A Bit About Me and Linux
Posted by Jason Sun, 16 Jul 2006 22:47:00 GMT
I cleaning out some old junk recently and found some of my old InfoMagic Linux CDs. It sparked some memories from my early days playing with Linux, and I figured it’d be fun to share.
My first experience with Linux was sometime in late 96 or early 97. I think I was in grade 9 at the time. My family’s main computer was a Pentium 2, our second PC. I had a friend who shared a name with someone who had developed a lot of network card drivers for Linux. This friend brought over a Walnut Creek Slackware CD set. We ran tried it out with a UMSDOS filesystem and booted it with a floppy disk. It worked, and I think we even got X running. It was totally foreign to me. ls? mv? cp? I was interested enough to buy a Walnut Creek CD set of my own…
The maple leaf is a reflection and not actually on the CD, in case you’re wondering. I wish I could remember what version my friend had me try. It could have been Slackware 96.
I caught the Linux bug when I was in high school. During computer classes, I started reading Slashdot, and that got me excited. (My Slashdot UID is 10414, BTW.) I was most interested in networking at the time. To get the learning started, I needed some reading material:
Discover Linux by Steve Oualline was my first Linux book, and I found it quite helpful. Amazon reviews do not seem to remember it fondly, but it was essential for me. Later on, Matt Welsh’s book filled in the rest of the gaps.
Dial-up networking was the first area where I had some memorable success. The first Grand Theft Auto game only had multiplayer support over TCP/IP. No modems. And our dial-up internet was not suitable for gaming. So I got my Linux machine to act as a dial-up server. It worked and it was playable, that’s all I could ask for. Did the same thing with Quake. I had the idea to make a little pseudo-BBS where local people could dial into my machine, share files, post messages, etc… Always-On broadband, among other technologies, eventually made this unnecessary though.
It definitely was more a hobby thing though. Never even thought of it as my primary desktop OS. It was all experimentation; very few installations lasted more than a couple months before being wiped out in a favour of an exciting new distribution. Whenever we travelled up to Edmonton, I’d head out to the Compusmart right near the Mayfield Inn to buy the latest InfoMagic Linux Developer’s Resource:
This was before broadband… When CD burners were more than $500. InfoMagic.com is now just placeholder.
- I bought an older computer from a friend. It had no video, so I through in a super old that I got for free. It didn’t work well with will Windows 95, but it Just Worked with Linux. I was able to run X at 640×480 with 16 colour. It was good enough to view some moon maps with Netscape. I had the binoculars setup on a tripod pointing out the window and the monitor on the other side.
- Itwas certainly an advantage to be able to do all my assignments for my operating systems locally instead of remotely.
- Working with vi in the console on your old 14 inch monitor is the only way to develop for the Atmel AVR… Unless you have a green screen.
- An old Pentium running SmoothWall is infinitely better than the cheap router that previously used.
Now Linux is indispensable. It’s on my development machine at work and all of our servers. At home I use it for any of the cool stuff. (The boring stuff is best left for Mac OS X.) Couldn’t live without it.
And whaddaya know, I’m right back where I started, using Slackware.
