Episode: 2051
Title: HPR2051: My Linux Journey
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2051/hpr2051.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 13:45:03

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This is my first recording for HBR. My name is Tony Hughes. Some of you may have heard
me before on a full circle podcast, which I did with a couple of members of my Linux user
group a few years ago. But we've not recorded anything for that for a while.
When Ken sent out the appeal for new recordings, I thought I've got to do something. So I
thought I'd talk about my journey to Linux. I started using Linux in about 2006, but my
journey to experimenting with something that at the time I didn't think was very user-friendly
started in the early 90s. I first started using... Well, late 80s actually. I first started
using computers when I went back to college in 1987 and I used a 286 at college for CAD
Cam design. I subsequently went on to get a job, but computers didn't really take
much place at work until the early 90s when I started working in a health and social
care and started having to input data onto Windows 93... Sorry, not Windows 93. Windows 3.1.
And then subsequently Windows 95. In around about 1992, we got a home computer, but
that was for me wife, and that had Windows 3 on it. She did a dissertation on that computer,
but I didn't get a more modern computer until the late 90s when I went back to university.
And I started working on computers at the college, so I decided I needed one at home.
And by then internet access was starting to become more something that you could use
at home. So I went out and I spent £1400 on a Pentium 2, 350 with Windows 98. It had
128 Mega Ram and a 6 gig hard drive, which was pretty good at the time. Even though
Pentium 3 chips were around, that wasn't bad. Pentium 3 chips were actually a bit more
top end and out of my price bracket at the time. But subsequently I started getting into
what I could do on the computer. I started doing a bit of extra stuff other than word processing
and accessing the internet. I had a couple of friends who built or upgraded their own
computers, and they got me into Tinkrin. I added one or two things to my computer and
eventually got a new computer built for me, which I continued to tinker with. In 2005 I moved
from London back up to the North West where I live now, and I had an old computer of me
bombs given to me. That was a Pentium 2, 300. I thought, oh I'll have a tinker with this
and see what I can do with it. By then it was going to be a bit long in the tooth. But I'd
been reading a popular computer magazine here in the UK called Micromar and they had a page
called Beginners Linux at the time and I'd been hearing about Linux and eventually I got this
thing working and I stuck around about 2006. I think it was by the time I started faffing around
with this computer and I got it working with Exubuntu, managed to get hold of a copy of Exubuntu
and stick that on it. Although it was quite a low-power machine, I think it had 128 mega-ram,
but I upgraded it to 256 and it was a small hard drive. But actually with Exubuntu on it run quite
smoothly. I thought, oh it's not too bad this, but at the time I was still a regular Windows user.
By now I was on XP. I'd had a Pentium 4 2.8 at the time and my machine was strictly Windows XP
and I didn't want to look about with that because I used it quite regularly. I'd also,
when I came up north, I'd managed to get cable broadband so I had the massive speed of two
megabytes of two megabits, I should say, of download speed which was pretty good. So it did make
it feasible to download ISOs, but they were still relatively long when didn't get in down if you
were talking about 600 meg or 700 meg for an ISO. But I started experimenting with one or two
different Ubuntu distros and a couple of other LinSphere was still around and they had a
distribution that was free called FreeSphere and I played around with that. That was a
Debian-based distribution and it was quite user friendly and you can download codex and stuff from
there, App Store. I can't remember what it was called now, but it was quite good. It was quite
user friendly and easy to use. But in the end I moved away from that and moved on to Ubuntu or
its derivatives full-time. In 2007 I went back to uni and during the summer break I had a
bit of a sabbatical before I went back in September 2007 and during that sabbatical I decided to
see what FreeSphere could offer and whether I could build some computers out of spares I could get on
there. I subsequently managed to put together a few computers and I gave them away with
Exubuntu on them and they were quite well received actually. So the following year I did a similar
thing during the summer break. Still using Exubuntu because it was quite low weight and easy to get
working. I discovered the Medibuntu packages so you could get the all the codex and everything
working, DVD out the box and all that kind of stuff. I also started to experiment with
dual booting on my home PC so I used to run Ubuntu on my PC alongside Windows XP and gradually
over the next 12 months or so I found myself more and more using Ubuntu and less and less using
XP. I started to experiment with the different alternatives to software in Ubuntu and found that
most of them worked really good. I used things like GIMP for photo editing and things like that
obviously. At the time it was Libra Office. It was open office but now I use Libra Office
but there were a number of different programs that I managed to find that replaced all the software
or most of the software I was using Windows XP. And then in Spring 2009 I had a massive
crash of my computer and luckily I didn't lose any data because I was able to use a live
CD to rescue the data that was on the hard drive but when I reinstalled the computer I just reinstalled
Ubuntu. I didn't put Windows XP back on it and my home computer has been a Linux box ever since.
I currently run a Lenovo ThinkCenter. It's a dual core 2.6. It's a good number of years old but
does everything I want it to do and that currently has Linux 17.3 on it.
So over the years I've also managed to persuade several different people that Linux is the way
forward. I've got a bit of a reputation of being a computer fixer and several people come along
and ask me to help them with the computers and quite often they've got dodgy software on it
and no license or whatever and I say well I'll do it but I can't put Windows XP at the time
or whatever the current version of Windows is. I can't put that back on after and I explained
to them about Linux and offered them Linux Mint and several people have said yeah that's fine
and I've put Linux, I've shown them a laptop of mine with Linux Mint on it and they've liked it
and they've said well what do I do to use that and so I've showed them the different software
alternatives and showed them how to install software so I've ended up putting Linux Mint on
several PCs for family and friends and I can't think of anyone out of the you know half a
dozen or so people that I've done that for that use have reinstalled XP on the machine.
My wife currently uses a dual boot machine because her machine was an XP box and of course when
support for that was stopped eight well about 12 18 months ago she decided to let me upgrade
her to a dual boot so that she could still use some of the software that she uses in in Windows
but she can securely access the internet for things that she needs through the Linux and again
gradually she's found that Linux meets more and more of her needs and doesn't necessarily use
the now she's got Windows 7 but she doesn't use Windows 7 that much at all so that's my journey
to using Linux as an operating system I think I'll probably do another one of these in the future
about what I keep in my geek bag I'm quite heavily involved in the Raspberry Pi community locally
and I keep quite a bit of stuff in my computer bags in various forms so maybe I'll do one of
them in the next couple of weeks but thanks for listening and it's goodbye from me for now thanks.
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