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What Did You Do First With Linux?
ruphus13 writes "OStatic has an interesting article on remembering the first time you used Linux. Quoting: 'I'm not sure if the admission that I remember my first Linux installation much more clearly than any date with my first boyfriend or my first date with my husband is a really wise thing to put in writing. I will freely admit it wasn't quite as anxiety-inducing as a date, and the long-term relationship that sprang from it taught me quite a bit about myself, how I learn, and how to passionately load kernel modules at boot. So, what was your first Linux experience?'"
I tried to access the floppy drive. Eventually gave up, and re-installed Windows. That was 1998. I finally installed Debian Aug 2006 and it's been running on this machine ever since.
Windows is like a drug addiction. Sometimes it takes several tries to kick it.
I'd heard of Linux while at school, so during summer break I saw a book, "Linux Unleashed" with a copy of the latest Slackware (3.0) at the back. So, I bought the book, took it home, made the boot floppies, and proceeded to blow away the Windows 3.1 and installed Slackware 3.0 on the machine. Took a good 45 minutes (it was a 486SX2-50) but then, I was there. I configured my PPP dialer (took half the time than with Winsock dialer) and logged onto my ISP and proceeded to install ircII to then chat with my friends on IRC. I had an IRC star trek game to attend that weekend, so I logged into DALNet and then went to play my game, all the while enjoying the B&W plain jane interface. Then I flipped through the book and found the page talking about virtual terminals. ALT+F2 and BAM, I was then using Lynx to browse the web at the same time. I was in hog heaven. ALT+F3 and I was learning how to make an Xconfiguration script to try and turn on the GUI. then the magical moments, I typed startx.... and 5 minutes later fvwm came up! Rediculously slow compared to today, but compared to Win3.1 and OS/2 2.11, I was loving every moment of it.
I still have the hard drive from that old machine, still sporting Slackware 3.0 on it, with the 1.0.13 kernel in all of its glory residing as vmlinuz.orig.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
First time was kind of mandated by moneyless employer. With my own Windows Compaq laptop in hand, I flew to Atlanta and was greeted by a bunch of old Unix hippies. I was to write PHP/miniSQL code for them but had only one computer to do it on, mine. Problem was that I had windows and they wanted me to run RH. So, I totally wiped my machine and installed RH. Even at that time (years ago), I had no problem getting Red Hat installed (5.2?) on my presario.
Ever since then my tolerance of Windows has been in nothing but decline.
Long live The Penguin!!
-- A cat is no trade for integrity!
Up to that point, I never thought of myself in any way, shape or form as a logical thinker. In some sense, I'm really not. But I learned something about myself. I learned that things go wrong in even completely logical settings for no apparent reason -- but there is a reason, and searching it down, identifying it, and solving it is actually fun and rewarding. I can't write code, but I am quite skilled in digging around in it and bending it to my will -- something I never dreamed I'd like doing.
I must say that using Linux (manpages and all) has taught me a stack of confidence, logical thinking, problem solving skills etc as well as a lot about computers in general and how they run. I even run a PC repair business now as well as setting up free Linux boxes for disadvantaged students.
Has anyone else found that using Linux has really helped them develop personally in this way?
sudo mount --milk --sugar
A bit off topic, but extremely easy to do on any Mac.
First things first. Install ReFit to make the OS boot selection easier. Very nice boot manager for OS X.
Next, you install your Bootcamp, which will partition your OS X HD into two OS partitions (Refit first, OS X, and then Bootcamp partition last). Once completed, go into Disk Utility and shrink your OS X partition by whatever number of GB you want your Linux partition to be (Bootcamp should always have the last partition on your HD. If it isn't last, it doesn't work with the built in tools.
Install whatever flavor of Linux you like and ensure you install your boot loader on the actual Linux partition and not on any of your other partitions (usually in the 'advanced' setup during the partitioning process in distros I've set up. Check the documentation)
Rinse and repeat as needed for any number of OS's.
That's it in a nutshell. VERY easy to do...
Unusual. In this thread, /.ers compete with each other to try and be the earliest to use Linux. Where's Linus when you need him?
[FUCK BETA]
Don't use Ubuntu if you want to configure things yourself... Try LFS (Linux From Scratch)... Even Gentoo is fairly automated these days.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
My first time wasn't even an install either.....I think the install came during try #6 or something.
What was the first thing I did with Linux? Fail. Fail and give up.
Of course, I always got pissed at Windows a month later, and tried another flavor. On and off for two years, until I did the unthinkable....
I did a Gentoo minimal install.
So I guess the first thing I did with linux was watch Gentoo compile. (Guess that's the last thing I'll also do with linux, eh?)
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
I first installed an early version of slackware, back in 95 or so. I don't quite remember how many floppies it was, but a couple friends and I were able to split the downloads up between us. One boot floppy, one root floppy and a significant number of installation floppies (that we soon learned to copy to the HD before installing). We got this through a hole in the state library system's gopher access number.
I spent a large number of sleepless nights chatting on the 50 person(!) BBSs, facinated by the ability to chat with so many people at once instead of the one or two that I could with the better set-up local dialup BBSs. A little later I learned about ytalk and got to have more "personal" (wink wink, nudge nudge) chats with 1 or 2 people at a time again. :-D
Eventually, I met my wife on the Illinois Institute of Technology computer club's BBS, shadow. Yep, that annoying sound a modem makes was "the handshake o' love" to me.
Now excuse me while I go see if there are any kids on my lawn.
Early 1992, Manchester Computer Center (MCC) distribution on a half-dozen floppies, on a laptop with a 20 MHz 386 with external floating point unit, 4M of RAM, 40M hard disk, 640x480 monochrome display. Added a port of (then) Bellcore's MGR light-weight windowing system.
On an evening flight from New Jersey to Denver, I had the machine out with an analog clock in one window, was compiling something in another, and editing a document in a third. A guy headed back to his seat from the restroom stopped and yelled up the length of the plane, "Hey! This guy's got UNIX on a laptop!" Next thing I knew there were half-a-dozen people hanging over me, elbowing each other and some of the other passengers, all trying to see and asking questions at the same time. The flight attendants were NOT happy.
IIRC, recompiling the kernel on that machine took about 45 minutes.
Interesting... usually the "handshake o' love" only involves one person...
In the 1997th year, much Quaking was being done by myself, a young 2ltnapalm. I fragged and it was good. Yet not all was well in the land of the rocket launcher. There was this fell beast, Windows 95, which ever was watchful for any joy in the world, existing only to bring the blue hell to the screens of the earth.
"Surely, there cannot be this misery alone for the computers of the earth. For in the earlier days of home computing I cast off Windows 3.0, who was then but a pretender operating system, for DOS 5. But Windows has grown more ambitious if not more useful and its infection spreads wide and no retreat to DOS does it permit. Tell me, Quakers, are their no alternatives to this dreck? And speak not of MacOS, for it is a joke."
Out of the depths of IRC, from the servers of EFNet, the oracles of #quake did speak.
"Linux. For it is stable and the Carmack has decreed that Quake shall run upon it with joy in its heart."
"Carmack the Wise is a powerful programmer and much does he understand. Hark, I shall give this Linux thing a shot."
To the merchant Computer City, I did go and they had a boxed copy of Red Hat 4.2 (if my memory does not betray me) which I did buy. Upon returning to my abode, I did begin preparations for the installation upon my whitebox. Partitioning was simple enough. The choices which one needed to make were not difficult, but to one who was but yet a pup it, it was so foreign. Eventually, perseverance and much RTMFing did triumph. Linux was installed. But one other thing must be done. X.
Many were the incantations invoked and the curses hurled due to X. Long days were spent editing text and typing that accursed startx only to find my work in vain. And yet did I endure for I knew that Windows 95 was cackling in the darkness of Redmond, awaiting my defeat to consume my soul should I fail and never again would I be able to hold my head high amongst the geeks of the realm.
Always teetering on the edge of disaster, but never managing to destroy my machine (which the pages of man ensured me was possible), I one day found something new. Something unexpected. For after messing with mode lines and color depths and other things arcane, startx worked. A graphical user interface was mine!
"My heart doth rejoice in this success! I shall install Window Maker and Enlightenment and many others besides so that I may never be bored with the look and feel of this machine, for that is the crowning glory of this victory: I can have any UI I desire."
Feeling very pleased with myself, I looked over all I surveyed with great confidence, yet the victory was not mine alone. For this unnamed box had endured much in the trials of installation. Yes. "Endured much beyond the reckoning of the typical home computer," said I, "and not just endured, but thrived and in the coming days shall have many challenges to overcome, so henceforth let this machine be known as tankgirl!"
Many were the adventures of tankgirl and, now, ltnapalm. Running a website over a cable modem, a MySQL database server, and numerous other tasks that tankgirl did perform, singing all the while with her K6 233 and 128 megabytes of RAM. In time, helper machines were obtained so that less interesting tasks tankgirl would not have to do herself, for her processing time was valuable and wasted on other tasks. A 486 there was, scorned by many as out of date and useless, now raised from its nadir to its apex with Linux installed and became a mighty wall of fire, shielding the local area network from the depredations of script kiddies and other wearers of the black hat of crackerdom.
Many were the nooks and crannies that cptnapalm and tankgirl delved into together, from dabbling in C programming and shell scripting to kernel compilation and switching to Debian. Together we witnessed the horrors of sendmail.cf and learned the mysteries of bind. And Quake there was, of course, too.
After long years, time did takes its toll and its toll was death. Impoverishment prevente
My first experience installing and using linux was with Red Hat Linux 4.1. It was mostly out of curiosity as my younger brother had been using linux but I didn't expect much from a free operating system. At the time I was running Windows 95, Windows NT 4 and OS/2 Warp 4 on the same box so I was already well prepared the difficulties of a multi-boot setup and using a diversity of operating systems.
Its been awhile but I don't recall any major issues with the installation. It definitely required more tweaking than the other operating systems to get a working desktop, but as pretty much anyone in this forum knows there is a high probability of install difficulties with almost any operating system when you build a custom system rather than purchase a pre-installed system.
I don't recall the window manager I used at the time but it was a functional desktop albeit not as polished as Windows or OS/2. But something interesting happened, I found Gimp.
I had a large flatbed color scanner on a SCSI bus that I used in Windows and OS/2. In Windows I used the applications that shipped with the scanner and for OS/2 I purchased an image editing program, I don't recall the name anymore, in both cases the applications absolutely refused to use the full size of the scanner. The scanner was a full legal size 8.5x14 but the proprietary applications would only allow up to 8.5x11 scans. With a little research I found there were applications available for purchase that would use the full scan size but I was not in dire need of full legal size scans so I held off on the purchase.
When I used Gimp+SANE with the flatbed scanner it allowed complete legal size scans! My eyes were opened. In the proprietary closed source software world the extra scan size required extra cash, which seemed ludicrous and disingenuous as I doubt it required any significant code changes to implement, but in the open source world the software was written to take full advantage of the hardware's capabilities and it was FREE!
At that point I was sold. By 2003 I was only running linux based operating systems, my laptop, three desktops in the house, a couple of firewalls/routers and a few servers. During this time I have become progressively aware of the ridiculous demands of the closed source proprietary software vendors. They have become sick and demented on their own greed to the point where they've twisted the purpose of Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution from "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" into some bizarre protected and perpetual revenue stream. In this upside down world created by closed source software vendors research and development capital is spent not to advance the science or art but instead to create false limitations on there proprietary applications capabilities to create equally false product price points.
But the first thing I typed into the shell was:
man woman
Then I giggled.
My first *nix shell experience wasn't with Linux at all, but SunOS. First day at university, and I had received no instruction on how to use Unix at all, had read no books on it, had never even heard anyone _talking_ about it. All I had was a sign on the wall telling me how to sign up for a new account and log in.
So, I finally get to a shell prompt. And the only relevant experience I have is from using either CP/M and/or DOS. So there I am:
$ help
help: command not found
$ commands
commands: command not found
$ what the fuck?
what: command not found
So I start peering around the room. Guy behind me is also doing this. Sneaky look... hmmm... "ls" seems to do things. Try it. It works. So there I am. Only damned command I know is "ls". I know from somewhere that this system uses forward slashes to separate directories, so "ls /". "ls /bin". Start trying random programs in there. So I find 'man' by experimentation. Things start to get easier.
This rather peculiar way of learning Unix shell probably had the bizarrest of influences on my habits. For example, for e-mail I used 'elm', despite 'pine' being way more popular at the time. Why? It was earlier in the alphabet, so I tried it first. I used 'rn' for months before I found 'trn'.
Bah, that's nothing!
I overheard a conversation Linus had at the campus cafeteria back in 1990, when the Linux kernel was just an idea in his head. During the conversation, I wrote down the machine code on a napkin and executed it by hand, using a couple of salt shakers to keep track of the status registers.
You youngsters think you need a lot of expensive hardware to run software, but let me tell you, back in those days, we learnt to use our heads!
Yeah, yeah.
So I guess the first thing I did with linux was watch Gentoo compile. (Guess that's the last thing I'll also do with linux, eh?)
Is that because it's still compiling??
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
I used to work with a guy who, on a monday, said he installed gentoo over the weekend. Not too long after he said he was getting divorced. I wonder if it was related?
Flappinbooger isn't my real name