevalent in fact I had a robotics 14.4
kilowatt I believe it is modem that we use and the chat scripts were the ppp chat scripts excuse me
we're designed to communicate with the modems I think I use it wasn't Kermit I did use Kermit but
in this particular case I used an encursion-based application that allowed me to communicate with
the modem itself and I can't remember that at the moment I was I do I'll put it in a show notes
but essentially that application allowed me to communicate with the modem and it was probably
the most difficult thing for me to comprehend at the time and how those chat scripts worked it was
like magic but if they did work eventually now I was able to connect to the internet and
actually start browsing the web from home on a different operating system at the time I was
still dual booting because I thought that I needed that other operating system on my computer
to do other work at the time the application features or rather the availability of
whole applications the different distributions were smaller than and they weren't always as
compatible so you might need to have certain things where like an office suite or you might need
to have some other application so I did some dual booting it wasn't so much later than I
started getting into this thing called virtual machines and I think there was sometimes like 99
I got my copy of VMware 1.0 and it was horribly slow because it was mismanaged in those days and
it was in its nascent form where virtual management or virtual machines took up so much memory
and in those days memory was not inexpensive and it was something that people tried desperately
to preserve in the mid to late 90s so it was a tough order so out of that whole interest in
Linux at home I learned a little bit about networking because obviously at the time I had one
desktop because it was pretty expensive for me to put together another box but ultimately I needed to
learn how to do some networking if I wanted to have other machines on a network or have an
understanding of how to get two computers to talk to each other and so of course as I mentioned
in those days we had Windows computers and it wasn't until much later that those Windows computers
and I say much later probably in the late 90s that those Windows computers began to get networked
and to not only network amongst themselves from computer to computer but also getting them out
onto the internet so when Windows NT 4.0 came into being there was a much more polished
type of experience if you were talking about a Windows machine if you want to call it polished I
think Windows NT took a page out of the BSD stack I think it took the TCPIP stack from BSD if I
wasn't mistaken someone might have more accuracy experience than I do but I thought that was a case
but anyway I began to work with NT in something called the yellow pages and I.S. to get these
Solaris machines to network with these Windows NT machines in labs and such so they could talk
to each other and authenticate the users that might sit down at those Windows computers to authenticate
themselves to the rest of the network so fast forward a little bit you know the Linux experience got
me interested in networking and as a consequence I could take that knowledge that I've experimented
with at home bring it back to the labs at school and people were pretty happy with that knowledge
that I had and I became one of the people that others would seek out for advice on how networking
should work it was funny it wasn't like that all of the students were interested in YP and NIS that
was more of a job that I created for myself working with some professors at school the students
were more so interested in dial up networking with Windows computers and the awful you know networking
stack that was Winsock that Microsoft had it was net boolean crap like that those are the things
that students were interested in getting to work not so much the underpinnings of it but just
getting the damn thing to dial and connect to the to the rotary system at school so I ended up
getting free meals I ended up getting a little cash you know a little music for some mixed tapes
I would buy and you know do that sort of thing on a on campus and so it became worth my
while to really learn how to get the stuff working for people so that you know they could connect
so we talked about the chat strips we talked about Winsock we talked about net boolean things
like that eventually I began to as I was working with Blackwear at home I eventually began to
branch into something called Red Hat 4.2 I actually set that up for some people at school
I did some work for some professors with 4.2 that was actually the platform where I installed
YPO the yellow pages and I S for this authentication assignment that I had and we did the
authentication we can actually tie in the the print quotas and such like that for each individual
lab because I think the overall problem we were trying to solve was to stop you from stealing
our paper or wasting paper as they were you know working lab and in midnight hours we needed to
figure out who was in there what they were doing and how much of the paper they were using because
the print quarter was very important so 4.2 was the platform that professor wanted me to use
and that's what I learned so I got a chance to learn not only slackwear but I got chance to learn
Red Hat as well fast forward 2000 2001 2003 I started to learn a little bit about Debian I got
involved with Debian on a humble so to speak my first Debian distribution was potato I believe it
was and I would later use Debian as some business deployments which I use now as a consultant
for small to me aside businesses primarily independent healthcare professionals I deploy
web services on Debian these days open VPN for authentication and data encryption and also
file management services back office services like Samba and things of that nature that's my
holy trinity if you will you know open VPN Samba and those types of things working together with
of course Apache and your lab stack a pretty robust solution to provide I would of course use
slackwear for those things as well but I think for from people they would rather me use Debian
because it's easier for them to to deploy packages so so quote unquote as they would think and I'm
not going to get into the dependency management I never have a problem with it but for others that
are deployed they would tend to use app get more so they're trying to understand things like SBOPG
or you know slack bills stuff like that that's a whole nother discussion but anyway I'm not much
about a distribution jumper slackwear has been my distribution of choice and it will contain
to be that for my home use and I'm not ashamed of that because I love slackwear and it's done a lot
for me taught me a lot about the Unix operating system for say at least it's the most Unix
like operating system Linux distribution that you can find in my opinion and it's taught me a lot
all great debt to Patrick and of course this restless slackwear team that has taught me so much
over the years these days the only other distribution I may play with would be sent OS because I
run asterix on that and pull deployment I also run asterix on OpenBSD at home I have delved a bit
into arch because the latest one of the one of the myth TV distributions runs on arch it used
to be not myth but now it's a arch based distribution that I might use and pretty much that is
my experience it has been my experience networking is something that I really enjoy
heterogeneous networks is the norm these days you have to be able to speak all kinds of protocols
and Linux operating system has taught me much about networking and the ability to get computers
to do what you want from a networking perspective not much of a script or I just hack at it and
get things to work the way I need but like I said earlier Unix was the thing that got me interested
in going to step further and finding Linux as an option and Linux became a lot to me in terms
of helping me with school in terms of getting money in my pocket getting me food in my belly
all that good stuff so that pretty much is my story of how I came to Linux or how I discovered
Linux I want to thank Ken Fallon Dan Washco and Clot 2 for inspiring me to tell this particular story
and I encourage others to submit their how I got to Linux or how I got introduced to Linux stories
I do find them interesting submit if you can't submit that type of discussion or show submit any
show of you choosing because we are running low on shows and I could proper radios a great service
to the community so I thank everyone for listening until next time sounds a man
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