hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0937.txt

Episode: 937
Title: HPR0937: How I started with linux
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0937/hpr0937.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 05:11:01

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Hey everybody, it's Riddlebox again and today I'd like to talk to you about I guess it's
more like tell you about how I got started with Linux.
My story goes back to grade school actually.
The first computer I ever played on was an Apple computer in grade school.
We mostly just used them to play organ trail and wherein the world is Carmen San Diego.
That was pretty much all I did on a computer all the way up until high school.
My freshman year was 1994 and actually I had no interesting computers at all and I even
paid other kids to type my papers for me.
I remember typing in the computer lab and using WordPerfect I think everything being
DOS based at the time or we were mostly in the DOS interface.
I didn't really use the shell too much when it was 3.1 or anything and then in 1998 my
senior year I had a teacher that told me if I wanted to do something during study
hall she would give me a pass to go to the computer lab and create some
pliers for.
I reluctantly took that opportunity and went and started to learn a little bit about
Microsoft Office.
I think it was 95 and I just kept playing more and more with it and then that year we
actually got our first computer in our house.
It was an old Packard Bell IBM clone.
I think it came with Windows 95 on it and then I bought Windows 98, the upgrade disk and
upgraded it to 98 and started talking to people online.
We actually had a 28-eighth connection, modem connection, dial up and I started reading
a lot about computers and I found IRC and my step-sister who was also getting into computers
and IRC at the same time started talking to people about Linux and we both looked into
it and everything and she eventually faded away from it but I kept reading more and more
on it and really liked the idea of free software and everything.
Those days like I said before we had a 28-eighth modem connection and I spent my evenings
talking on hash Linux help on free node and actually ended up talking to someone from
the Philippines and I was telling them I would love to try Linux but couldn't download
it because of our modem connection it would just never happen.
He asked for my address and a couple weeks later I had received a CD in the mail with red
hat 6.0 on it.
I tried to install it a few times and had some problems getting it to work, getting
acts to work, getting certain things to work and every time I would reinstall Windows again
and then I would keep Windows around long enough until I figured out what minor issue
I had with Linux and then I would reinstall Linux and kept just trying it eventually.
I was able to get everything working even the dial-up modem worked.
I was pretty excited I jumped online, went into IRC as root because I had never read
anything telling me not to and right about that time a couple of minutes after I entered
into hash Linux help and announced that I had finally gotten everything working on my
Linux install, my computer quickly shut down and then I rebooted and checked everything
and got back online and popped into IRC and my Linux box shut down again and I started
looking into everything and found out that there were ports that I definitely needed
to disable in order to stop people from being able to get into my system.
So after that I pretty much stuck with Red Hat or went to Best Buy store here in the
United States and actually purchased Red Hat 6.2, I think I paid $40 for the set which
came with a sticker to put on your desk and that sticker had all these command line utilities
and a short explanation of the utilities and that really helped me a lot actually still
have this on my desk and I look at it quite a bit.
From there you know I had a lot of trying times because it was the RTFM times of Linux
or any time you asked a question you heard RTFM and that's it you know or really sharp
answers people just didn't want to help you too much.
It was a difficult time to learn it.
I eventually ran into RPM hell with Red Hat and moved on to Slackware which I ran Slackware
for a long long time and then moved on to LibreNet which was basically Debian that had a lot
of utilities and a control panel to make life easier for you to administer it and sadly
the main developer died and his son didn't keep the project going.
Then I just started distro hopping, I tried Mandrake's juice, Red Hat, went back to Slack
where I think I even tried Caldera or something like that.
I ran College Linux for a while, started to actually get into their community and was
working with them on a control panel like LibreNet had and that project just kind of fell
apart but after that I went to a Ubuntu and I stayed on a Ubuntu for quite a while and
I recently switched back to Fedora and I have no problems with Fedora, I actually like
it better than Ubuntu and that's where I'm at right now.
I just deal with Fedora and I'm happy and that's pretty much the story of how I got into
Linux and what I've been doing lately so that's it, thank you and please contribute
to HPR and help put some shows together.
If you have any comments or anything, you can reach me at james.mitendorf.gmail.com.
That's M-I-D-D-E-N-D-O-R-F-F, thank you.
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