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Debian Founder: How I Came To Find Linux
An anonymous reader writes: Ian Murdock has pretty solid open source cred: in 1993 he founded Debian, he was the CTO of Progeny and the Linux Foundation, and he helped pave the way for OpenSolaris. He has published a post about how he initially joined the Linux ecosystem. Quoting: "[In 1992], I spent most evenings in the basement of the MATH building basking in the green phosphorescent glow of the Z-29 terminals, exploring every nook and cranny of the UNIX system upstairs. ... I was also accessing UNIX from home via my Intel 80286-based PC and a 2400-baud modem, which saved me the trek across campus to the computer lab on particularly cold days. Being able to get to the Sequent from home was great, but I wanted to replicate the experience of the ENAD building's X terminals, so one day, in January 1993, I set out to find an X server that would run on my PC. As I searched for such a thing on Usenet, I stumbled across something called 'Linux.'"
How did you come to find Linux?
I was studying for my M.Eng in electronics and we were using Sun workstations for EDA software. After I graduated, I joined a startup company that produced chip layout software. We had purchased a bunch of Sun workstations, but they were going to take weeks to arrive.
So we loaded up a few PCs with Slackware Linux from about 40 floppy disks (took two of us an entire day to finish all the installations) and started our development on the PCs while we waited for the Suns to arrive.
so i loggoed on to male.alphabet.com.... what a surprise
I knew some FreeBSD guys but nobody wanted to help me install it and back then it was horribly confusing. Then I saw slackware, downloaded the A, N, and D floppy sets, and followed the prompts... and I was running Linux on my 386DX25 with 8MB of DIP DRAM, and 120MB IDE disk.
Today, Linux still wins out over BSD because it's easier.
BSD fans will tell you that this is a feature, and then five minutes later bitch about something they don't have because BSD is less popular
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Back in '91 a friend at Uni showed me an announcement on a mailing list of a minux like PC unix clone called "linux".
I didn't have a PC at the time so didn't try it.
In fact it wasn't until August '94 and kernel version 1.0.13 that I started using linux.
I consider myself late to the party.
Now I run ubuntu on my server, Mint on my desktop and laptop.
I've been using Linux for over 20 years and cannot imagine being without it.
At the time I had this big expensive intimidating Solaris box on my desk that I hardly dared to touch.
Linux seemed a lot more accessible.
I tried something called SLS (Soft Landing System) to installed it but failed.
A few months later I found Slackware (1.0) and I tried again together with a colleague, this time I was successful, kernel version 0.99 or something, that must have been 1993, 22 years ago...
I've been running one or more Linux boxes (usually headless) ever since.
In the early 90's a coworker loaned me a handful of 1.44MB floppies; I think there were thirteen of them. I had to reformat the hard drive that was running Windows 3.1 and install both OSs from diskettes. I don't miss those days.
In 1997 a friend told me about Linux so I checked out a book from the library (the book had a CD with Slackware). I installed Slackware (XFree86 worked out of the box*!) because it was free. Soon I was using Linux because it was Free. Eighteen years later I continue to run Linux because it is Better.
* I later switched from Slackware to RedHat because I could not figure out how to get rid of panning!
Life is short; think quickly.
(1996) Newly minted CNE two weeks on the job. My boss handed me a box that said Caldera Linux on it and said; 'get this setup. The Sequent box(ironic) is getting full and a bit flakey and there's no budget for a replacement.'
I was like; 'WTF is this? I barely know anything about the Sequent system, I'm not qualified for this.' He said; 'you'll figure it out. Just get it done.' Boom Linux!
Almost 20 years later, I'm still using Linux almost solely. But, I'm still no where near capable of launching my own distro. Hell, I can't even figure out systemd. WFT!
I was a Debian user for many users. For most of that time it was the best OS I'd used. It was stable, it was reliable, it was easy to safely update, and I knew I could rely on it. Then that all changed. Systemd was integrated. I'm open to new technology, so I was willing to give it a shot. However, as I soon found out, this was a horrible mistake. After a Debian update installed system I had nothing but problems. This update also updated the kernel, so I chose to do a reboot. Long story short, my system didn't completely boot due to systemd. I don't remember the specifics of the problem, since it was some time ago, but I remember wasting a lot of time trying to find out what was wrong. I must have fixed it somehow, because I continued to use my Debian system for a few months after that. But very frequently I'd run into problems with systemd preventing a proper boot of the system. It was particularly bad after updates, and frankly I just ran out of patience with it, and with Debian for including it.
Seeing as how pretty much every other Linux distro has moved to systemd, I decided to try FreeBSD instead. I'd used FreeBSD at work many years ago, but hadn't used it since. What a breath of fresh air! FreeBSD 10 is a superb system, and I'm glad I switched to it when I did. In fact, I regret not switching earlier! It has given me everything that Debian used to give me, but it doesn't have system, and it's extremely reliable and stable. Its packaging system is great. I've asked for help on their mailing lists a few times, and the replies have been courteous and prompt. Everything about FreeBSD has been such a good experience for me. While Debian and Linux did give me many great years, that time has come to an end. I'm much happier with FreeBSD now than I ever was with modern Linux distros.
Living in Allston in the early 90's and some friends of mine (L0pht, NewHackCity, CDC, etc...) ran all kinds of boxen. Solaris, Mac, and something brand new called Linux. I loved the power and efficiency. I loved how configurable it was. I wasn't even in college at the time (broke adult).
Slackware on a 486dx4-25. Gotta admit, I miss the days of hacking hardware to get it to do what you want.
God, remember when Linux fit on a floppy?
"Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
I used UNIX and "The Internet" back in the 1980s, but Linux didn't come to my attention until the mid-1990s when I encountered a Slackware box-set of CDs that a colleague was playing with. I subscribed to the updates for a couple of years, but found that Linux "wasn't ready for prime-time" at that point, it was problematic getting a reliable modem connection to the Internet (yes, it could be solved, but after hours of using my Windows box to browse the internet for solutions for the Linux problem.....) So, I would install each new release, play with it for a few days, then wipe it. After a couple of years of being told that sound support is unimportant and "real" people have ethernet connection to the Internet, and nothing really useful in the distributions that wasn't readily available on other platforms I already had, I cancelled my subscription.
I didn't really start using Linux in earnest until 2005-ish when I got full AMD 64 bit support in a home system I built up with 4GB of RAM - using the only "true" 64 bit OS available at the time: Gentoo. I kept Gentoo around for about 5 years, but was migrating to Debian/Ubuntu as my distro of choice on work and eventually home systems.
Being a kid with no money I was constantly pirating Windows versions for gaming and for keeping my computer hermit life going. At 15 I found this thing "SuSe Linux 6.0" in a bookstore that came with a huge manual and on several CDs. I paid a bunch of my pocket money for it, took it home and gave up immediately because whatever it was wouldn't recognize my sound card. I didn't have internet access back then, especially not on that machine with this "Linux" thing on it. Nobody I talked to knew what Linux was and I ran out of ideas on where to find help. That I wouldn't be able to use my computer the way I expected anyway wasn't clear to me until years later. I went back to my pirated Windows 98 or whatever it was and dove back into gaming/warez.
Several years later, 2006 to be exact. I again found myself struggling with some Windows XP activation issues, poor performance and a near constant effort of maintenance to keep the POS (last word is not "Sale") running. My gaming days where over, I'd gotten into more outdoorsy, drug-typie, other sex-experiences and decided that I'd give it another shot. So I got another hard drive (this time eager to at least keep a working OS around while I tinkered). I Installed Ubuntu 6.06 and dove into the rabbit hole. I had no clue at first and it took about two years until I somewhat knew what to do and how to fix stuff but boy was it worth it.
Now, almost ten years later my main machine still runs Ubuntu, I use Fedora and various other varieties at work. I Work for a company that develops Linux centric software. It's been a fun ride, I've been provided a Mac by my employer and run Win10 in a VM for various things but nothing compares to what Linux has given me - freedom. Nothing beats that feeling the first time I realized that it had been four years since I had switched to Linux at home and missed nothing.
In high school (circa 2002) I asked a coworker for an alternative to Internet Explorer because it made web browsing so slow. He told me he found this program called Firefox which was fast "because it was open source". I tried it and when I told him how fast it was going for me, he told me "there is a whole open source operating system! You should try it!"
And here I am.
Somewhere in mid 92, playing around with the SLS disks I found on my favorite BBS. The sysop later posted the "new" Slackware disks, and I never looked back.
It was so great then, I could have a full Unix workstation and not pay a metric shit-ton of $$$ for media and license.
-> I dislike sigs...
I was a young adult about to head out in the world, and I had a machine running Windows XP, and it was terrible, so I put this thing called Slackware 1.0 on it. Just kiddin', it was Ubuntu. Turns out I'm new to the game.
Heh, reading through these comments felt like those testimonials at pentecostal churches, "I found Jesus when..."
I was working for a VAR that used Xenix and later SCO Unix and AT&T Unix (NCR Towers). Somehow I ran across some GNU tools. I got a tape of some GNU utilities. In any case I had become familiar with GNU. I started to hear about Usenet and wanted to get on the internet. I got a prodigy account and subscribed to some Unix newsgroups. Somewhere I saw reference to Slackware. By that time I was using a local ISP that has a limit on how long you could stay connected but unlimited from midnight to 8 in the morning. I started a diskette downloading at midnight every night for a couple of weeks to download all the diskettes.
I had a 386sx system cobbled together from parts. I installed and was impressed that I had an actual running unix like system. I played around with it for a couple of years. In January 1996 I started a local ISP/Web hosting and web development company. Not sure if I trusted Linux for production I bought two servers. On one I installed the commercial BSDI Unix system and on the other I install Red Hat 1.0.1 I believe. I set them up in identical configurations (as much as possible). As we grew and added servers it was all Linux. We ended up hosting hundreds of web sites and thousands of email accounts. I started taking old PCs and installing Red Hat along with Linuxconf (not the crappy version that came with some versions of Red Hat, but downloaded and updated from the maintainer). I set these up for most of my local business customers running their own email/proxy/NAT gateway they could self manage with the Linuxconf web interface.
I was all in with Linux in every part of my job until 2001 I was offered a job by one of my customers. The hiring manager told me they were 100% Microsoft and would never use any Unix or Linux or anything else. The offer was too good financially to turn down so I took it. Since that time I have continued to use Linux almost exclusively at home and hobby projects. It has been amazing to see Linux grow in use and acceptance and a shame that I have been prevented from using it for work. I have managed to implement a couple of Linux based proxies here but in general the IT staff is anti-Linux just based on the historical culture.
Started with trying to get linux running on my mac clone box. Ended up running redhat on a intel box someone gave me. This was in the mid to late 90's.
Today I use Lubuntu - perfect for my laptop.
I was bored with windows. All I could do was copy and paste some things into the reagistry and I wanted to do more. I also disliked the fact that I could not see my desktop. Why have wallpapers if you can't see them.
I then saw a cow orker using Enlightenment! with a transparent terminal and that was what I wanted. So I bought a magazine with RedHat on a CD on it and that did not work. I then bought one with S.u.S.E. as it was called then and that did work. I believ it was 5.2 or 5.4.
Started buying the boxed sets untill Novell started sending them to me.
I was stuck at the prompt at first, but a week later I learned that I had to type root.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Back in 1998 i was learning perl and trying out the examples for client/server programming on my windows 98 box, and I got "error: fork() not implemented".
So I looked up fork() on the net and found out it was a UNIX system call. I had only a dim notion of Linux being "some new os" by the time, but when i found out it was essentially Unix, i was hooked. At the same time I was wondering how such a useful system call could be missing from Windows.
In about 1995 I was looking for a multi-user, multi tasking operating system for a new "operating and communications system".. I bought a copy of Coherent, and installed it on an old PC-AT. I was able to log in "remotely" over a serial cable! This was big news! Then, in a warehouse club-type store, I found a thick book about something called "Linux". It had several CDs inside, things like "Slackware", SuSe", and "RedHat". I tried all of them, and settled on RedHat 5.2 My first anti-Wintel box was an AMD system running at 50 mhz, with 4 mb of memory, and Red Hat Linux. This was SPARCL1, where the SPOCS system was born. See http://sourceforge.net/project....
I was a largely MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 user in the 1990s, but in late 1998, I found that I hated Windows 9x. I felt like the days of my completely controlling computers were starting to slip away. I also had ambitions to be a Network Administrator pst High School. So on a 25 Mhz 486 SX I installed a very Rudimentary thing called ZipSlack. My first experiences on the Internet were on a Tandy 1000 TL using a Dial up PPP Connection. I found out that ZipSlack could emulate/simulate the PPP Connection and NAT my Tandy over the Tandy's Remaining serial Port. When I didn't need the Network connection, I could reboot into MS-DOS 6 and play my DOS games.
Fast forward to 2000 and I found out that my new Mandrake Linux 7.1 Pentium 200 that replaced that 486 could not only NAT Internet connections, but using a software called Mars NWE, simulate a Novell Netware Server and provide logins to DOS Computers, and Windows 95 machines alike. It wasn't very stable, but it worked to my astonishment. Months later that became a Samba 2.0.6 Domain controller. Combined with seeing KDE 1 at the time and I was like "This is the future"
The Domain created by that 2.0.6 Domain controller still exists to this day, running Samba 4.1.19.
Like many many other adolescent young males growing up in the 90s with crappy internet connections my first brush with greatness was a Slackware distro on a magazine disk.
It was fun getting my ISDN card working all the while booting back to windows lookup stuff on the internet. Ah the days when you could (semi) comfortably dualboot DOS/Linux on a 200MB 486.
Got my first job as a programmer and Windows 3.0 had just come out. It still couldn't do much. My team were unix advocates and used it for everything they could (there was an order, unix > Amiga > MVS > Winodws). I thought it was really cool to have a machine that used the network so naturally and had scripting languages, multi-user and compilers built in. I wanted to learn more. Looked at something called Coherent and even bought a PC variant of unix, but neither was up to the task. Both were hobby unixes. Found out a Linux on some newsgroups and, like someone else said, 12 1.44mb disks later I had a system running.
I had just arrived at uni, had not yet used unix (but would soon since the physics dept at brum uni had a lab of X terminals and a Ultrasparc server). I read PCW magazine regularly, and one month Slackware was on the cover cd. Virtually instructions, and as I was new to the web, searching for help was alien. I figured out how to boot my 486 off an install floppy. I guessed cd from dos, had read about ls somewhere, but the way I finally figured out how to delete a file (del didnt work, nor did era) was to run Xconfigurator, then startx, and use the openlookalike file manager. When it asked 'do you want to remove...' I had that epiphany, switched to a vt, logged in and, rm worked! I found out many programs by reinstalling and noting package names as things went on, and used them as hints once i was logged in. Ultima 7 was a great adventure game, but Linux and the task of making anything work at all was my new adventure.
John_Chalisque
We're talking about something that happened 20 years ago in the basement of a library. Some representatives from O'Reilly were talking about one of the latest developments, ELF, and brought along some free goodies. Soon thereafter I bought a thick book from a competing publisher that included Slackware on CD-ROM. I marveled at how easy it was to install compared to OS/2 (involving only a boot disk and kernel parameters, rather than custom boot disks) and set about learning the thing.
My IT job, 1997?
I had been out of work for a while, and was at an unemployment "get into work" workshop, and one of the chaps spotted a local paper article mentioning an internet cafe opening in that town, and he knew I wanted to work in computing (I'd self-trained and then properly trained in C programming). I typed and sent a letter (WordPerfect 5.1, thank you very much), and the owner asked to meet me. So we met, and even though he'd already appointed a member of IT staff he liked the look of me and offered me a job as well. Apparently the fact I wore a beard was a deciding factor as he believed it was the right sort of look for an internet cafe....
Anyway, the owner (an interesting/odd chap... but I digress) arranged for Demon Internet to deal with a lot of the initial setup, including the local mail/web server. This ran Slackware (I believe, but I really don't know the version), and it's there I started to use Linux. I didn't do that much on it, merely hope it worked, and maintained the website and user accounts.
It was this experience / CV info that got me a proper IT job looking after WinNT, Solaris and all sorts of user-stuff, and I've moved further and further into the world of Linux with each new role.
I love Linux, it's great.
Oh arse
I found it on usenet.
spent weeks downloading Yggdrasil install disks and finally got a base install running. when I finally downloaded enough to run X I was pissed that 90% of the software was designed for 17" monitors that could do 1024X768 and the largest I could afford was a 15 that was only useable at 800X600
I remember trying to play nettrek over a ill gotten credentials to log into a local university dial up connection to access the internet, on a pan and scan desktop on that little monitor.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Back in around '92... Was doing some highschool activities in the Unis physics building and they had Sun machines, they also had older Sun machines in the computer club. One guy there loaned me the 30-odd floppies to install slackware 0.99.14 and it took a weekend or so on the 386SX I had at home. Used it mostly to read alt.sex.stories from home. ;)
English is not my first language, so cut me some slack -: Om du kan lasa det har sa kan du Svenska
A friend was using Minix for a class, and he read the Minix Usenet group and saw Linus' first post. He told us about "this guy (in Finland?) writing Unix for a PC", and we all said "nah, that's got to be a joke". The joke is on us, Mr. Torvalds!
In 1991 I was an Atari ST user. I'd learned C, written some software to connect it to Usenet, and spent most of my time in a command line or MicroEMACS rather than in the graphical interface. At that point it was clear that Atari was headed for oblivion, and I jokingly told some of my friends that I was thinking about kicking it aside for something really crazy -- a PC running Minix, or maybe even that new Linux thing people were talking about.
The following year I used the U of M Gopher system to download SLS Linux (the very first distro) to a handful of floppies, and took them to a computer junk store across from the Minnesota Supercomputer Center. I told the proprietor that if he could bolt something together that would boot SLS, I'd buy it. I went home with a '386 with a 10MB hard drive, a keyboard, and a cheap monochrome monitor, and never looked back.
The big breakthrough was switching from Miniterm to a TCP/IP dialup connection made available by a friend at the university. I downloaded alpha kernel patches from ftp.funet.fi and recompiled about once a week. I hovered over sunsite.unc.edu and wuarchive.wustl.edu. Swapped in a '486 motherboard and I was on a roll. I wound up putting Linux on a spare Pentium at work for the mission-critical functions of file sharing between PCs and Macs and Friday afternoon Quake.
Now I run Linux on my wristwatch.
I goof'ed off in high school, taking ROP & technician track classes. This was back when they taught things like "Electronics Repair" in high school. I went to a local community college, and re-did the entire math sequence thru Calculus, took chemistry, etc... I spent a lot of time in the library, and found myself following the Jolitz BSD effort in Dr. Dobbs. I learned TCP/IP networking via packet radio (Ham radio), using Phil Karn's software. I met a Unix Sysadmin at a local ham radio club about the same time I transferred to Uni and settled into a science program. Early 1992 I found myself trying to write finite element code on my ageing 286 clone. I picked up a 386 motherboard and a bit more RAM, but couldn't really make use of it under DOS. I asked my sysadmin friend what happened to the 386BSD effort, and he pointed me at a USENET post by this guy in Finland. Went to school early, so I could line up 4 systems in the computer lab, and downloaded on a stack of 5-1/4 inch floppies... My first kernel was Kernel 0.95a.
Around 1994 (yes, I guess I'm getting old) I had already seen friends at university fiddling with rather large stacks of 3.5" floppies, downloading Linux from some large FTP mirrors, while I was happily using the solid OS/2 Warp 3 (after TOS on Atari, then DOS, Win 2-3 on PC).
When stumbling upon a computer magazine's offer, ca. 1995, with a couple of CDs containing Slackware, I tried that. Back then, we had to fiddle with modelines to get X11 working, no ISDN support yet, dialing in needed chat scripts, etc. I was pretty much non-impressed with what I saw, not yet having recognized the value of UNIX or FOSS, and quickly went back to Warp, also trying those other OSs from Redmond.
Not that far further on, I got to know SuSE Linux, can't even remember which version it was, and got hooked for good - many things worked better out of the box, less fiddling required, and it became my standard desktop not only for private use, but also for my first job.
A few years later I switched to Debian, with a much superior updating system, then to KUbuntu for the desktop, keeping Debian on the server end... and now, owing to systemd, thinking about moving on.
Ian, thanks for a very nice distro that has provided me with all sorts of resources for private and professional use.
Didn't hurt that my teacher was a retired Sun engineer with serious technical chops. Gave me a CD with Debian on it and the world was never the same after that.
Well... :).
I was looking for an X-server for my PC.
Then I started looking on NewsNet for such a thing, and I found Debian
Version 0.93R6, in 1996 it was I think, on a pile of diskettes I think numbering 23.
I read the first ideas about what Ian wanted the thing to be and immediately liked his attitude and approach. It was what kept me with Debian, even when later RedHat and others came and gained popularity. I knew with the solid technical and social basis and fanatic aspiration towards architectural perfection it would survive.
I was given a "repair project" by a co-worker, I think in 1994, or thereabouts. His son had loaded Linux on a ThinkPad laptop and this co-worker wanted it removed. I had no idea what it was but I was made very curious by what I saw. Later, I found a couple of books, one on RedHat and one on Slackware, and dug in. The Slackware book was Volkerding's brand new "Linux: Configuration and Installation." It was very accurate and concise. When I saw what I could accomplish with a PC without licensing an OS from "some other company" I was hooked. Every PC I built from then on was $100 less expensive and 100x more effective, because of Patrick. I still owe him.
Too funny! Same story here, different campus... Iowa State University. Saved a 30 minute walk across campus to an engineering lab in the bitter Iowa winters 90-95'ish. I remember having to research the timings on my monitor to get the video card / xServer to work correctly and downloading the distro diskette image by diskette image on a 4800 baud modem. The whole experience was so rewarding and had a major impact on my life. I majored and graduated with an Aerospace Engineering degree which I used for about two years at McDonnell Douglas (Boeing), but my love of computers brought me back to a Unix Admin job in '97 at Norwest (Wells Fargo) where I've been ever since. I'm now a systems architect who is probably making *way* more than I would have ever made in Aerospace doing a job that I just absolutely love beyond all belief. That day I learned how to "export DISPLAY=myhost.iastate.edu:0.0" was a game changer, pure and simple.
Much love Linus!
-Rob
I landed my first real compute gig working at IBM. My boss was ok with me tinkering with anything in the hardware closets (I was in intern at first). Soon I had a RS/6000 on my desk next to the mod 80 it was a dream. Soon I had internet access from my desk and everything went from there.
No sir I dont like it.
truly free (that is, non-GPL) licenses.
Let me help you understand Stallman's mind:
Under the BSD license, you can take free code and use it as part of a proprietary operating system.
Under the GNU license, derivative code must also be distributed under the GNU license.
So it is not about your freedom. It's about the code's freedom.
Stallman's view is that proprietary software is an evil by itself; it represents a refusal to cooperate with your fellow men. His work, his cause, is to make sure that good code is always freely available to all, and anything else is a treason against mankind. If that sounds too extreme, just read the first chapter of Free As In Freedom. Even if you disagree, there is no way not to feel sympathy for his stance.
A stranger in a dark alleyway slipped me disk A1 of Slackware saying "hey kid, give this a shot, you're gonna love it. If you want more, you know where to find me". Over the next weeks (months? It's hard to say since that time was all a blur) I kept coming back. Once I finished with the As, I moved onto the Ns and APs, then got into the harder stuff...the Ds and Ks. Before I knew it, I was making my way to the alley every couple hours for my next X or XP. When I went back for disk E1 is when my friends confronted me about my problem and staged an intervention. Thank god for that...who knows what would have happened had I gone down that dark path.
>> How did you come to find Linux?
It was installed by default on the laptop I bought from Best Buy. NOT!
More seriously, bought a 386 then floppy-copied it during an all-nighter at a friend's house. I'd been a user on Unix systems before but never an admin so I used the box to build out a home intranet, share the modem connection, etc.
In 1995 I bought a new PC and installed "Windows 95" on it. I was so excited to have a brand new system.
OMG, what a giant steaming pile of shit it was! Windows 95 was completely unusable.
A nerdy grad student friend of mine suggested trying Linux, and having used a number of commercial unixes, I was very skeptical. How could something free be worthwhile? But I tried it. It was just as good as my DEC Unix workstation! It was rock solid!
At that time I swore that I would never use Microsoft software on my systems again. Thank you, Microsoft.
No, really. Games. When I was in elementary school, my dad gave me a Knoppix Games live CD, and a lot of the early PC games I played came from that. It was years before the idea of Linux being a gaming OS and Windows being the OS for everyday work for dislodged from my mind.
I downloaded it off some BBS. It was 2, 3.5 floppies. Which was nice because it didnt require me to reinstall my computer.
At that point I wanted in. Several hundred distro downloads, stacks of Yggdrasil, stacks of cdrom.com redistros later I think I am currently using ubuntu and cut my teeth on Slackware. Kinda miss fvwm.
A friend of mine was a SERIOUS Linux guy back in ... mid 90's I'd have to say. This was back in the days of TIE FIGHTER Simulator...I bring this up because it is THIS very title that got me into Linux, sort of. My friend wanted to play Tie Fighter online with REAL people, not just on a LAN...so he built a Tie Fighter server that people could connect to with their Tie Fighter game (somehow, I still don't know what he did)...I connected to it, played, and it was great. But I wanted a peer under the hood, because before this all I had ever done was LAN parties ... he invited me over and I saw a PC skeleton with no sides, no top, just hard drives bolted in, wires everywhere, a few hard drives hanging on the cable ... everyone has had a PC like this (or seen one).
"What's THAT thing?!" I asked
"That's the TIE FIGHTER SERVER, moron..."
I couldn't believe that a SERVER was running on such a piece of shit looking rig...and then it dawned on me that a SERVER did not have to be a monolithic huge machine that thousands of users connected to. I BEGGED him to tell me more about what it was running on, and he started telling me about Linux (Slackware to be precise). I had bumped my way around solaris an Uni so I knew my way around a shell account, and I asked if I could have one on his box to check it out.
"A shelly on my box? Are you insane? GO HOME KID."
Defeated, as I was turning to leave, he threw at me the last version of the Slackware install disks and said, "Here, try not to break anything..."
And ever since then I've been running Linux in some capacity.
In South America, it was a lot easier to buy a magazine with Shareware on the cover CD. So first time I got Linux was on a PC Magazine Cover CD. I was too clueless and the lack of reliable access to the internet made it difficult to find resources to learn. Forward a couple years and I met Debian 2.0 at my college computer lab.
You're full of bullshit, son. PC-BSD is very easy to install, and very easy to use.
Was it very easy to install, and very easy to use in 1994? Because I didn't just discover this "Unix" and "Linux" shit last week, son. And the answer is no. The installer was poorly documented and the attitude of the BSD types tended to be "figure it out yourself" ... forgetting that they'd had someone to help them figure it out, or some applicable background, etc. Such a libertarian OS. And look at how popular it is today!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I went to university with my parents' old 486DX-33 which I promptly upgraded with a DX2-66 CPU. But it was still slow, and became unusable when I tried running Windows 95 on it. So one of the physicists in the year above loaned me a Red Hat 5.0 CD, and I never looked back. In those days I had a 3 digit Slashdot UID. Since then I've run Linux on everything I could in one form or another, including a first generation iPod. I've used at least the following distributions: Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, Yggdrasil (briefly), Debian, Arch, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu (on my children's netbook), Skolelinux, Slackware, Mythbuntu, RuneAudio, Volumio and a bunch of pendrive distributions for security / recovery / etc. I've also used it at work on nuclear submarines and have an Android phone. (Now if only I could make a Beowulf cluster of all of those, powered by long forgotten Slashdot memes.) I've contributed to a few free software projects over the years too.
My first real experience of Linux was seeing other people installing Linux on a machine in the computer lab at school. (probably around Windows 3.x time frame and I think possibly some version of RedHat). I didn't actually get to use it though (I did spend a lot of time in those labs and got busted trying to pirate Visual Basic off the Windows machines :)
I also had experience with it at University with various courses that involved Linux in some way.
As for personal use, my first use of Linux was installing some version of Mandriva (exactly what hardware I ran it on I don't have a clue). After that I installed Gentoo on an old Pentium 4 box that a family member no longer needed (ironically it was a computer that used to be mine before I sold it to said family member as an upgrade to whatever they had at the time).
I used that Gentoo box for some brief development work for a Motorola Z6 linux phone (including kernel compilation). At some point something went bad in the system and I didn't do anything with it for a while.
Then after I took it to a repair shop who cleaned out all the dust and gunk, redid the thermal goop on the CPU and replaced the busted video card with a working card my system started working again and I used that system to do a lot of software work for my Nokia N900 linux phone (software work that has made a number of other N900 enthusiasts very happy).
That system lasted all the way until just before xmas 2013 when I moved to the other side of Australia and decided the old clunker of a PC wasn't worth moving (especially since I only had a really old really heavy CRT monitor that I was using with it).
Since then my use of Linux has been confined to my Nokia N900, a VMWare VM I set up for N900 development (which I haven't used since I bought an SSD and re-installed Windows) and various interactions of various sorts with computers I dont own out there in the cloud :)
Would love to get back into Gentoo again though but I dont have any hardware I can run it on (maybe if I ever get enough money I can upgrade this Core 2 Duo to a nice Core i7 or something and use the Core 2 Duo as a Gentoo box :)
FreeBSD was what got me going down the path to Linux. Actually, I think it was QNX at first and the small single-floppy installs. This was back in maybe '97 or so? I felt Windows was just too bloated and inefficient. I recall searching for more micro-kernel operating systems to fool around with and read up on POSIX and eventually fell down a rabbit hole which ended at Walnut Creek and me buying a FreeBSD disk set along with The Complete FreeBSD. Learned a lot about networking and servers from that set of disks.
I spent time dicking around with Linux as well, Red Hat at first from some CDs included in a magazine somewhere, before Mandrake or Caldera tried making Linux for the masses. I tried everything I could get my hands on.
I'm still terrible at it, though. But I've certainly done a lot of work around Red Hat (and begrudgingly, Oracle Linux), especially in the Enterprise space. This Win 8.1 laptop I'm typing on (work) dual-boots Ubuntu and always has a couple small RHEL VMs for testing and demoing. I'll stick with what works from the most rinky-dink LAMP box through to Oracle RAC clusters powering hundred million dollar businesses.
captcha: disciple (lol)
Early 1995, still in high school. I was in a small town in Kansas. Absolutely disconnected from the pre-web internet. No BBSes or anything that wouldn't be a long-distance call. And my parents were fairly poor (okay... lower-middle income but horrible with money), so no long distance.
But geeky. My dad bought into the TI-99 after TI pulled out of the home computer industry because he could buy a computer for $50. There was a whole community of people who did fairly amazing things with 15-year-old hardware well into the mid-1990s (heck, there's still a few around today, like old Atari/Amiga/Apple ][, etc groups). One day, along with the shareware TI 5-1/4" floppies that we were mailing around with other users, there was a Slackware CD. I had recently scrounged together a 486 that was capable of running it. And Bob's your uncle.
A floppy, a CD, and a couple manuals. 0.9 kernel and fvwm as the X window manager. Found it for, I think, $25 at a Software Etc in the Red Cliffs Mall in St George UT. Since OS2 was a couple hundred and I was looking for an alternative to Windows 3.11 I picked it up.
I remember a Comdex in the late 90's when Linux was going corporate and every company seemed to be basing their distros off of Red Hat and SuSe and I asked an engineer why they didn't use Debian. The reply was "The problems with Debian are Deb and Ian".
Best Slashdot Co
I was using sunOS and HP/UX in the computer lab of my university. A frind of mine rented me a shoe box full of floppy disks. It was one of the first slackware distributions. A year later I could do the same (ie, installing Linux) using a more convenient cd rom. I'm still using linux but I switched to redhat and then to fedora since then
When I first went to college in 1993 I was fairly inexperienced on computers. I'd had a Commodore 128 and spent hours upon hours keying in programs from Ahoy magazine, but later in high school never really worked on a PC or a Mac. So when I got to college and was thrust into needing to use the computer labs, I quickly got frustrated by having to wait in line to use a computer.
I quickly noticed that these engineering workstations in the corners were almost never used - these were the SunOS days and most of them were Sparc 5's, 10's and the rarer 20's. I quickly started using those and fell in love with Unix and how it worked. The commandline seemed really natural. After that when I needed to use a Mac or PC it just seemed to suck.
So, fast forward to late 1994 or early 95. My first Pentium 75MHz PC I put together needed Linux, so I downloaded Slackware to floppy and off I went.
----- obSig
Heh, reading through these comments felt like those testimonials at pentecostal churches, "I found Jesus when..."
That's bashphemy you insensitive God!
On my first years of college I found this Linux thing on the computers of some lab there. I found it interesting and very different of that Windows 98 I've using on my house and on the other labs on the college.
I found a friend have the Suse cds, I think 9 of them and the Suse version was 6.1 wich came with a user manual printed on a book with a beautiful mathematical image on the cover(here it is the cover)
I took me endlesss rebootings and formatting to install it and made it usable
Ahhh! the joys of youthful !
Slashdot ya no es que lo era!
Redhat Commercial Linux, Somewhere between version 4 and 5 circa 1996-1997... one of the people I knew who were heavily into software piracy found it. All I remember is the 2.2 kernel came out around the same time Google did, and boy did the efficiency of using the internet change.
Today, Linux still wins out over BSD because it's easier.
Was it very easy to install, and very easy to use in 1994?
I don't see how it perhaps being difficult 20 years ago supports your claim that it would still be difficult today.
Are you trying to make a point here or are you just "arguing" for the sake of it?
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
course -> Yggdrasil(1994) -> Caldera -> RH -> Monta Vista -> made my own version for new hardware -> Gumstix -> Mandrake -> Maemo -> whatever (stopped paying attention) -> rPi (debian?)
I wanted to capture some network traffic from a Macintosh, and EtherPeek wasn't working for me, so I installed Debian GNU/Linux on a PC connected to the same Ethernet hub, and I used tcpdump.
Linux and BSD's are about on par when it comes to install-ability. Here's something cool-but-useless. Remember Windows NT 4? I managed to set that up using nothing but the Boot-rom's on the network cards and a single installation. So I was able to repeat that later with FreeBSD.
Where BSD tends to fall down is much of the same reason Linux does. Some drivers are just not available because the hardware you're installing onto is too new, and unlike Windows, BSD and Linux are practically useless without an internet connection to download ports/packages. FreeBSD is a complete OS when you install it, and you can pretty much use it stock, Linux on the other hand you can not(Recompiling the kernel on Linux was a requirement up to the 2.6 kernel.) This had to do with trying to stick enough support on a single floppy disk before bootable CD-ROM's became usable (circa 1998.) If your hardware wasn't supported on the kernel, then you were never going to be able to install it. So for most people, installing a fully-working copy of Linux or FreeBSD wasn't possible until at least 2001 if they were putting it on a machine that was designed for Windows 98. If you were setting up a server (Eg for Apache HTTPD) you didn't need to find support for the sound and video card, and only needed network card support, which meant you needed a 3Com card for the most part. Many of the cheap network cards were Realtek chips at the time, and too new.
Overall, past 2001, a lot of the common hardware had kernel support in Linux and BSD, so it was mostly people trying to replace a Windows Desktop who found Linux to be more useful, because BSD often targeted headless servers in their on-disk support, while half the Linux distros targeted the desktop with their kernel builds.
Even today you see weak GPU support in Linux, and nearly non-existent support on BSD. This goes all the way back to that on-disk kernel support in 2001. Installing BSD or Linux was doable... getting hardware support for Video and Sound cards... is and has always been a pain in the ass.
I found out about Linux when I setted out to find a real irc client, and a real port scanner. bitchX and satan (the scanner) are what lured me to Linux
I recall finding linux via Usenet(Everything was on Usenet and the true geeks hung out there). Installation wasn't easy. First you had to use gopher or ftp to find download the linux boot image. Then you need to use the "correct" utility to create a bootable floppy. You also had to make sure your I/O base addresses and interrupts for you keyboard and possibly mouse matched what the Linux version had. After installation you need to understand major/minor #s and know which device nodes needed to be created. As a young kernel engineer I did find it somewhat challenging but had enough knowledge to get past this issues. :-)
What really blew me away was when I heard about Red Hat and bought their software which came with a printed manual!(Still have the book and the guy who wrote it is still at Red Hat). I was AMAZED with a GUI installation with mouse support!!! It was a magical day I still remember
I started using FreeBSD around 1993 and was using it exclusively at home until around 14 years ago. I had been using RH Linux (customer requirement) in developing embedded applications for a while so I put together a Debian box at home to try something different. I was running JReceiver on a FreeBSD where it was intended to run on Linux and was becoming a pain to maintain so I moved it to the Linux box. Over time the BSD boxes saw less use so they were deprecated. Besides my Thinkpad, I now have 3 machines running Debian, one is a general purpose machine and the other two are geographically separated mythTV boxes.
Was it very easy to install, and very easy to use in 1994? Because I didn't just discover this "Unix" and "Linux" shit last week, son. And the answer is no.
It was easy for me. I installed and used it on my work desktop PC at work then. Then again, I'm a system programmer/admin -- who's also been around for a while -- and at that time I *also* maintained SunOS, System V, DG-UX, HP-UX, SCO (shudder), VMS and Windows. Perhaps somethings just come easier to some than others - ie. Your mileage may vary...
Since than, I've also managed system running other Unix variants: Convex (C1, C2), Cray (2, YMP), DEC Alpha, SGI (several) and Linux PCs (RHEL, Ubuntu) -- in addition to newer Sun/Oracle, HP and Windows systems. Some are easier to install and manage than others. You get used to it.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Bought a Redhat book with CD's from a book store in the mid to late 90's. Experience was so painful I've been a windows guy since.
I had considered slackware but I didn't have enough floppy disks and it seemed like a huge waste of time and money to buy all the floppies then download them over 28.8k when the cd in my awesome new tower was faster. Don't remember how much I paid for the box with CDs in it, but I still have the CDs somewhere.
I discovered Debian when redhat's 5.0->6.0 (libc5->glibc2) upgrade went completely fubar. I have an installation (of Theseus) that started as Hamm (Debian 2.0, which was already glibc2) and has been successfully upgraded ever since then, thanks in no small part to the wonders that are dselect and apt-get, which was light years beyond anything redhat had for RPM way back then (which way back then was "download all the rpms and rpm -i *.rpm")
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I was active on the BBS scene, found the very first Linux release, tried to install it, but it couldn't handle the bad sectors on my hard drive, so I never returned to Linux until about 10 years later.
In 1994 the network consulting company I worked for decided to become an ISP. As part of building up the systems to support that, on a craptastic System V UNIX from Novell they called UnixWare, I was installing all these open source tools and they all seemed to want to be compiled on something called Linux, by default. Getting some of them to compile on UnixWare was so much fun.
Eventually I figured out Linux was an actual open source OS, and I tried some Slack disks, but it didn't run very well and had like no driver support for my RAID and network boards, so I stayed with UnixWare.
At my next job in 1996, though, I installed Red Hat Linux, and never looked back. I was running a Linux desktop by 1997 I think.
I have tried Debian a couple of times but never really got into it; I just had too much time invested in building RPM packages and doing things the Red Hat way, and the Debian installer has always been so useless it's quite off-putting. I did run Ubuntu on my laptop for a couple of years, though.
I now run a mix of Gentoo and CentOS, depending on application.
Linus appeared to me in a dream and told me to download Mandrake 7.0.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Read your own fucking comment, shitburglar!
You said:
That bullshit allegation of yours has been proven false by the existence of PC-BSD, which is easier to install and use than any Linux distro.
It's bad enough when you don't read other people's comments, but Jesus Fucking Christ, you didn't even read your own comment!
Me and me squad had same down with a nasty case of Linux after celebrating VE day with a dutch girl. It took all of my sulphur packs and a strike anywhere match to get rid of it !
I don't see how it perhaps being difficult 20 years ago supports your claim that it would still be difficult today.
Can you just mash enter (and type a username and password, perhaps) and get an installed system?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Back in 1994 I was working at the Computer center at my University doing some CAD Investigations to setup training for students. A fellow there was downloading Slackware to setup some web servers and I got curious about, then setup a double booting system with windows and slackware to test it. Since then I always have a linux system somewhere around for playing and learning.
I found Linux because there was a CD-ROM shop in Dinkytown that had the Yggdrasil 'Plug and Play Linux' for sale. The first edition, which had a plain manual white cover with green ink. Yggdrasil at the time were calling it 'LGX' and I suspect they intended that to be the brand name of their product, not 'Plug and Play Linux' which they later adopted.
I had a '486 machine with the whopping 16 MB of memory in it that I had spent $600 on (the '486 cpu and motherboard were an additional $600) and the Windows NT beta copy I bought the hardware because of had proven to be a real bomb.
Can you just mash enter (and type a username and password, perhaps) and get an installed system?
I've never used PC-BSD, but the stock FreeBSD installer is pretty close to that.
So I said fuck it, and somehow got slackware running circa 96/97 . I remember it was a true cunt to get the cable modem working with it back then when cable modems first came out.
Once I loaded it up I was able to freeze all my buddies windows boxes for fun :) being on linux I was now immune to this vuln
In the mid-90s an issue of BOOT Magazine had an article about various non-Microsoft operating systems. Linux seemed to offer what I was looking for and RedHat 5.1 was my first successful install. I went to Mandrake with their first release and have stuck with that (now Mandriva) ever since. I was privileged to contribute to the RedHat Unleashed series with Bill Ball and write for both MaximumLinux and LinuxFORMAT magazines as well as contributing to the Mandriva documentation. It has been an amazing experience.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Such a libertarian OS. And look at how popular it is today!
I assume you mean "libertarian" simply as a general pejorative? Interesting, since FreeBSD has long had a very formalized governing structure, elections, etc. I'm not honestly not sure what you would describe as libertarian about FreeBSD other than the fact that they -- like Linux -- are open source. FreeBSD is doing quite well today. It's certainly not as widely used as Linux, but from what I can tell it's growing and more than self-sustaining.
if I had heard of this lynn-u-ex thing.
--J(K) DOS is like Unix in exactly the same way that a pinto is like an aircraft carrier.
My first exposure came via a BBS - they ran RemoteAccess, and they were experimenting with Linux. As part of that, that Linux machine would do UUCP or so every night, so you could get *gasp*, email.
So what they had was a door that basically connected to the Linux machine over serial to which you could log into that and use your email. It wasn't a full shell prompt - more of a limited menu of options, but regular internet email! I used it join the DOOM mailing list back in the day. I remember getting emails from that admin saying my inbox was taking too long to synchronize nightly over UUCP.
From there, I acquired internet access via a shell - PPP/SLIP access being a cost-plus feature and Singapore was juts experimenting with Internet access. Then I lost that over to a real PPP account, and I ended up missing the best part of that shell account - usenet.
A friend of mine loaned me his book on Linux and I saw it as an opportunity to get my usenet back (using tin). It was a slackware release - kernel 1.2.3 I remember fondly running under UMSDOS.
It's been on and off until I started working and then maintained a Linux box full time.
when i read this post on the comp.os.minix usenet forum, from a young whipper-snapper called "linus torvalds", announcing the creation of "linux".
(that was back in the days of fred van kempen and his "super-minix" (?) effort.)
i was not happy about this, as i saw this as a move that would fracture the minix community.
i didn't think at the time that it would amount to much, except a waste of time and resources.
i could have never envisioned what happened afterwards.
that plate of crow was a bit hard to eat...
Yeah, the subject line is kinda a joke...
I came up through DOS, then DESQview, then DESQview/X. In the early '90's, I was big into the local BBS scene, and as the Internet exploded into public consciousness a few years later, I got a dial-up ISP account so my BBS could download network packets from my e-mail inbox at night (It was much cheaper than long-distance charges and most of the big networks were switching to it). A friend of mine who was dating a SysOp at my ISP hooked me up with a .tcshrc file that mapped all my muscle-memory DOS commands to their FreeBSD (The ISP's UNIX of choice) equivalents.
One the largest local BBS, there was a message board talking about UNIX and some people started talking about this UNIX that you could install on your own hardware, called Linux. I was intrigued, since my time on the shell machine at my ISP felt a lot like the DOS environments that I was very familiar with, but with moar power !
So I went to a local bookstore (I can't even remember what one anymore) and bought a huge tome on Linux that came with a Slackware CD mounted to the inside back cover. I used existing software to shrink my DOS partitions, and installed my first Linux. I don't remember the version of Slackware, but it was kernel 1.2.13. A few months after that, on the same local BBS, people were talking about another Linux variant that came with "a package manager". After I began to understand the benefits of packages, I sent Red Hat money and they sent me a 4-CD set of Red Hat (Not Enterprise) Linux 3.0.3. I saved my custom rc files, steamrolled the system and installed Red Hat.
I kept running my BBS until the end of that era. I switched from DOS/DESQview to Linux/DosEMU so I didn't have to keep booting into an OS that felt increasingly archaic. I even helped with a porting project for the BBS software that I ran until interest in that dried up too. I still occasionally get hits on my web server looking for it. I think they're mostly bots now though.
Improvise, adapt, and overcome.
I can only speak for NetBSD, which these days I install by unpacking tarballs, but yes, the installer is pretty much like that. Granted, you'll have to arrow-up to 'yes' when it asks you the 'last chance to back out' question, and again before it overwrites the master boot record. I'm rather happy it's that way.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
"The Greatest OS That (N)ever Was"
I bought this issue in July 1997, I guess? Put Slackware from a magazine on 26 floppies or similar that month, found the command-line too difficult, bought Red Hat Linux 5.1 or 5.2 a couple of months after that about the same time I discovered Slashdot. Been a member ever since.
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
In 2000, the Utah state high school programming contest was run in a Solaris lab at the University of Utah. That was my first exposure to unix and emacs. I thought it was so different and one of the students recommended that I check out linux because I could run it at home. I bought a book with a copy of Corel linux the next day (mostly because I wanted to use Word Perfect with it to write papers) and have been using linux in some form ever since.
I tried Linux for the first time when i heard that it was 10 years old back in 2001. First i tried some distros that would run without partitioning (dragonlinux, zipslack, phat linux) before getting a boxed copy of Mandrake for christmas.
I was born when some of you guys were discovering Linux for the first time, so I can't say I've had decades of experience with any of the old-school distros. I had heard of it before, but I started giving Linux some on-and-off tries in 2006, mainly Arch and Fedora before ultimately settling on Xubuntu for both my laptop and desktop, with Windows remaining on a separate drive on the desktop for certain applications (totally not video games or anything!). Since then, every time I need to, for whatever reason, wipe or replace my system drive, I've given a new distro a shot. After Xubuntu came Crunchbang (R.I.P.), then Debian sid, then Mint MATE. Now I've settled back into Arch Linux with KDE for my desktop system, Arch with MATE for my laptop, and Debian/Raspbian for my project servers, but after some issues with dumb things the Arch devs have done (kernel being compiled with a version of gcc not available in the repos yet, which makes every module compile shit itself), I may take the plunge and actually install and use Gentoo on my desktop system next time something drastic happens. While I value the philosophical aspects of Linux and other FLOSS operating systems, I like it more at the technical level; something is appealing about no part of the system really being 'native,' and where (GNOME dependencies aside) even something as vital as the init system is replaceable. That, and package management is lovely in the current age of the World Wide Web, to the point where even Microsoft toyed around with the idea of a pretty half-assed package management system for Windows 10 called OneGet. Modern video games are spreading to Linux too, which has spurred efforts to improve video drivers, and while Steam and the games it installs may be proprietary, even Richard Stallman said it could do good and lead to an increase in usership. I still keep Windows around for some games and the odd times I actually have to open something with MSOffice in particular, but I make sure to keep Windows quarantined to its own drive. I may not have installed Slackware off a few dozen 3 1/2" floppies, but put me down as one of you goofy freetard nutters.
It is easy enough to run Linux from a Live (Bootable) media or to install a VM based Linux box. You do not need a dedicated box.
https://www.kali.org/
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html
https://www.vmware.com/products/player
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I was initially interested in learning UNIX but of course had no access to those systems. I read an article about Yggdrasil and knew I had to try that out. I got transferred out of town and got busy with a new job and let it go for a while. When I came back to it I found Slackware. The rest is history...Slack, Redhat, Centos, Debian, Ubuntu etc etc. Been using it on servers for years and eventually moved my desktop as well.
http://linux.slashdot.org/stor...
http://games.slashdot.org/stor...
At the time my internet access was via WebTV...hey don't look at me that way, it was CHEAP. Anyway, I figured that Linux on the PS2 would be a neat way of adding computing functionality to my PS2. I signed the petition to get the kit released in the US and pre-ordered the kit. I had no experience with Unix or Linux so when I pre-ordered I ordered me some Linux books from Amazon, including O'Reilly's Running Linux, Linux for Dummies, Complete Idiot's guide to Linux and some Sybex omnibus Linux compendium book.
When I got the kit, I installed it blind since I didn't have a Sync-on-green monitor, once installed you can make it boot to NTSC. What we didn't know at the time was that there's a secret controller button combo that chooses what mode RTE install disc runs in and that a sync-on-green monitor ISN'T actually required if you use Select+R1 (IIRC it's Select + R2 if you want to use component)
Once installed I had it up and running for basic desktop tasks within a day. The default desktop is windowmaker, but I switched to KDE1.x It's a wacky Kondara-ized Red Hat 6 and has the usual things a RH6 distro has...EXCEPT Netscape. I did my first compile on it a few days later, it was either gaim or Abiword. It'll run practically anything you can get to compile on it. Heck I once got a 2.6 series GIMP on it.
I remember one time reading some article on slashdot about GNUPG and wondering if I could get it to work on the thing, and then finding out that it was already installed by default. I created my first gnupg key on the thing, had a devil of time trying to get enough entropy on the command line no matter what I threw at it. I think I solved the problem by running a compile, playing an MP3 AND using Gnu privacy assistant GUI at the same time to get enough entropy.
I still have a PS2 capable of booting the RTE and a PS2 HDD with a basic Linux install on it stored away. The wonderful keyboard gave out. I'd get another if people weren't charging an arm and a leg for them.
I also ran Linux on the PS3 as well, but currently run Fedora 22 on X86.
Like some old timers around here, I was using UNIX professionally since 1987, and had to use a modem over metered calls from 1989 to learn more about UNIX.
I heard about Minix, and was following the Usenet group for it, when I saw a post by a student in Finland called Linus. It was not ready for installation on PCs.
I looked for other options, such as the various UNIX SVR4s from the likes of Dell and Everex. They required an expensive tape drive. CD-ROMs were not yet popular in the early 1990s.
Then in 1995, I bought a CD set which has a bunch of Linux distros, from Walnut Creek Software. The set included Slackware, Red Hat, and Debian. That was a life changing moment.
Fast forward a couple of decades, I am a full time consultant on open source (mainly Drupal and LAMP), running on top of Linux (mainly Ubuntu Server LTS). And I am typing this from my main laptop, which runs KDE Ubuntu.
Thank you Linus, and thank you Ian, and a few thousand more people who made all this possible.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
SLS was fun to play with, but sadly that's all I did. I grabbed a boot and root diskette image plus the A and B series diskettes from a local BBS in the Twin Cities sometime in 1993. SPS 099pl13 or something. Moobasi BBS? Anyway, I also grabbed the X series for XFree86, but I couldn't get it to work (I might've had a Diamond Stealth VRAM at the time which didn't play nice outside of Windows), so I mostly just putzed on the command line.
By the time I tried Slackware for my 486, I'd upgraded to a CL5343-based Speedstar 64 because it worked with OS/2, and XFree86 was perfectly happy.
I was purchasing monthly shareware CDs packs.
I found these some 40 floppy images, it turned out to be a unix, LINUX ! 0.92 kernel.
Slackware !
Back in high school, around 1996, I discovered FreeBSD and Slackware while scouring the USENET.
Installed both in turn on my Packard Bell 486DX2 to check it out. Didn't really know how to use it and didn't know anyone to talk to for questions. But was still excited on the idea of a completely free OS.
A year+ later I was in college and learning about it again, first in intro CS classes, this time using Red Hat and with many knowledgeable peers to learn from. Then I started building and configuring the kernel for my PC (Pentium 233MHz MMX). If I remember, the first kenel I compiled was 2.2.10 or so. Then moved on to Mandrake, Debian, and Ubuntu and Linux Mint.
Back in 1998 I was frequenting BBS, and I setup a 386 to create a website about 3D gaming as the first trully 3D capable cards made it to market. First, the RealVR, then the Monster3D (first version of the 3dfx later aquired by Nvidia). So I started playing with Linux, and with PHP 1.0 to create a very basic Blog site with a friend. I didn't know well what I was doing until we later launched a more mainstream site to research used and new cars (this was 1999) and we were introduced to a properly installed Slackware powered by PHP 2, MySQL, Apache, Sendmail. We rebooted that system only once in three years, as it was hosted in the USA, and we lived in serviced the Argentina market from it. The reason for a reboot was upgrading the kernel and accomodating more functionality on the same U2. The site was highly optimized and served millions of pages per month from a single pentium core. And the reinstalation (including Boot Loader) was all done with a single script - if anything would go wrong we'd have to to use a nasty backup plan. But amazingly, the server installed the upgrade, changed all needed configurations, rebooted, continued to reconfigure network and everything on it's own, to appear live about 1 minute after the reboot. it was 550 days uptime, for a very very busy server (at the time). For this, we had an a self-taught expert that had studied engineering and physics, and that thought us all the things me and my colleage at the time knew about Linux (the kind of things you don't learn from reading map pages). He showed us the true way to use different tools, grep, regular expressions, a bit of shell scripting, how the libraries work, compiling things, how X truly works, and why a lot of things that usually appear cryptic to people with a Windows mentality, make total sense if you change your point of view.
I was amazed to see Linux being used by people that knew how to do anything, easily. I would ask if there's a way to do something really intricate and unthinkable, and he'd think of a 2 minute way to do exactly that, and very well. For example, we wanted to create a UNIQUE email for every inquiry in our website, to host a conversation with a client. If you replied to that email, it'd be routed back to the system. I hink only 10 years later many companies started to do that, but our CTO just opened sendmail, changed some things and connected it with PHP (before any sendmail extensions were in place).
Windows empowered those that knew little. But Linux enabled the most non-trivial things to happen in a brutally stable and efficient way. Was it artisan work? Yes. You know the tools well, you can do anything. And it was completely different approach. Today, it's the same. iOS may be the least flexible, simplest OS anyone can think of that still gets you to do most of what you want. But you need to become an expert on the millions of apps and their limitations - and they will always imply big sacrifices. With Linux, you could do that in a second. Eg. he had his emails read to him directly in 1998. Just pipe into a text-2-speech program, and pipe the audio to whatever you wanted. I know it's trivial, but these was at a time when things like this where just not possible in windows, and the approaches to solving problems was extremely different.
Fede
Went to CMU for a month in the summer of '93. He came back with a somewhat professional looking CD that had the source code for linux, the slackware floppy images, and some other junk (maybe it was SLS).
We spent a day or two installing it on my 486sx20 (which actually involved creating a bunch of floppies, and installing from them IIRC).
Not much worked, for sure X didn't. I wasn't very impressed, so I stopped messing with it. Some time passed and I tried again (possibly with another CD). I remember eventually getting X running a few months later. and probably the networking support too. Two things I remember from that time period, was my buddy impressively getting his VGA monitor to run at some resolution far beyond what it was designed for. Which then resulted in trying it on a bunch of different monitors and a number of them strangely dying not long after (the noises they made were quite memorable too). Including my buddies IIRC..
But, I didn't really stick with it other than to show it to people and mess around a bit once in a while. It didn't have any games, the command line wasn't DOS, and the few apps it had pretty much sucked. NT 3.1 which I had at the same time was more useful, but was dog slow booting on the same hardware. Heck it was slow on the screaming fast Pentium 60 we had at work. (which was also installed off floppies... all ~40 of them).
I first got acquainted with Linux in about 1993, when a friend of mine got it on his 386. I think it was an early Slackware. When I got to the University a year later, we had some IRIX very nice machines there, and the computer department was all HP-UX. That made me learn Linux in earnest.
When I got my own computer, a Pentium 90, late 1994, I installed it to dual boot between Slackware and DOS/Windows.
I switched to SuSE around version 5.0, somewhere around 1997. I then started using Linux much more, as SuSE came on CDs, and thus I didn't have to download the programs over my 14k4 modem, as I could get them from the CDs.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
The easy way to install '90s Slackware!
Step 1: Download Slackware packages to spare (old) hard drive. .[YourInitials] , Edit tagfile so that everything is either ADD or SKP.
Step 2: Copy tagfile to
Repeat Step 2 for each disk set.
Step 3: Turn off computer, remove spare HD, plug into new computer (alongside new HD), insert boot floppy, turn on new computer, swap to root disk when prompted.
Step 4: Run setup. When asked from where, select old HD. When asked for how, select your tagfile extension. Start.
Step 5: Go out and do something else.
227-3517
I fell in love with Unix in my college computer lab in the mid-90s. I really wanted to be able to have a similar system at home. Some of the guys there were using Linux to run a BBS, which evolved into the first ISP in our area. I got Slackware floppies and assistance from them and soon enough I was running Linux too! It's been my more-or-less full-time desktop (and everything else) OS since that time.
The problem with windows was that the driver for my PCMCIA ethernet card made the system unstable. Most notably it was unable to reliably wake up from sleep. Solaris on i386 was available, but I considered it a weak beta. A few people at work were big fans of Linux, so I tried loading Redhat on my system. It only took me an hour or two to find the driver I needed (our windows guru had spent days trying to solve the driver problem with Windows).
Once I got the driver installed, the system was gloriously stable and fast compared to Windows. I was hooked! Now, all of my machines run either Linux (desktop) or OpenBSD (routers, etc.). One laptop can dual-boot to Windows for a single piece of software that I occasionally use that depends on MS Office.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
However, I used UNIX through a borrowed CSUF's remote shell account before I even went to college with dial-up modems. I used mostly to FTP (e.g., ftp.cdrom.com) and Z-modem (still use this old school BBS' file transfer protocol!). After I started going to college, then I learned about Linux in c(lass/ours)es and from (nerd/geek)s. They were mostly on their local machines (labs) and still remotely (mostly dial-up). And then, I finally installed Red Hat (RH) Linux (v5?) on my own box (dual boot with Windows) after I graduated. I kept using RH until v7.2(?) since v8 sucked until Mouse(y) told me about Debian which I still use today. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I'm confused by this. I remember installing RedHat in 1996 using one floppy and a CD.
Every rule has more than one consequence.
I had a dead badger and then I found I could install Linux on it!
I grew up with DOS and Windows 3.1 and while while some Apple IIs were accessible to me at the local library, I stuck with DOS and Windows 3.1 since my father was a debugger at IBM and this was back before the failed OS/2. I was also exposed to MVS on mainframes through my father, but unless you're insanely rich and just really want to run a mainframe, you're not going to be running a mainframe at home. Also in high school, I was exposed to UNIX for the first time which blew me away with how different it was. They had a small UNIX setup in the computer room that the computer club could play with but my exposure was still pretty limited. I can't say for certain which UNIX it was, but given that the high school was very IBM centric (there was an IBM campus across the river that employed most if not all the IT people in the area) the high school got a lot of equipment from IBM and had a tie in to an IBM mainframe, I'm thinking it was probably AIX.
Since it was what I primarily had access to, I pretty much used the latest Microsoft OS (except WinME...that..shouldn't have existed) as my primary OS up until Windows XP.
While Windows XP was getting all it's praise and so on for working as well as it did, there was one glaring "feature" in it that I found unacceptable and will find unacceptable today...The online activation and then having to call them if you use up all your activations to essentially get "permission" to use your computer again if you had to reformat and reinstall Windows. I know it's not as bad today for the number of activations you have, but at no time should you EVER have to call a company to ask for PERMISSION to use something you BOUGHT a VALID license for.
I don't care if they're having trouble with piracy, the whole issue is trust and you can't trust a company that doesn't trust you even when you do everything correctly and legally and that's what online activation implied to me. I can't stand it. Now looking at the state of DRM and all the licensing hoops I have to jump through at work just to get things up and running on a Windows platform, it's clear that I was right to question it back then.
Anyway, as soon as I saw that issue with online activation with Windows XP, I started looking around and found Linux in 2001. I was in college back then when I got my first experience with Linux on a PC I was hooked. I had regained control over my PC even if I had a lot of work to do to get it running (my first main distro was Slackware while I was playing with Red Hat and Debian on another PC). Since I had control over my PC again I didn't mind if I had to do extra work to get X running or recompile the kernel. The main thing was that I had control again. It also reminded me of the UNIX system I saw back in high school that intrigued me so much so it was a win-win situation.
Now when I see the mess that is Windows 10 where you have even less control of your PC (Microsoft collecting data when you tell them not to, forced driver updates you can't stop, etc) I've never been so glad to run a Linux distro for my primary OS. I also love it when I can put up a Linux server instead of a Windows server at work. We have complete control over it and we don't have to constantly reboot it for every patch that comes out which maximizes uptime.
Since when does "easier" equate to "easier to install", rather than just easier in general?
You need to learn how to read, lass.
I took the plunge when I was old enough to make a conscious decision on the matter. I was either eleven or thirteen, can't remember which.
Same here!
I used to talk shit about Linux in a community of users from mixed platforms. I was a jaded would-be refugee who had tried to escape Windows, and failed. I had low expectations for this Linux thing too, and trumpeted them loudly.
One of those guys was deeply offended by the fact that I was bitching about something I had never even tried. He wanted me to try it, and then continue bitching if I wanted, and if I wouldn't try it, he wanted me to shut the fuck up about it and give it a rest.
He mailed me some CDs. That was 2001, and I haven't used Windows since.
At the time, I was running Windows 98 on my PC, and wanted to move to Windows XP, which had just been released. Unfortunately, the drivers for my sound card and some other hardware was not available for XP (or even Win2K), so I figured "why not try out this Linux thing instead?"
I had had some limited experience with Suse 6.4 some time earlier, but from reading about the different distros, I decided to pick up Mandrake 8.2. I downloaded the whole CD set and even printed covers and everything for them. From there, I've used Debian, Gentoo and Arch. I'm pondering trying out PC-BSD next, it seems pretty nifty, and I'm getting too old to constantly tinker with my main desktop OS.
I lasted a year or so running Linux exclusively (and playing a LOT of Quake 3) before I buckled and added a Windows partition again. I'm pretty well satisfied with Windows 7/10, actually. Very good OSes, if you must run Windows apps.
Eat the rich.