Episode: 2032
Title: HPR2032: How I Came to Linux
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2032/hpr2032.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 13:32:26

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This is HPR episode 2032 entitled How I Came to Linux.
It is posted my first time post SteamCainer and is about 14 minutes long.
The summary is, Steam tells his story on how he came to be a Linux user.
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Howdy folks, this is 5150 and I'm here to tell you about Kansas Linux Fest 2016,
which will be happening on the campus of Wichita State University, May 21 and 22nd.
KLF started last year with the idea that a first rate Linux event could be hosted in the underserved midwest.
I think KLF 2016 is the further realization of that dream.
The full schedule is now available at KansasLinuxFest.com.
But highlights for me include Alex Wrez from Rackspace and Ryan Sypes from Kansas' own MyCraft.AI Project.
There is also a talk on Sunday morning about promoting free software and the role of the hobbyist podcaster.
Attendance is without cost, but donations may be made on the sponsor page.
Guess who arrived Friday evening may attend a free showing of Revolution OS.
The Saturday Night event will be hosted headshots of Video Game Bar.
I know it seems a little late to put the word out,
but please don't miss this opportunity to interact with your fellow open source enthusiast and professionals
in the only venue convenient to the central United States.
Hello, my name is Steve and you are listening to Hacker Public Radio.
I've been a listener of Hacker Public Radio for several months now,
but this is my first attempt at contributing a show.
Hopefully it will be the first of many.
I decided that from my first show I would add to the How I Came to Linux series.
Before I do that, I'll tell you just a little bit about myself.
I live in South Central Kansas and the United States near the city of Wichita.
My day job is Systems and Network Administration for a local internet service provider.
My wife and I live outside of town on a small acreage where we can keep a garden and a horse.
I have a wide range of interests and hobbies, most of which are, shall we say, Hacker Friendly.
One of these is amateur radio. My call sign is KD0ijp.
Another big hobby of mine is model rocketry. I'm actually hoping to put together an HPR show
on that subject sometime in the near future.
Anyway, to the main subject of this show, my road to Linux.
I would say that I'm an avid Linux user. In fact, I use some form of Linux for easily 95%
of my computing activities on a daily basis. Unlike many Linux users, however,
I would not say that I am a Linux evangelist. While I might suggest the use of Linux to someone,
or I might mock Windows users when they're having those typical Windows problems,
I don't generally care to spend much time convincing others that they should use Linux.
I have this little mantra that I'm rather fond of that goes like this.
Use whatever operating system you want. Just don't ask me to fix it.
So how did I come to be a Linux user? My first computing experience that I remember was an
elementary school in the late 1970s or early 1980s. For a while, we had a Commodore 64 computer,
and I used it a little bit. I wasn't really that much interested in it at the time.
When I moved on to middle school and high school, however, we had an Apple II lab.
This is when I first started taking an interest in computers. We had a couple computer literacy
type classes that I took, but I went beyond those and started tinkering with programming
and more advanced topics on my own. During my sophomore year in high school, probably around 1986,
I was able to use some money that I had saved up to purchase an Apple II C computer of my own.
I got fairly heavily into basic programming as well as some assembly programming,
as a senior in high school, I took a computer science class and found that I pretty much knew
more about the computer than the teacher did. After high school, I went to a small two-year
college and began studying electronics technology. I was also exposed there to some
DOS-based PCs. This was still pretty much before Windows, or at least before Windows became popular.
I took a couple programming classes there, but that's about it.
After those two years, I transferred to Kansas State University into the electrical engineering
program. As part of that curriculum, I took some more heavy-duty programming classes and began
to learn about the computer systems available on campus. At that time, K-State had a mainframe
computer system running some form of VMS operating system, I think. It was, I was able to get an
account on this system and access it via serial terminals in various computer labs around campus.
Soon after that, though, I learned about the Unix system that was operated by the computer
science department. I don't know what the hardware was, but I believe it was running some form
of SunOS. This Unix system was available through various network terminals around campus.
They also had a dial-up terminal server that I could use to dial in with my modem in my PC
and access the shell. By this time, I had purchased a PC computer with a 386 SX running Windows 3.1.
I used the Windows terminal program and some other software to connect to the Unix show.
I used this system for some programming assignments and stuff. I also learned about e-mail and
using it news groups. Using it news groups were pretty popular back in that day.
I learned how to download and upload files to and from my PC using things like X modem, Y modem,
and Z modem protocols. K-State also had server labs around campus full of Sun Spark stations.
These provided my first experience with X Windows and graphical interfaces on Unix systems.
Near the end of my time at K-State, I began hearing about this thing called Linux.
That would let you have a Unix-like operating system on your own PC.
By now, I had upgraded to a 486 computer and was able to establish a TCP-IP connection to
the school network using a modem and the PPP protocol. I was still using Windows 3.1 and I
think I used the trumpet wind sucks stack to make the TCP-IP connection.
My first attempt at installing Linux was to download a set of 20-25 floppy disk images
of an early release of Slackware. I wrote those images to floppy disks and then installed them
one by one. And if I remember right, you know, like on disk number 15 or something like that,
I had a corrupted file, so I had to redo that disk and start all over.
In the end, though, I was successful enough to boot to a login prompt and log into the system.
Soon after that, I found the book called Linux Unleashed and it had a slightly newer version of
Slackware on a CD in the back cover. So I installed that and by reading the book, I was able to get
further in my discovery of Linux. I also began diving into configuring X Windows, which in that day
was not for the faint of heart. I spent quite a few hours tinkering around with
mode-line configurations and learning about my monitor specifications and that kind of thing.
But I did finally get X running pretty well. At that time, I had the TWM window manager
on the Slackware install. And that was okay because I was used to that on the Sun Spark
stations on campus as well. But beyond that, I really had very little software to use and I didn't
quite understand how to get software or how to do much beyond booting the system.
So really, I mostly continued to be a Windows user at that time.
After graduating from college, I upgraded the Windows 95. I continued to have Linux kind of
lurking in the background and I wanted to use it more. But I just didn't really understand how.
Everyone's in a while I would boot into it and tinker around, but that's about it.
The next turn of events came when I started working for an internet service provider.
And this ISP was using BSDI, which is a commercial version of the BSDOS running on X86-based servers.
Even though we were using Windows workstations, we had a number of tools and scripts that we used
on the BSDI command line and connected to the server with telnet and then later SSH.
So in this way, I learned a lot more about Unix command line tools and the environment in general.
After several years, I was able to move into a systems administration role and was able to have
my own BSDI workstation running X and the FVWM window manager.
However, during this time, I also decided to pick up Linux again outside of work on my own.
I obtained a then current version of Slackware, which I believe was version 3.0 or possibly 3.5.
And found that it had come a long way since my first attempts a number of years ago.
It was a much more complete system. This much easier to set up had more usable software.
Of course, I was also beginning to learn how to build software from source.
It was kind of at this point that I started to transition my daily computing activities from Windows
to Linux in earnest. So much of my computer usage from the time I started using computers was
programming. And as I was rediscovering Linux, I was also learning how to program in a Linux
environment. I had learned C in college, so that was an easy transition. I also learned scripting
languages such as Pearl and Bash. Since I was an ISP industry, I was also learning how to
configure all manner of server software from web servers to mail servers to FTP servers and so on.
I was also learning more about networking and firewalls and those kinds of things.
In 2001, I changed jobs to a different ISP this time as the senior systems and networking
administrator. This ISP had been using Red Hat for a couple servers. As we needed additional servers
and as those servers needed to be replaced, I was able to build everything using my preferred
Linux distribution, namely Slackware. I'm still working for this ISP today and I now administer
around 80 Linux servers. Some of these are bare metal servers and others are virtual machines.
Most of these are still running Slackware, believe it or not. I do also run a couple devian servers.
I know that in this day and age, Slackware has lost a lot of popularity and I know why that is.
Still, especially for server environments, it has treated me extremely well. It is exceptionally
stable and easier to maintain than you might think once you develop some processes. Over the years,
I've added some customizations that have made it work for me. Until recently, I've also been
using Slackware as my primary workstation environment as well using the XFCE desktop which comes with
that distribution. That too has worked pretty well for me. One of the main knocks against Slackware,
of course, is the lack of software package repositories associated with the distribution.
If you want to use software outside of the base distribution, you have to build it yourself
for the most part. This is made easier by a community project called Slack Builds.
This is basically a library of scripts that is maintained by the community that can be used
to build Slackware packages of software from Source. This actually works pretty good and for
the servers that I run, it's pretty easy to maintain. I was, however, finding that for the workstation
environment, simply the sheer number of packages needed to do everything I wanted to do was becoming
a bit of a burden. I have recently been branching out and trying some other distributions,
particularly for the workstation environment. I'm currently using Linux Mint on my laptop,
which I'm using to record this show, actually. I mentioned that I'm an amateur radio operator.
For my HamShet computer, I'm using Debian 8, which is Jesse, with the HamRadio PureBlend
Project Distribution. This is maintained by the HamRadio community within Debian and is
basically stock Debian with a bunch of HamRadio software installed by default. It uses the
desktop and it works pretty well also. In general, I haven't been a distro hopper. I tend to find
what I like and stick with it until it doesn't do what I need it to do. I also don't tend to spend
too much time on the bleeding edge of Linux. For the most part, my goal is to run a system
that does the things I need it to do and in which I understand the inner workings well enough to
be able to maintain it, secure it, and troubleshoot any problems that come up. In other words,
you could say that I'm more interested in using Linux than in learning about every detail
and nuance. I do also maintain a couple versions of Windows as VirtualBox machines that I fire up
every once in a while. There are a couple of tasks that I still have to use Windows for, but they
are fairly rare. I've also come to appreciate Apple OSX and I even had a Macbook laptop for a while,
but really, when I want to get something done, I find that the Linux environment is still the
most suited to my needs. So that's really my story of how I came to Linux. I hope that you found
it interesting or enjoyed it and maybe found it useful in some possible way. Please leave any
comments or suggestions that you might have. So with that, I will sign off for today and hopefully
I will be able to produce another show soon. So this again is Steve and you have been listening to
Hacker Public Radio. I hope everyone has a great day.
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