47 ms·

How I came to find Linux

317 points by pythonist 11y ago

jug5 11y ago
That server lasted long...
terminalcommand 11y ago
Murdock mentions that he was studying management at the time he got into Linux. I couldn't find any further information about it. In Wikipedia it says that he studied computer science in Germany. At some point in life he changed majors. I'd very much like to read a post about that decision. I share the love of computers. I spend all my free time in front of computers, programming and reading. It's been like this for my whole life. Due to a twist of fate (couldn't get a scholarship) I ended up in law school. I have no interest in anything beside computers. I can't live without them, but it's killing me to know that I can't study computer science. Any suggestions??
- lavya 11y ago
  I don't think you really need to go to a computer science school to study computer science at this point. It can be done, perhaps much better, on your own with the amount of courses and information available online.
- paublyrne 11y ago
  If you spend as much of your free time programming as you say, you'll probably be spending more time programming than many CS students I've come across who have no interest in computing, and you'll probably be much better at programming than many CS graduates I've come across, who have hardly any interest in computing. Your passion will take you further than your college programme.
  - chucksmash 11y ago
    This was my experience as a hobbyist with a business degree who went back to school several years later for CS. My second semester, we worked in groups of four for an elective Robotics course. Our group was composed of 3 seniors and me. One was super competent, I noobed hard but contributed working code and the other two were very eager to do the write-ups.
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    That wouldn't work at my university, unless it changed a lot on the last 20 years.
    - walshemj 11y ago
      Must be a minority then you know they built the raspberry pi to try and get kids to have some programing experience at GCSE and A level (15-18) This was so they didn't have to teach the basics on CS and EE courses
      - pjmlp 11y ago
        You are talking about UK. On my Portuguese university, we got to code in standard Pascal, C, C++, Prolog, Smalltalk, Caml Light, PL/SQL, 80x86 and MIPS Assembly, Java. Many of the lectures were composed by exam + mini-project. Anyone that made it without much coding was getting a ride in workgroups, on single projects it was either code or fail.
    - paublyrne 11y ago
      A lot of people fail CS, but I have friends who go through without having a real passion for it, and just doing enough to get through it. And in the workplace there are plenty of people who know enough to do their programming jobs, but don't have a real interest in it, don't code at home, etc. People with passion for it will shine eventually, whatever road they take.
- chippy 11y ago
  Almost all of the programmers, coders and internet guys I have worked with or know have not studied computer science at university. Almost all of them have the same interest, passion and enthusiasm as you have. Studying computer science won't get you as far as that. Plus because they have varied backgrounds, they can bring additional colour, learning and stories.
  - terminalcommand 11y ago
    I wish you could experience how much this reassurance meant for me. Living an isolated hacker life can lead to harmful presumptions such as me thinking that I had to give up my dream of continuing to work with computers 'cause I couldn't study it at a Uni. Now I realize how unreasonable and childish that was. Nevertheless, this very idea caused a depressive episode for more than a year. I am leaving this comment here because I know that there are other hackers out there struggling with the same problem as me. The solution to it can be as brief as the few sentences in your comment. I am sure that I will bring additional colour, learning and stories to the hacker community. Thank you again.
- globuous 11y ago
  If the issue is purely financial, could you crowd fund part of your CS education ? People are starting to crowdfund healthcare [1], some are crowdfunding their university education [2]. That being said, I feel like CS is one of the few things you can study in depth for free using the internet. I'm not saying its the only one, but I really do feel like you can. Actually, that's why I decided to go with engineering at university, because I felt learning CS without school would probably be easier than learning rocket science without school because of the material freely available online. This way I could learn both aero engr and CS! (the hard part with this reasoning isn't finding the material, it's having the work ethics to read, understand, and apply what you learn alone). Maybe your law school has an online library also ? Back when I was doing my Bacherlor's, I wanted to learn more about math, aero engineering wasn't broad enough and wasn't in depth enough either. So I went on my online library and read pretty much every graduate textbooks in math I could find. It was so simple, I'd just type what I wanted to study, and I would read the books accessible online. I didn't even need to be on campus anymoe. I'm saying this because if you can find CS books that you can read for free and that are easily accessible/legal, you can learn CS this way. Of course, it'll be a lot harder to learn CS (anything actually) alone than by being 'forced' by your prof to read the books, turn in homework, and study your stuff for the exams. But with discipline, of course it's possible. I didn't learn engineering by going to class, I learned and earned my BS in engr by reading the books, doing my homework, and studying for my exam; not by going to class. I actually only very very rarely showed up to class. It may be very hard while also going to law school though :( Anyway, if math isn't a barrier/scary to you, definitely look into alternate ways to fund your CS education/making your own [1] https://watsi.org/ https://watsi.org/ [2] https://hubbub.net/p/eotoimperial https://hubbub.net/p/eotoimperial
- Delmania 11y ago
  Do you find the law degree interesting? If so, I'd recommend continuing with it, and focus on doing well. You already have the interest in computing, you don't need to go to school for it. My personal opinion, if I was in your situation, would be to continue mastering the law, and working on computation in my spare time, and then start getting involved in computational law. Having a niche like that is great, since it helps you focus.
  - terminalcommand 11y ago
    After kicking and screaming for a while, I do find the law degree interesting. I think this issue is a turning point in many hackers' lives. I feel much better now. Thanks for all the help and support you guys showed. Especially thank you for making me realize that nothing is lost by not majoring in comp-sci. It was really an existential paradox for me.
- zaphar 11y ago
  A programmer with a law degree can be really useful to a company. Particularly if a company uses open source. You have a perspective on software licensing that many do not have. Programming remains a profession where certifications and degrees are much less valued. If I were you I would leverage your unique perspective as both someone who understands law and code.
  - lauritz 11y ago
    Being a fellow law student who decided against a formal CS education, I can second that. It also works the other way around, a lawyer who knows about computer science is (in my experience) pretty rare, and issues that also require a thorough understanding of technical processes (e.g. privacy legislation) are becoming more and more important.
- imurdock 11y ago
  Hi. This is Ian Murdock. I struggled for nearly two years after I found Linux before I changed my major to computer science. I thought I was too far along toward my degree to make any change. After three semesters of hand-wringing, Advanced International Tax Accounting helped me realize it wasn't too late actually. :-) The other commenters are correct: You don't need a degree in computer science to do what we do now. In fact, as other have already pointed out, these days, a more well-rounded background / education is a major advantage, whether that background / education is law, design, writing, etc. Best of luck to you. -ian
fit2rule 11y ago
I remember the joy I felt when I downloaded Linux for the first time and booted it on my 386 .. it was like I was suddenly granted access to the hallowed halls of technology. I'd been a Unix guy for a decade before that, but never able to afford my own machine .. working with a Magnum pizzabox at work, but a lame DOS PC at home, it was always very frustrating to me. But when I got on the minix-list and saw Linus' post a few days later, I was instantly transported into an .. at the time .. elite new world. Never looked back, and its amazing to me today to see just how far we've come. Truly a phenomenal technology ..
- jcadam 11y ago
  And now the situation for many of us is reversed - I have a powerful Linux workstation at home where I work on my own projects, and a crappy under-specced Dell running Windows at work. It is very frustrating to me :(
  - fit2rule 11y ago
    That is indeed a quandry! Virtualbox for the win! :)
    - jcadam 11y ago
      Try connecting a Linux box (or vm) to the network and you'll get to watch Corporate IT throw a massive hissy-fit :|
      - toothbrush 11y ago
        Need they ever know if you do NAT instead of introducing a new IP on the network (making sure that the Linux image isn't advertising any naughty services like SSH of course)? Of course, on a corporate Windows box you may not be root, i suppose... Courage to you nonetheless! Time to find a job where you're root on your machine? :)
    - walshemj 11y ago
      I fid HyperV an godsend I run about 5 or 6 vm's for testing at work a mix of Ubuntu LTS and various phone emulators
arethuza 11y ago
Being used to Sun workstations, and then DEC Alpha boxen, it was rather cool to be able to download and install a pretty complete Unix system on my PC at home in '93/'94. No Internet at home though so I had to get multiple boxes of floppies from stores and download everything at work and then cycle home with them - I seem to remember X and its applications being the single largest chunk of stuff to install.
- tyfon 11y ago
  I went through the floppy hell my self with something called minilinux first, then slackware. After failing both I went out and bought a slackware book with a CD and everything went much better. Been a linux user ever since :)
pjmlp 11y ago
I discovered Slackware Linux in 1995's summer with 1.0.9 kernel, still using a.out format and first support for non SCSI CD-ROM drives. Had to use the installation from a MS-DOS partition. Already knew Aix and Xenix back then, but having UNIX at home was great and I became a bit too much FOSS Zealot. Nowadays I use all OSes and the Zealot guy has been replaced by a pragmatic guy that uses whatever makes sense for the business.
pcunite 11y ago
I think it was Redhat Zoot (6.2) that was my first experience with Linux. It had linuxconfig installed by default (I desperately needed the assistance). The command line was so powerful over what Windows 95 had that I found it very intriguing. It seemed like MS Dos 6 but so much better! The later versions had xEarth installed which is so cool.
alkonaut 11y ago
Wow, I did exactly the same thing, sneaking around in labs, carrying floppies, saving pennies. The only difference is that it was Duke Nukem on my floppies. I bet this guy has a better paying gig these days :/
- annnnd 11y ago
  I have no clue about his pay, but his karma must be very very high. Thank you for giving us Debian!
dcminter 11y ago
I remember being very chuffed with the fact that the boot and root disks (on 3.5" floppies) were physically smaller than my copy of "Portable Unix" [0] Then a year or two later getting Dec$Write running on a V8650 to display on the X11 server of a Linux box elsewhere on the campus instead of one of the creaking DecStations we normally used. Now I'm sitting in front of a laptop running Ubuntu and have an Android phone in my pocket. Good times (then and now). [0] http://www.amazon.com/Portable-UNIX-Douglas-W-Topham/dp/0471579262 http://www.amazon.com/Portable-UNIX-Douglas-W-Topham/dp/0471...
mettamage 11y ago
This is the first time that I read a background story of someone who feels similar to mine (which isn't to say it's a special story). I too got interested in girls and stopped with my computer hobby. I too started business school at first and eventually switched to computer science (started in 2010). I always felt a bit out of place for having this origin story compared to 'normal computer science' students. I know it kind of sounds ridiculous, but it never stopped me from feeling it. Murdock's story really gave me the feeling that its just a silly thought I'm having :)
- Delmania 11y ago
  I suspect a there's a bit of confirmation bias going on here. All we seem to hear about on sites like HN, Reddit, TechCrunch are those individuals whose interest in computers started at a very young age. I suspect if you aggregated to all developers, a significant number, if not the majority have a story similar to yours. For what it's worth, my story is like yours, I was interested in my youth, found other interests, and didn't "find myself" until college.
mettamage 11y ago
This is the first time that I read a background story of someone who feels similar to mine. I too got interested in girls and stopped with my computer hobby. I too started business school at first and eventually switched to computer science. I always felt a bit out of place for having this origin story compared to 'normal computer science' students. I know it kind of sounds ridiculous, but it never stopped me from feeling it. Murdock's story really gave me the feeling that its just a silly thought I'm having :)
bvm 11y ago
Could someone explain or link me to how revision control worked in the very early days of the Linux kernel? I'm aware of BitKeeper, Git et al. but interested in how things worked at its outset.
- Sothis 11y ago
  Tarballs and patches for the first 10 years apparently! https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/LinusTalk200705Transcript https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/LinusTalk200705Transcr...
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    And partially why Linus insist on patches being broken down into digestible parts before being sent his way. He would (will?) outright refuse patches that touched multiple kernel subsystems in one go.
    - TorKlingberg 11y ago
      This also forces you to keep a backwards-compatible interface between the two subsystems.
      - digi_owl 11y ago
        One lesson userspace fails to take in time and time again...
- jlgaddis 11y ago
  (N.B.: It's been 10+ years since I've done this, so I'm sure I'm slightly off WRT the file names.) Let's say you had the 2.6.0 source in /usr/src/linux. You would FTP to ftp.kernel.org, download patch-2.6.1.gz into /usr/src and # cd /usr/src # gzip -d patch-2.6.1.gz # patch -p0 < patch-2.6.1 Descend into /usr/src/linux and begin the process of (re)configuring and recompiling your kernel. Side note: there would often be other patches by various kernel developers (e.g. Alan Cox) and they would be named something like "patch-2.6.1-pre6-ac.gz". I recall once coming across a patch by someone I had never heard of -- Don Tuse was his name, apparently. I proceeded to download, e.g., patch-2.4.8-dontuse.gz (or whatever version it was), apply it, and recompile my kernel. It was only later that I realized Don Tuse was actually "Don't Use".
varlock 11y ago
I remember being introduced to Linux by our programming TA, who used to come at classes with the 'You need Python' t-shirt (it was early '00s for me). "So you don't need to reboot after installing a program?" - I was shocked. And in awe. Then I jumped in the library and got myself a manual based on the UNIX 'System V R4' and am still amazed how 15 years later all commands still make sense (BTW, a link to the PDF copy of the SVR1 manual has passed here on HN a few days ago - I _so_ recommend it to anyone starting out[0]). Dissatisfied with RedHat, Mandrake and SUSE I fell in love with the minimalist Slackware - that was my first true love, the one you will never forget. Good memories, made of long nights recompiling the kernel, failing and wonder why nothing boots anymore, giggling when modprobing the module for the wireless device, and dreading leaving the home server up at nights with port 22 open (did I harden it enough?). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10052592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10052592
- nnoitra 11y ago
  No, you don't need to reboot Linux. You need to consistently make fixes which include go to this config, change this line so that this software-package doesn't crash. Oh, it still doesn't work then please reformat it. If you want an OSX which doesn't require reboots OSX is the answer.
  - ChrisClark 11y ago
    Some context: The last time nnoitra tried running Linux was in 1998.
    - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      Yet I see this sentiment all the time on, of all places, Hacker News. People absolutely convinced GNU/Linux is some arcane, unusable dark art. It's quite baffling to watch, really. Then again, most people don't install Windows and OS X on hardware as heterogenous and diverse as what GNU/Linux frequents. If you can't even handle GNU/Linux, though, what does that say about people's receptiveness to research OS that completely shakes established paradigms? Are we just going to keep reinventing what is most convenient to our preestablished biases? Given the things coming out of GnomeOS and Freedesktop.org, it sure seems like it.
antocv 11y ago
How I came to find Linux; Rented a "C Programming Language by K&R" from the library. They said I need something called cc, to really grok the book I must type and try the examples, the "Practice" questions did ask "What happens if you omit ;" or something similar. Keep in mind, I had no idea what programming even meant or what it was, it was just curious exploration, "you mean to tell me they have books in libraries with recipes for things to do with a computer!?". Windows 98 had no compiler, being poor there was not a chance we could even afford one, the PC was the investment of several years, but at the library there was a RedHat book with RedHat 6.x CD in it, which had gcc. So after a few months, and after installing dgjpp (? some gcc or similar free compiler for windows so I ran the hello world program) finally, I could do what the book said, cc fahrenheit to celsius.c program. Ah the joy.
anti-shill 11y ago
I have used and installed linux many times. I have ubuntu on a dual boot on this computer. But linux on the desktop is going nowhere now that android is on the scene. Yeah, I understand that android is based on linux. But android is the big alternative man on campus now.
- ionised 11y ago
  How does Android, a mobile OS mean the end of desktop Linux?
- mikekchar 11y ago
  For me, as Linux on the desktop got more and more mainstream, I started to feel more and more left out. I moved from Debian to Ubuntu because I thought "I just want my computer to work without having to mess with it". Over time, Ubuntu made many decisions that I disagreed with and I spent huge amounts of effort trying to figure out how to uninstall things (which is quite difficult for a Debian based distro since the configuration often assumes you want everything integrated). I finally ended up with an Arch system running xmonad and huge numbers of terminal based apps. I'm finally happy with my system again. What I realized is that I specifically don't want a Mac-like/Windows-like/shinkwrapped experience. I want choice and freedom, because what I like is not necessarily what the masses (or Mark Shuttleworth or Redhat or Gnome developers) want. I kind of picked on your post because even though it is kind of negative, I think there are quite a lot of people who think the same way. It's a valid opinion, but a bit unfortunate. The advantage of a (dare I say Gnu/) Linux system or a BSD system is the freedom from being told how you are going to use your computer. It's not having to put up with some stupid design decision just because it was pushed by a popular company and now the masses are used to it. It the ability to explore, experiment and create with absolutely no boundaries. It is popular enough and gives me more of everything I want than OSes that are more visible to the masses.
  - toothbrush 11y ago
    A hundred times this. Same setup for me, except that i'm considering moving to Stump WM or Guile-WM as a result of heavily drinking the Lisp / Libre koolaid. Let people pry my Emacs and tiling window manager from my cold dead hands! :)
drewg123 11y ago
Wow, that's a remarkably similar story to mine. Except I wound up with FreeBSD because of, well, Linus. I had a very similar journey. For me, I got hooked on computers when my mom (a programmer at a defense contractor) would take me in to work when she didn't have a sitter. I got to hang out in the computer room and play adventure on the minicomputers they had in the late 70s. I had the typical Apple II experience many of us had in the early 80s. I learned to type by typing in those games from Byte (and how to debug by finding my typos), eventually writing my own games and learning 6502 assembly. Flash forward to university and my first Unix account on an always-melting-down sparc server. There were dozens of DEC VT220 terminals in our public lab at UB in 1989, but only a few Xterminals which were highly coveted. My friends and I jumped at the chance to use them. Most of us eventually got on-campus jobs or internships with the goal of getting unfettered access to Sun or DECstation workstations. I STILL use some of the same keyboard shortcuts from my 1990 .twmrc, and my .cshrc, .Xdefaults and .emacs files have all just evolved from then (and yes, I still use tcsh). The first time I installed Linux was from a stack of 3.5" floppies sometime in 1993 when I was a grad student at a different school. I was a huge Linux fan. A year later, I met Linus at the '94 Linux BOF at the USENIX in Boston. At the time, I was trying to convince our dept to buy PCs rather than Suns or DECs to replace some wheezing grad student workstations. However, I ran into a problem where we used LaTeX, and it kept its fonts on a central NFS server (these were the days when disk space was precious, there were no package managers, and everything was installed by hand --- so installing stuff to NFS was very common). The 12MHz Mips R2000 DECstation 2100s we had (our slowest machines) would render a page of text in a second or two using xdvi. However, a test Linux machine (which was a blazingly fast 66MHz 486) would take 10x as long. I eventually figured out that this was because Linux NFS did not do any file caching at the time, and xdvi was seeking around byte by byte in the font files. I was very excited to meet Linus, and was really looking forward to the USENIX BOF. So when I asked Linus about NFS file caching, he blew me off in what I now know is a typical Linus like fashion, and said he didn't care about NFS. So I went to the very friendly and welcoming FreeBSD BOF, found out that NFS works, and never looked back.
- yitchelle 11y ago
  > So when I asked Linus about NFS file caching, he blew me off in what I now know is a typical Linus like fashion, and said he didn't care about NFS. I have always wondered if Linus was a bit for friendly, would the Linux community have gotten a lot more mainstream faster?
digi_owl 11y ago
I think my first encounter was as a CD attached to a magazine. Sadly someone had goofed and gotten a German variant of Slackware, as best i recall. After that it was Suse and Mandrake in half-serious fashion. Right now though i am using Gobolinux, after having it sit as a CD for a time until i had Windows blow up on me for the nth time. I should really do a clean reinstall, as some major changes has come down the Linux pipeline since then. But at the same time, it basically works as it stands. And in a telling expression of where Linux is heading, the guy that prepared the last iso for Gobolinux claims he spent more time getting the desktop parts (Consolekit, polkit, dbus, etc) working than the kernel etc.
m-i-l 11y ago
I was setting up one of those new fangled web sites at the software company for which I worked back in 1995. It was just two of us doing it in our spare time, with me doing the software side of things and a colleague looking after the hardware. He installed Slackware Linux on some hardware he had scavenged, and I installed Apache, Perl and (slightly later) MySQL. These choices weren't because we were visionaries or anything like that, but because we had zero budget and didn't know any alternatives. The funny thing is, I remember a few years later going for interviews and being slightly bashful about our use of free software. But it was only after I subsequently got a job at a much bigger company using very expensive commercial software, which was an order of magnitude slower and mind bogglingly unreliable not to mention completely opaque, that I came to realise just how good some of the free software is.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
giodamelio 11y ago
Awesome. I read the whole thing without reading the name of the author, so I got to read the whole story without knowing it was written by Ian Murdock
dpcan 11y ago
Wow, that's quite a story, he clearly took it more seriously than I did. Mine is pretty simple, because I loved to tinker with OS's, and since everyone is sharing... My local ISP gave away shell account I could telnet to and access a home directory that became a free website, ie theirispname.whatever/~myusername I logged in, used HTML and Perl to do what I thought at the time to be the most amazing stuff in the world. Found out they used a variety of Linux as I sniffed around the commands available to me (like I had done with MS-DOS over the past couple years). Thought it was awesome, and I ended up putting Slackware on a couple of my old systems people had donated to me and run little servers in my bedroom. Eventually went to RedHat, then CentOS, now mostly Ubuntu. At the time I saved up for, and bought, any books that said "Linux" on them that came with CD's stuck to the back with a distro I could install :)
larrydag 11y ago
My encounter with Linux was somewhat similar but mostly from having enough with windoze. I had called a PC repair guru for the third time because of virus's on my windoze PC in 2007. He told me about a Linux but I was skeptical thinking it was more for the uber elite hackers. I tried out the Knoppix CD and then installed SuSE. I was hooked immediately. Much like the article writer's hook with being my own "superuser". For those that haven't seen Revolution OS I would highly recommend it for much of the Linux backstory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw8K460vx1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw8K460vx1c
- gegtik 11y ago
  amazing that in 2015 people are still saying stuff like "windoze", "micro$haft", etc.
  - yellowapple 11y ago
    Ain't that what they're supposed to be called? :)
  - roghummal 11y ago
    >amazing It really isn't.
    - WalterGR 11y ago
      Yup. Slashdot is still one of the ~1,500 most popular sites on the web.
  - larrydag 11y ago
    I'll give you that. I did it without thinking. Yet my experience with windows has been really awful. I've had various issues including viruses, firewalls, bloatware, support deprecation to name a few. I guess I'm really happy with the Linux distributions I use. That said Microsoft is still an innovative company. They still create good applications and have robust data software.
davidw 11y ago
Even after all these years, sometimes something like this article makes me stop and think how awesome it is, and how fortunate I am to have had Linux and open source available. Having the freedom to learn about and tinker with everything is incredibly cool, and one reason I don't think I'll ever give up Linux as my OS for... pretty much everything.
ssharp 11y ago
I was taking a Unix programming course in college and had a large enough programming project that it was a burden to try and program on the terminal through SSH or Telnet. Since I wasn't going to get Unix on my PC, I needed to find an alternative and remember hearing about Linux in the past. This was probably right around 2000. I don't remember the reasons why, but I didn't download a distro and instead went to Staples and bought the cheapest flavor they had for sale. I can't remember what it was, but it had a GUI and text editor and all the backend programming stuff I needed to do the project much more efficiently. I ended up keeping that Linux partition around and used it to teach myself Apache, MySQL, and PHP, which is what got me my first job our of college. That company was an Apple shop, so that's when I was first introduced to OSX and the need for a Linux desktop was eliminated for me.
- paulryanrogers 11y ago
  My university was still using telnet around the same time. So I resorted to floppies before finally breaking down and getting a laptop. Red Hat came loaded on some of the college's surplus equipment. Before long I ended up trying it on my laptop too. Updating and driver support was weak back then. Thankfully this has improved a lot. Ubuntu is also a more novice friendly alternative.
jhallenworld 11y ago
Well when Linux came out I was just annoyed that I hadn't been the one to do it. A friend of mine (the author of TinyMush) and I were certainly thinking about it at the time (I had embedded OS design experience, but none with virtual memory so maybe we would not have pulled it off). Also don't forget that the enabling technology was gcc and there was the example of Minix. We did contribute to the floppy driver. The original driver read a block at a time before incurring a rotational latency. I had had enough of this slowness with SCO Xenix, so added a track buffer to speed it up on Linux. My friend wrote the original generic SCSI driver, to support a film scanner. I think we may have made one of the earliest products using Linux. We worked for an entrepreneur who started a business selling medical image archiving and teleradiography equipment. In those days, ct-scan machines and MRI machines had no networking. To get images from them you had to capture the image sent to the console screen or use the 3M laser camera parallel interface. (My job was to make cards for this capturing). Image transfer was over phone lines using sz/rz and Telebit Trailblazer modems. Anyway, at some point one machine did have network (I think it was some proprietary interface, not DICOM). The problem was that Linux did not yet have a networking stack. The solution? Use "KA9Q", the amateur radio TCP/IP stack in userspace for this. At some point Pat Volkerding (Slackware) also worked with us. I remember he was a big deadhead at the time, wrote Slackware while living in parent's basement. We were half installing / half developing a teleradiography system after hours in Eastern Long Island Hospital.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  You should strongly consider writing a blog article about your experiences, there's some really great bits of trivia you're describing. Particularly about crossing paths with Patrick Volkerding (he's still a diehard deadhead from what I know).
  - heywire 11y ago
    I'll second this. I love reading stories like this.
noir_lord 11y ago
For me it was visiting a friend who was using RH4 and seeing the stuff he was doing, I was already a computer geek and programming quite a lot so the idea of an open source operating system I could have the source code to was incredible. I broke the family PC a whole bunch of times (software not hardware) before I managed to get linux onto and then onto the internet, after that nothing came close as a platform to work on and so it's nearly 20 years and I still run it to this day.
samstave 11y ago
heh - in 1997-1999 I was replacing a novel network on token ring with a new IP net. I had some B2B EDI crap that needed to be scripted to deliver files from us to Sun... I installed several linux servers and hired a couple contractors I knew to manage the deployment. They setup these linux boxes and consulted supporting them.... I went to one of them on day and said "you guys should just start a consulting company offering linux support!" A few weeks later, one of my consultants came back and said "Hey guess what! We are starting a linux consulting company!" I was excited... we talked briefly about me joining them, but that didnt work out... A little later - they were valued at over $1B! Those consultants that worked for me on this in 99? Dave Sifry, Art Tide and Chris DiBona.... They founded LinuxCare. I later met Linus at one of the conferences and chatted with him for a bit, I don't recall him not being friendly though... but that was the only time I met with him.
RexRollman 11y ago
Although my favorite free Unix-like is NetBSD, I have a great deal of admiration for what Debian does and how it does it. To me, it is one of the best Linux distibutions, along with Slackware and Arch.
- keithpeter 11y ago
  Debian and Slackware: both roughly same age (Slackware releasing first). Contrasting package management, patching policies and governance models. I find the stable releases of both to be, well, stable.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
ithinkso 11y ago
I've started about 9 years ago, we have only one computer in home used also by my brother and father (diehard EE engineer that started with punched card programming and still writes, albeit great, software for embedded in notepad++(syntax coloring) and copy-paste into IAR IDE) and I was craving for linux but no one would allow me to install some strange OS. In 2006 I finally got mine first PC and I've installed ubuntu. I was enlightened so to speak, ubuntu worked for me for quite a while until gnome3 and unity, then I've switched to Arch and am using it ever since.
faragon 11y ago
I remember that in 1994-1995 Linux was a shock: you were able to run for free in your personal computer a system that did similar things to SCO Unix or Coherent (Unix clone) without the need of pirating it (students were used to pirate SCO Unix 20 1.44MB floppies using a special DOS copy program called "PC Trace" in order to copy non-DOS formatted disks, that "tradition" was lost because Linux was able to run using less space, and usually performing quite well on cheap hardware)

317 points by pythonist 11y ago

jug5 11y ago

That server lasted long...

Murdock mentions that he was studying management at the time he got into Linux. I couldn't find any further information about it. In Wikipedia it says that he studied computer science in Germany. At some point in life he changed majors. I'd very much like to read a post about that decision. I share the love of computers. I spend all my free time in front of computers, programming and reading. It's been like this for my whole life. Due to a twist of fate (couldn't get a scholarship) I ended up in law school. I have no interest in anything beside computers. I can't live without them, but it's killing me to know that I can't study computer science. Any suggestions??

lavya 11y ago
I don't think you really need to go to a computer science school to study computer science at this point. It can be done, perhaps much better, on your own with the amount of courses and information available online.
paublyrne 11y ago
If you spend as much of your free time programming as you say, you'll probably be spending more time programming than many CS students I've come across who have no interest in computing, and you'll probably be much better at programming than many CS graduates I've come across, who have hardly any interest in computing. Your passion will take you further than your college programme.
- chucksmash 11y ago
  This was my experience as a hobbyist with a business degree who went back to school several years later for CS. My second semester, we worked in groups of four for an elective Robotics course. Our group was composed of 3 seniors and me. One was super competent, I noobed hard but contributed working code and the other two were very eager to do the write-ups.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  That wouldn't work at my university, unless it changed a lot on the last 20 years.
  - walshemj 11y ago
    Must be a minority then you know they built the raspberry pi to try and get kids to have some programing experience at GCSE and A level (15-18) This was so they didn't have to teach the basics on CS and EE courses
    - pjmlp 11y ago
      You are talking about UK. On my Portuguese university, we got to code in standard Pascal, C, C++, Prolog, Smalltalk, Caml Light, PL/SQL, 80x86 and MIPS Assembly, Java. Many of the lectures were composed by exam + mini-project. Anyone that made it without much coding was getting a ride in workgroups, on single projects it was either code or fail.
  - paublyrne 11y ago
    A lot of people fail CS, but I have friends who go through without having a real passion for it, and just doing enough to get through it. And in the workplace there are plenty of people who know enough to do their programming jobs, but don't have a real interest in it, don't code at home, etc. People with passion for it will shine eventually, whatever road they take.
chippy 11y ago
Almost all of the programmers, coders and internet guys I have worked with or know have not studied computer science at university. Almost all of them have the same interest, passion and enthusiasm as you have. Studying computer science won't get you as far as that. Plus because they have varied backgrounds, they can bring additional colour, learning and stories.
- terminalcommand 11y ago
  I wish you could experience how much this reassurance meant for me. Living an isolated hacker life can lead to harmful presumptions such as me thinking that I had to give up my dream of continuing to work with computers 'cause I couldn't study it at a Uni. Now I realize how unreasonable and childish that was. Nevertheless, this very idea caused a depressive episode for more than a year. I am leaving this comment here because I know that there are other hackers out there struggling with the same problem as me. The solution to it can be as brief as the few sentences in your comment. I am sure that I will bring additional colour, learning and stories to the hacker community. Thank you again.
globuous 11y ago
If the issue is purely financial, could you crowd fund part of your CS education ? People are starting to crowdfund healthcare [1], some are crowdfunding their university education [2]. That being said, I feel like CS is one of the few things you can study in depth for free using the internet. I'm not saying its the only one, but I really do feel like you can. Actually, that's why I decided to go with engineering at university, because I felt learning CS without school would probably be easier than learning rocket science without school because of the material freely available online. This way I could learn both aero engr and CS! (the hard part with this reasoning isn't finding the material, it's having the work ethics to read, understand, and apply what you learn alone). Maybe your law school has an online library also ? Back when I was doing my Bacherlor's, I wanted to learn more about math, aero engineering wasn't broad enough and wasn't in depth enough either. So I went on my online library and read pretty much every graduate textbooks in math I could find. It was so simple, I'd just type what I wanted to study, and I would read the books accessible online. I didn't even need to be on campus anymoe. I'm saying this because if you can find CS books that you can read for free and that are easily accessible/legal, you can learn CS this way. Of course, it'll be a lot harder to learn CS (anything actually) alone than by being 'forced' by your prof to read the books, turn in homework, and study your stuff for the exams. But with discipline, of course it's possible. I didn't learn engineering by going to class, I learned and earned my BS in engr by reading the books, doing my homework, and studying for my exam; not by going to class. I actually only very very rarely showed up to class. It may be very hard while also going to law school though :( Anyway, if math isn't a barrier/scary to you, definitely look into alternate ways to fund your CS education/making your own [1] https://watsi.org/ https://watsi.org/ [2] https://hubbub.net/p/eotoimperial https://hubbub.net/p/eotoimperial
Delmania 11y ago
Do you find the law degree interesting? If so, I'd recommend continuing with it, and focus on doing well. You already have the interest in computing, you don't need to go to school for it. My personal opinion, if I was in your situation, would be to continue mastering the law, and working on computation in my spare time, and then start getting involved in computational law. Having a niche like that is great, since it helps you focus.
- terminalcommand 11y ago
  After kicking and screaming for a while, I do find the law degree interesting. I think this issue is a turning point in many hackers' lives. I feel much better now. Thanks for all the help and support you guys showed. Especially thank you for making me realize that nothing is lost by not majoring in comp-sci. It was really an existential paradox for me.
zaphar 11y ago
A programmer with a law degree can be really useful to a company. Particularly if a company uses open source. You have a perspective on software licensing that many do not have. Programming remains a profession where certifications and degrees are much less valued. If I were you I would leverage your unique perspective as both someone who understands law and code.
- lauritz 11y ago
  Being a fellow law student who decided against a formal CS education, I can second that. It also works the other way around, a lawyer who knows about computer science is (in my experience) pretty rare, and issues that also require a thorough understanding of technical processes (e.g. privacy legislation) are becoming more and more important.
imurdock 11y ago
Hi. This is Ian Murdock. I struggled for nearly two years after I found Linux before I changed my major to computer science. I thought I was too far along toward my degree to make any change. After three semesters of hand-wringing, Advanced International Tax Accounting helped me realize it wasn't too late actually. :-) The other commenters are correct: You don't need a degree in computer science to do what we do now. In fact, as other have already pointed out, these days, a more well-rounded background / education is a major advantage, whether that background / education is law, design, writing, etc. Best of luck to you. -ian

fit2rule 11y ago

I remember the joy I felt when I downloaded Linux for the first time and booted it on my 386 .. it was like I was suddenly granted access to the hallowed halls of technology. I'd been a Unix guy for a decade before that, but never able to afford my own machine .. working with a Magnum pizzabox at work, but a lame DOS PC at home, it was always very frustrating to me. But when I got on the minix-list and saw Linus' post a few days later, I was instantly transported into an .. at the time .. elite new world. Never looked back, and its amazing to me today to see just how far we've come. Truly a phenomenal technology ..

jcadam 11y ago
And now the situation for many of us is reversed - I have a powerful Linux workstation at home where I work on my own projects, and a crappy under-specced Dell running Windows at work. It is very frustrating to me :(
- fit2rule 11y ago
  That is indeed a quandry! Virtualbox for the win! :)
  - jcadam 11y ago
    Try connecting a Linux box (or vm) to the network and you'll get to watch Corporate IT throw a massive hissy-fit :|
    - toothbrush 11y ago
      Need they ever know if you do NAT instead of introducing a new IP on the network (making sure that the Linux image isn't advertising any naughty services like SSH of course)? Of course, on a corporate Windows box you may not be root, i suppose... Courage to you nonetheless! Time to find a job where you're root on your machine? :)
  - walshemj 11y ago
    I fid HyperV an godsend I run about 5 or 6 vm's for testing at work a mix of Ubuntu LTS and various phone emulators

arethuza 11y ago

Being used to Sun workstations, and then DEC Alpha boxen, it was rather cool to be able to download and install a pretty complete Unix system on my PC at home in '93/'94. No Internet at home though so I had to get multiple boxes of floppies from stores and download everything at work and then cycle home with them - I seem to remember X and its applications being the single largest chunk of stuff to install.

tyfon 11y ago
I went through the floppy hell my self with something called minilinux first, then slackware. After failing both I went out and bought a slackware book with a CD and everything went much better. Been a linux user ever since :)

pjmlp 11y ago

I discovered Slackware Linux in 1995's summer with 1.0.9 kernel, still using a.out format and first support for non SCSI CD-ROM drives. Had to use the installation from a MS-DOS partition. Already knew Aix and Xenix back then, but having UNIX at home was great and I became a bit too much FOSS Zealot. Nowadays I use all OSes and the Zealot guy has been replaced by a pragmatic guy that uses whatever makes sense for the business.

pcunite 11y ago

I think it was Redhat Zoot (6.2) that was my first experience with Linux. It had linuxconfig installed by default (I desperately needed the assistance). The command line was so powerful over what Windows 95 had that I found it very intriguing. It seemed like MS Dos 6 but so much better! The later versions had xEarth installed which is so cool.

alkonaut 11y ago

Wow, I did exactly the same thing, sneaking around in labs, carrying floppies, saving pennies. The only difference is that it was Duke Nukem on my floppies. I bet this guy has a better paying gig these days :/

annnnd 11y ago
I have no clue about his pay, but his karma must be very very high. Thank you for giving us Debian!

dcminter 11y ago

I remember being very chuffed with the fact that the boot and root disks (on 3.5" floppies) were physically smaller than my copy of "Portable Unix" [0] Then a year or two later getting Dec$Write running on a V8650 to display on the X11 server of a Linux box elsewhere on the campus instead of one of the creaking DecStations we normally used. Now I'm sitting in front of a laptop running Ubuntu and have an Android phone in my pocket. Good times (then and now). [0] http://www.amazon.com/Portable-UNIX-Douglas-W-Topham/dp/0471579262 http://www.amazon.com/Portable-UNIX-Douglas-W-Topham/dp/0471...

mettamage 11y ago

This is the first time that I read a background story of someone who feels similar to mine (which isn't to say it's a special story). I too got interested in girls and stopped with my computer hobby. I too started business school at first and eventually switched to computer science (started in 2010). I always felt a bit out of place for having this origin story compared to 'normal computer science' students. I know it kind of sounds ridiculous, but it never stopped me from feeling it. Murdock's story really gave me the feeling that its just a silly thought I'm having :)

Delmania 11y ago
I suspect a there's a bit of confirmation bias going on here. All we seem to hear about on sites like HN, Reddit, TechCrunch are those individuals whose interest in computers started at a very young age. I suspect if you aggregated to all developers, a significant number, if not the majority have a story similar to yours. For what it's worth, my story is like yours, I was interested in my youth, found other interests, and didn't "find myself" until college.

mettamage 11y ago

This is the first time that I read a background story of someone who feels similar to mine. I too got interested in girls and stopped with my computer hobby. I too started business school at first and eventually switched to computer science. I always felt a bit out of place for having this origin story compared to 'normal computer science' students. I know it kind of sounds ridiculous, but it never stopped me from feeling it. Murdock's story really gave me the feeling that its just a silly thought I'm having :)

bvm 11y ago

Could someone explain or link me to how revision control worked in the very early days of the Linux kernel? I'm aware of BitKeeper, Git et al. but interested in how things worked at its outset.

Sothis 11y ago
Tarballs and patches for the first 10 years apparently! https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/LinusTalk200705Transcript https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/LinusTalk200705Transcr...
- digi_owl 11y ago
  And partially why Linus insist on patches being broken down into digestible parts before being sent his way. He would (will?) outright refuse patches that touched multiple kernel subsystems in one go.
  - TorKlingberg 11y ago
    This also forces you to keep a backwards-compatible interface between the two subsystems.
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      One lesson userspace fails to take in time and time again...
jlgaddis 11y ago
(N.B.: It's been 10+ years since I've done this, so I'm sure I'm slightly off WRT the file names.) Let's say you had the 2.6.0 source in /usr/src/linux. You would FTP to ftp.kernel.org, download patch-2.6.1.gz into /usr/src and # cd /usr/src # gzip -d patch-2.6.1.gz # patch -p0 < patch-2.6.1 Descend into /usr/src/linux and begin the process of (re)configuring and recompiling your kernel. Side note: there would often be other patches by various kernel developers (e.g. Alan Cox) and they would be named something like "patch-2.6.1-pre6-ac.gz". I recall once coming across a patch by someone I had never heard of -- Don Tuse was his name, apparently. I proceeded to download, e.g., patch-2.4.8-dontuse.gz (or whatever version it was), apply it, and recompile my kernel. It was only later that I realized Don Tuse was actually "Don't Use".

varlock 11y ago

I remember being introduced to Linux by our programming TA, who used to come at classes with the 'You need Python' t-shirt (it was early '00s for me). "So you don't need to reboot after installing a program?" - I was shocked. And in awe. Then I jumped in the library and got myself a manual based on the UNIX 'System V R4' and am still amazed how 15 years later all commands still make sense (BTW, a link to the PDF copy of the SVR1 manual has passed here on HN a few days ago - I _so_ recommend it to anyone starting out[0]). Dissatisfied with RedHat, Mandrake and SUSE I fell in love with the minimalist Slackware - that was my first true love, the one you will never forget. Good memories, made of long nights recompiling the kernel, failing and wonder why nothing boots anymore, giggling when modprobing the module for the wireless device, and dreading leaving the home server up at nights with port 22 open (did I harden it enough?). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10052592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10052592

nnoitra 11y ago
No, you don't need to reboot Linux. You need to consistently make fixes which include go to this config, change this line so that this software-package doesn't crash. Oh, it still doesn't work then please reformat it. If you want an OSX which doesn't require reboots OSX is the answer.
- ChrisClark 11y ago
  Some context: The last time nnoitra tried running Linux was in 1998.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    Yet I see this sentiment all the time on, of all places, Hacker News. People absolutely convinced GNU/Linux is some arcane, unusable dark art. It's quite baffling to watch, really. Then again, most people don't install Windows and OS X on hardware as heterogenous and diverse as what GNU/Linux frequents. If you can't even handle GNU/Linux, though, what does that say about people's receptiveness to research OS that completely shakes established paradigms? Are we just going to keep reinventing what is most convenient to our preestablished biases? Given the things coming out of GnomeOS and Freedesktop.org, it sure seems like it.

antocv 11y ago

How I came to find Linux; Rented a "C Programming Language by K&R" from the library. They said I need something called cc, to really grok the book I must type and try the examples, the "Practice" questions did ask "What happens if you omit ;" or something similar. Keep in mind, I had no idea what programming even meant or what it was, it was just curious exploration, "you mean to tell me they have books in libraries with recipes for things to do with a computer!?". Windows 98 had no compiler, being poor there was not a chance we could even afford one, the PC was the investment of several years, but at the library there was a RedHat book with RedHat 6.x CD in it, which had gcc. So after a few months, and after installing dgjpp (? some gcc or similar free compiler for windows so I ran the hello world program) finally, I could do what the book said, cc fahrenheit to celsius.c program. Ah the joy.

anti-shill 11y ago

I have used and installed linux many times. I have ubuntu on a dual boot on this computer. But linux on the desktop is going nowhere now that android is on the scene. Yeah, I understand that android is based on linux. But android is the big alternative man on campus now.

ionised 11y ago
How does Android, a mobile OS mean the end of desktop Linux?
mikekchar 11y ago
For me, as Linux on the desktop got more and more mainstream, I started to feel more and more left out. I moved from Debian to Ubuntu because I thought "I just want my computer to work without having to mess with it". Over time, Ubuntu made many decisions that I disagreed with and I spent huge amounts of effort trying to figure out how to uninstall things (which is quite difficult for a Debian based distro since the configuration often assumes you want everything integrated). I finally ended up with an Arch system running xmonad and huge numbers of terminal based apps. I'm finally happy with my system again. What I realized is that I specifically don't want a Mac-like/Windows-like/shinkwrapped experience. I want choice and freedom, because what I like is not necessarily what the masses (or Mark Shuttleworth or Redhat or Gnome developers) want. I kind of picked on your post because even though it is kind of negative, I think there are quite a lot of people who think the same way. It's a valid opinion, but a bit unfortunate. The advantage of a (dare I say Gnu/) Linux system or a BSD system is the freedom from being told how you are going to use your computer. It's not having to put up with some stupid design decision just because it was pushed by a popular company and now the masses are used to it. It the ability to explore, experiment and create with absolutely no boundaries. It is popular enough and gives me more of everything I want than OSes that are more visible to the masses.
- toothbrush 11y ago
  A hundred times this. Same setup for me, except that i'm considering moving to Stump WM or Guile-WM as a result of heavily drinking the Lisp / Libre koolaid. Let people pry my Emacs and tiling window manager from my cold dead hands! :)

drewg123 11y ago

Wow, that's a remarkably similar story to mine. Except I wound up with FreeBSD because of, well, Linus. I had a very similar journey. For me, I got hooked on computers when my mom (a programmer at a defense contractor) would take me in to work when she didn't have a sitter. I got to hang out in the computer room and play adventure on the minicomputers they had in the late 70s. I had the typical Apple II experience many of us had in the early 80s. I learned to type by typing in those games from Byte (and how to debug by finding my typos), eventually writing my own games and learning 6502 assembly. Flash forward to university and my first Unix account on an always-melting-down sparc server. There were dozens of DEC VT220 terminals in our public lab at UB in 1989, but only a few Xterminals which were highly coveted. My friends and I jumped at the chance to use them. Most of us eventually got on-campus jobs or internships with the goal of getting unfettered access to Sun or DECstation workstations. I STILL use some of the same keyboard shortcuts from my 1990 .twmrc, and my .cshrc, .Xdefaults and .emacs files have all just evolved from then (and yes, I still use tcsh). The first time I installed Linux was from a stack of 3.5" floppies sometime in 1993 when I was a grad student at a different school. I was a huge Linux fan. A year later, I met Linus at the '94 Linux BOF at the USENIX in Boston. At the time, I was trying to convince our dept to buy PCs rather than Suns or DECs to replace some wheezing grad student workstations. However, I ran into a problem where we used LaTeX, and it kept its fonts on a central NFS server (these were the days when disk space was precious, there were no package managers, and everything was installed by hand --- so installing stuff to NFS was very common). The 12MHz Mips R2000 DECstation 2100s we had (our slowest machines) would render a page of text in a second or two using xdvi. However, a test Linux machine (which was a blazingly fast 66MHz 486) would take 10x as long. I eventually figured out that this was because Linux NFS did not do any file caching at the time, and xdvi was seeking around byte by byte in the font files. I was very excited to meet Linus, and was really looking forward to the USENIX BOF. So when I asked Linus about NFS file caching, he blew me off in what I now know is a typical Linus like fashion, and said he didn't care about NFS. So I went to the very friendly and welcoming FreeBSD BOF, found out that NFS works, and never looked back.

yitchelle 11y ago
> So when I asked Linus about NFS file caching, he blew me off in what I now know is a typical Linus like fashion, and said he didn't care about NFS. I have always wondered if Linus was a bit for friendly, would the Linux community have gotten a lot more mainstream faster?

digi_owl 11y ago

I think my first encounter was as a CD attached to a magazine. Sadly someone had goofed and gotten a German variant of Slackware, as best i recall. After that it was Suse and Mandrake in half-serious fashion. Right now though i am using Gobolinux, after having it sit as a CD for a time until i had Windows blow up on me for the nth time. I should really do a clean reinstall, as some major changes has come down the Linux pipeline since then. But at the same time, it basically works as it stands. And in a telling expression of where Linux is heading, the guy that prepared the last iso for Gobolinux claims he spent more time getting the desktop parts (Consolekit, polkit, dbus, etc) working than the kernel etc.

m-i-l 11y ago

I was setting up one of those new fangled web sites at the software company for which I worked back in 1995. It was just two of us doing it in our spare time, with me doing the software side of things and a colleague looking after the hardware. He installed Slackware Linux on some hardware he had scavenged, and I installed Apache, Perl and (slightly later) MySQL. These choices weren't because we were visionaries or anything like that, but because we had zero budget and didn't know any alternatives. The funny thing is, I remember a few years later going for interviews and being slightly bashful about our use of free software. But it was only after I subsequently got a job at a much bigger company using very expensive commercial software, which was an order of magnitude slower and mind bogglingly unreliable not to mention completely opaque, that I came to realise just how good some of the free software is.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

giodamelio 11y ago

Awesome. I read the whole thing without reading the name of the author, so I got to read the whole story without knowing it was written by Ian Murdock

dpcan 11y ago

Wow, that's quite a story, he clearly took it more seriously than I did. Mine is pretty simple, because I loved to tinker with OS's, and since everyone is sharing... My local ISP gave away shell account I could telnet to and access a home directory that became a free website, ie theirispname.whatever/~myusername I logged in, used HTML and Perl to do what I thought at the time to be the most amazing stuff in the world. Found out they used a variety of Linux as I sniffed around the commands available to me (like I had done with MS-DOS over the past couple years). Thought it was awesome, and I ended up putting Slackware on a couple of my old systems people had donated to me and run little servers in my bedroom. Eventually went to RedHat, then CentOS, now mostly Ubuntu. At the time I saved up for, and bought, any books that said "Linux" on them that came with CD's stuck to the back with a distro I could install :)

larrydag 11y ago

My encounter with Linux was somewhat similar but mostly from having enough with windoze. I had called a PC repair guru for the third time because of virus's on my windoze PC in 2007. He told me about a Linux but I was skeptical thinking it was more for the uber elite hackers. I tried out the Knoppix CD and then installed SuSE. I was hooked immediately. Much like the article writer's hook with being my own "superuser". For those that haven't seen Revolution OS I would highly recommend it for much of the Linux backstory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw8K460vx1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw8K460vx1c

gegtik 11y ago
amazing that in 2015 people are still saying stuff like "windoze", "micro$haft", etc.
- yellowapple 11y ago
  Ain't that what they're supposed to be called? :)
- roghummal 11y ago
  >amazing It really isn't.
  - WalterGR 11y ago
    Yup. Slashdot is still one of the ~1,500 most popular sites on the web.
- larrydag 11y ago
  I'll give you that. I did it without thinking. Yet my experience with windows has been really awful. I've had various issues including viruses, firewalls, bloatware, support deprecation to name a few. I guess I'm really happy with the Linux distributions I use. That said Microsoft is still an innovative company. They still create good applications and have robust data software.

davidw 11y ago

Even after all these years, sometimes something like this article makes me stop and think how awesome it is, and how fortunate I am to have had Linux and open source available. Having the freedom to learn about and tinker with everything is incredibly cool, and one reason I don't think I'll ever give up Linux as my OS for... pretty much everything.

ssharp 11y ago

I was taking a Unix programming course in college and had a large enough programming project that it was a burden to try and program on the terminal through SSH or Telnet. Since I wasn't going to get Unix on my PC, I needed to find an alternative and remember hearing about Linux in the past. This was probably right around 2000. I don't remember the reasons why, but I didn't download a distro and instead went to Staples and bought the cheapest flavor they had for sale. I can't remember what it was, but it had a GUI and text editor and all the backend programming stuff I needed to do the project much more efficiently. I ended up keeping that Linux partition around and used it to teach myself Apache, MySQL, and PHP, which is what got me my first job our of college. That company was an Apple shop, so that's when I was first introduced to OSX and the need for a Linux desktop was eliminated for me.

paulryanrogers 11y ago
My university was still using telnet around the same time. So I resorted to floppies before finally breaking down and getting a laptop. Red Hat came loaded on some of the college's surplus equipment. Before long I ended up trying it on my laptop too. Updating and driver support was weak back then. Thankfully this has improved a lot. Ubuntu is also a more novice friendly alternative.

jhallenworld 11y ago

Well when Linux came out I was just annoyed that I hadn't been the one to do it. A friend of mine (the author of TinyMush) and I were certainly thinking about it at the time (I had embedded OS design experience, but none with virtual memory so maybe we would not have pulled it off). Also don't forget that the enabling technology was gcc and there was the example of Minix. We did contribute to the floppy driver. The original driver read a block at a time before incurring a rotational latency. I had had enough of this slowness with SCO Xenix, so added a track buffer to speed it up on Linux. My friend wrote the original generic SCSI driver, to support a film scanner. I think we may have made one of the earliest products using Linux. We worked for an entrepreneur who started a business selling medical image archiving and teleradiography equipment. In those days, ct-scan machines and MRI machines had no networking. To get images from them you had to capture the image sent to the console screen or use the 3M laser camera parallel interface. (My job was to make cards for this capturing). Image transfer was over phone lines using sz/rz and Telebit Trailblazer modems. Anyway, at some point one machine did have network (I think it was some proprietary interface, not DICOM). The problem was that Linux did not yet have a networking stack. The solution? Use "KA9Q", the amateur radio TCP/IP stack in userspace for this. At some point Pat Volkerding (Slackware) also worked with us. I remember he was a big deadhead at the time, wrote Slackware while living in parent's basement. We were half installing / half developing a teleradiography system after hours in Eastern Long Island Hospital.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
You should strongly consider writing a blog article about your experiences, there's some really great bits of trivia you're describing. Particularly about crossing paths with Patrick Volkerding (he's still a diehard deadhead from what I know).
- heywire 11y ago
  I'll second this. I love reading stories like this.

noir_lord 11y ago

For me it was visiting a friend who was using RH4 and seeing the stuff he was doing, I was already a computer geek and programming quite a lot so the idea of an open source operating system I could have the source code to was incredible. I broke the family PC a whole bunch of times (software not hardware) before I managed to get linux onto and then onto the internet, after that nothing came close as a platform to work on and so it's nearly 20 years and I still run it to this day.

samstave 11y ago

heh - in 1997-1999 I was replacing a novel network on token ring with a new IP net. I had some B2B EDI crap that needed to be scripted to deliver files from us to Sun... I installed several linux servers and hired a couple contractors I knew to manage the deployment. They setup these linux boxes and consulted supporting them.... I went to one of them on day and said "you guys should just start a consulting company offering linux support!" A few weeks later, one of my consultants came back and said "Hey guess what! We are starting a linux consulting company!" I was excited... we talked briefly about me joining them, but that didnt work out... A little later - they were valued at over $1B! Those consultants that worked for me on this in 99? Dave Sifry, Art Tide and Chris DiBona.... They founded LinuxCare. I later met Linus at one of the conferences and chatted with him for a bit, I don't recall him not being friendly though... but that was the only time I met with him.

RexRollman 11y ago

Although my favorite free Unix-like is NetBSD, I have a great deal of admiration for what Debian does and how it does it. To me, it is one of the best Linux distibutions, along with Slackware and Arch.

keithpeter 11y ago
Debian and Slackware: both roughly same age (Slackware releasing first). Contrasting package management, patching policies and governance models. I find the stable releases of both to be, well, stable.
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ithinkso 11y ago

I've started about 9 years ago, we have only one computer in home used also by my brother and father (diehard EE engineer that started with punched card programming and still writes, albeit great, software for embedded in notepad++(syntax coloring) and copy-paste into IAR IDE) and I was craving for linux but no one would allow me to install some strange OS. In 2006 I finally got mine first PC and I've installed ubuntu. I was enlightened so to speak, ubuntu worked for me for quite a while until gnome3 and unity, then I've switched to Arch and am using it ever since.

faragon 11y ago

I remember that in 1994-1995 Linux was a shock: you were able to run for free in your personal computer a system that did similar things to SCO Unix or Coherent (Unix clone) without the need of pirating it (students were used to pirate SCO Unix 20 1.44MB floppies using a special DOS copy program called "PC Trace" in order to copy non-DOS formatted disks, that "tradition" was lost because Linux was able to run using less space, and usually performing quite well on cheap hardware)