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.

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.

Re:The Bomb

[_merlin]

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

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.

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!