Episode: 1333
Title: HPR1333: Introduction / How I Got Into Linux
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1333/hpr1333.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 23:40:13

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Hello, Hacker Public Radio, this is Matthew, the stay-at-home geek dad from Northern California.
This is my first contribution to HPR and I've been listening for a couple of months now
and been very excited about the content.
I have very much enjoyed a Hucka's series on Libre Office Writer, I'm looking forward
to him getting on to spreadsheets and impress and all that good stuff, so I am just going
to do a short introduction podcast and a little bit of how I got into Linux and then I would
like to branch out maybe in my next episode and do a What's in My Bag.
And then after that, I'm not sure.
I'd like to go on with, but I'm very excited about being part of this community and being
able to contribute content to all of you.
So bear with me as I said, this is my first recording, my first attempt at this.
Again, my name is Matthew and I go by the handle geek dad or stay-at-home geek dad.
I live in, as I said, in Northern California, in the Central Valley and I am a stay-at-home
dad.
That's my job.
I take care of my kids.
I have a one-year-old son and a almost three-year-old daughter.
And then I have an 11-year-old son who lives with his mom much of the year but comes out
to visit us here in California in the summer and on holidays.
So I have been involved with technology in one way or another as long as I can remember.
It started for me with high-fi equipment and stereo equipment.
My dad had a pretty decent stereo when I was a kid and I enjoy music a lot.
So I was interested in the machines that made the music come out of the speakers and when
I was in the sixth grade, I got my first component system and it had a dual cassette deck and
it had a CD player and an FM tuner and I just really enjoyed that.
And later on in my young teen years, I spent some time doing sound booths, sitting at
the sound board and working the sound booth for church and so I got involved with those
types of things and making recordings and using mics and leveling and all that stuff.
And so that sort of interest in how things worked and the machines and the electronics
that go into producing something just sort of stayed with me and when I graduated from
high school in 1993 and I'm aging myself there.
When I graduated from high school in 1993, I needed a computer for going off to college.
My first computer was an Apple Macintosh Classic II which the classic line, I don't know
if you all know or remember, was the all-in-one, the typical Mac, like the very first one,
the beige sort of stretched out cube with the grayscale monitor on the front and a floppy
drive slot on the front and then I had a keyboard and a mouse and it was running system
7.5 and it was awesome.
I loved that little machine and I took it to college and discovered the internet.
We had dial-up access to a, let's see, was it a AIX machine, anyway, that was our dial-up
access and we had shell access and then the campus was running a 56k frame relay connection
to the internet and boy, we thought that was just fast back in those days, kind of sound
like an old timer, anyway, I enjoyed getting on BBSs and telnet, telnetting into Bolton
Boards and sending email and I ended up getting a job with the campus telephone telecommunications
department and I learned about phones and fixing phones and running phone lines and
troubleshooting phone circuits.
We had our own physical plant on campus and our own switch.
We generated our own dial tone.
We had an NEC, big NEC switch in the basement of one of the buildings and we had cat
300 pair and 200 pair cables from each building to spread our phone system around and this
included all of the administration buildings, the offices, professors offices and all the
student dorms had a telephone line.
So I started working for telecommunications and learned how to pull cable and terminate
punch down.
My sophomore year, the college decided it was going to run an Ethernet network, the internet
had grown and it was becoming apparent that we were going to need higher speed communication
bandwidth on campus.
We ended up pulling fiber between the buildings and I learned how to terminate fiber and we
had cat 5, we had cat 5 drops to every dorm room, we had multiple drops to every classroom,
multiple drops to every faculty office and we had a good size, I would say probably 1600
node Ethernet network and that's where I cut my teeth with networking.
And our servers, the information technology people over in the library ran UNIX servers
and probably Linux, I don't even know at that time, this was in the mid 90s what they
were running but I know that my friend John who was the head of the information technology
department always had multiple terminals up and running and whenever I logged in to
my shell session he was always had at least one or two sessions logged in.
But as far as that, that was the only exposure I had.
The AS400 mainframe was still in the administration office and so many of our admin people needed
to run a terminal emulator so that they could log into that AS400.
So I started learning about networking and TCPIP and doing a bit of routing and not a
whole lot, I wasn't really getting into that part of it, mostly physical plant.
But I was still using Macintosh, I had swapped my friend of mine, actually became a girlfriend
and then I'm now married to her, had a pretty nice Macintosh and it had a color screen and
it was a little bit faster than mine and she didn't care much about computers at the time
plus she really liked me.
So she traded me in computers for the semester and I ended up using that machine and she
used my classic two to write her papers and things.
But I got into Mac networking and we actually ran two separate networks back in those days
because Apple wanted to run its own protocol over the network.
It wasn't using TCPIP there in pre OSX days, OSX 10 days.
So yeah, we had Apple Talk network and we had TCPIP network for the PCs and just went
along and went along and that was what I knew about.
So after leaving college I got a job with an educational technology company in the Phoenix
Arizona area and we ran labs at some charter schools and did text port and we did some consulting
type work.
So I got to do all of that and I learned a lot about Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 networking
because this was the end of the 90s and that's what we were doing in the schools because
it was tested and Windows 98 came out while I was at that job and so we learned how to transition
over.
But I learned about writing batch files and you know, when I and I files and all that
and stuff or getting drivers loaded and things that boot for Windows so I was learning more
about how computers worked and it up purchasing a new computer for our home which was a Windows
98 machine and then when that machine died I ended up with a Mac, an EMac actually running
OSX 10 and it was in those days in the early 2000s that I went to the library.
And I found a book on something called FreeBSD and it had a disk in the back of it and
this was FreeBSD4 I want to say maybe 5 and I took it home and I loaded it up on a
spare machine and I just thought it was cool that it was something that not everybody else
had.
Like everybody ran Windows and I knew a lot of people that used Macs but I didn't know
anybody that was using anything besides those two.
So I got this FreeBSD box going and it ran KDE3 was the desktop environment and I just
browse the net and send email and didn't really do anything spectacular with it.
I just used it like I would use any other computer.
So you know that's how I got associated with the concept of FreeSoftware.
I had of course as I was reading online about FreeBSD I started reading about this thing
called Linux but it seemed more flash in the panty at the time and at the same time
more mainstream so that's kind of weird but I had just decided that I was going to be
a FreeBSD guy and I was going to do everything with FreeBSD and those Linux guys could
just you know go be popular and I was going to be just hardcore which as I look back
now I realize how kind of silly that is sitting where I am today but anyway I worked with
FreeBSD for a long time and I used to I ran our first home server that served up RIPT
DVDs to play over our network was a FreeBSD server and it was a 4 I might have been a 486
or a Pentium 1 anyway those were the days right and all it did was serve up these RIPT
these file folders that had RIPT DVDs and they weren't compressed and they weren't you
know converted into any other format they were just straight RIPT on my Mac using Mac the
Ripper and then I would drop the RIPT folder onto the server and then connect to the server
from the Mac or from the Mac laptop and watch movies watch videos that way so gosh I'm not
even sure I'd have to think I probably should have thought before I started this recording
and when I first actually installed a Linux distribution but I believe it was in 2008 I think
it was Ubuntu and it was 9.04 I believe and I had gotten a new laptop from my wife for Christmas
I was getting ready to go back to school and I installed Ubuntu on this laptop and I used it
for all of my school stuff and it was great but I kept it as a dual boot with Windows Vista
because I couldn't get the audio to work I couldn't get audio to work in Ubuntu and so if I wanted
to watch a movie or listen to music or record something I had to do that in Windows and then I updated
to Ubuntu 10.10 and power management broke and it wouldn't even boot and I got really frustrated
and I reformatted and reinstalled Windows Vista and I said I'm just going to use Windows Vista
and maybe someday this Linux thing will get its act together
so fast forward to today and I have another laptop at Lenovo that I use every day
and I'm actually running Ubuntu Studio with XFCE 12.04 I have learned to stick with LTS releases
I have a 12.04.2 server in my house that runs my network my wife's laptop also runs as Ubuntu
I believe hers is actually running a raring and then I have a little netbook that I'm getting
ready to put elementary Luna on so I'm excited about that so that's sort of the short dish version
of how I came to Linux and how I learned to appreciate computers and I recently posted on Facebook
that I love computers more than anything else because they are the only things in my life that do
what I ask them to do when I ask them to do it so that's that's what I'll leave you guys with
as I am signing off on this first episode of hacker public radio thanks and as uh
hookah would say support free software thanks
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