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?

Comments

How I found Linux

[dskoll]

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.

Re:How I Found Linux

[Kiaser Zohsay]

I became a UNIX bigot in college in the late 80's. I remember following William and Lynn Jolitz's series "Porting UNIX to the 386" in Dr. Dobb's in the late 80's/early 90's. My first experiences with DOS PC's were disappointing, as I saw them as a big step backwards. My first download was something called Monkey Linux. A zip file that spanned 5 floppy disks, that when extracted to a DOS directory was bootable as a UMSDOS FS running a derivative of Slackware. I followed a pointer to the official Slackware package mirrors, and never went back.

Re:How I Found Linux

[Moridineas]

That's really interesting. When I was in highschool our school had a Netware network. We had a computer lab for physics and computer science that had no Internet access, but the teacher let me bring in my own computer (some kind of very early 486) that I installed RedHat Linux--I think 4--on and ran a NAT and http server for about 40-50 computers. That was really cool (and I really wonder if any school around would let a student have that kind of access to a school network now).

A friend of mine at school was from Taiwan and introduced me to FreeBSD that same year. Apparently--at least in the 90s--FreeBSD was big in Taiwan and used heavily in the BBS scene there.

I switched my own computers to FreeBSD not long after, and haven't really looked back. My experience at the time was that FreeBSD was MUCH easier to deal with. The system file layouts were far more consistent, man pages were excellent, and the FreeBSD handbook remains very helpful to this day. I've never understood the criticism that FreeBSD was "harder" than Linux, as that has not been my experience at all--at least since 1997 or so.

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

I've read many of the FreeBSD dev lists for about 15 years now, and I can't say I have ever seen this. Strawman?

How I found Linux

[James Durie]

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.

From SLS to Slackware

[Xenna]

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.

Pile of diskettes

[tomhath]

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.

free, Free, and Better

[Theolojin]

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!

23 years!! Holy crap I feel old!

[killfixx]

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?

Slackware

[JoeMerchant]

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.

Windows drove me there

[meist3r]

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.

SLS, later Slackware

[Mr Foobar]

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.

Re:The Bomb

[_merlin]

Heh, reading through these comments felt like those testimonials at pentecostal churches, "I found Jesus when..."

I was bored with Windows

[houghi]

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.

Finding Linux

[Unknown74]

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....

Novell Netware Emulation got me into Linux.

[Zombie Ryushu]

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.

PCW Cover CD

[John Allsup]

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.

Minix...

[Burdell]

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!

Re:Fucking hogwash! PC-BSD is easy to install.

[drinkypoo]

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!