Sunday, January 01, 2006
Why I use Linux
Pretty much everybody that I know knows that I don't care much for Microsoft junk. This sentiment goes way back to my early days as a computer geek - to before I knew there was any such thing as linux and I though that Unix was something that was just for big business computers and Mainframes and stuff.
I remember when I was first introduced to the concept that there are alternatives to MS Windows. Windows 95 was the top dog at the time and I'd reinstall it every few months in order to keep my system running smoothly. I figured out a lot about installing Windows 95.
Anyway, I was sitting on the toilet reading a computer magazine and came across this article about Windows alternatives. There was FreeBSD, NetBSD, Linux, and maybe another one or two. This was nineteen ninety something, so they weren't too well known or advanced as far as usability on the PC or suitability as a Windows replacement. But they were all free - I'd known about free software, it's called shareware. But I had no concept of open source or free-as-in-speech software and didn't get it until much later on. So I read the article and thought, "Well, that's interesting", then forgot all about it for a while. I may have done some searches on the internet (this was before google's domination as a search engine, so I was probably using AltaVista or something), and I think I downloaded some code, but I didn't know what to do with it or how to turn it into a running operating system.
Then, some time later, somebody gave me a RedHat 5.something CD. He'd gotten it from a local computer users group that had a few people experimenting with linux. I installed it. I figured out how to shut the system down. I couldn't get the GUI to work (I was thinking that maybe I could get Quake 3 running on there). No GUI and none of the DOS commands that I knew work (I was quite familiar with a DOS command line at this point). But, as I said, I did figure out the shutdown command - after rebooting the hard way a few times and corrupting the filesystem. Then I thought, "Eh, forget it" and reinstalled Windows on the system.
Then I went to Alaska. I got an old computer from the Good Will for $50 or something. I had a lot of time with not much to do, so I got on the internet and started reading about linux. I found Debian and started downloading the floppy installation set - it was like 14 floppies or something. This was annoying my uncle whom I was living with because he only had dial-up and only one phone line - but I did most of my downloading at night. I got that base system installed only to discover that you have to connect this to the internet and download more stuff if you want anything useful. So I played with it for a while, but never got it to much of a useful state. I read everything that I could find about installing and using linux and I ordered a Debian Linux Bible that came with an install cd - the only problem is that the old piece of junk computer can't boot from a cd. But I got something working and played with it some more. All this time, I'm learning to use the linux command line quite well, though there were many unix concepts that I didn't quite get (it's really philosophically different from a certain perspective).
I moved around a bit in Alaska, all the time reading about linux if I didn't have a system to play with it on. While living in Kenai, I got Redhat 7 or 8 installed with the Gnome Desktop Environment for a GUI and got it on the internet - used it for email, web browsing, printing, etc. While I was staying with a guy near the town of North Pole (it's not far from Fairbanks), I used his printer to print the book Linux From Scratch (some old version circa summer 2002) - it was a couple hundred pages anyhow - oh, I also printed the Linux Users Guide (LUG) available from tldp.org. But I didn't have a computer to install it on at the time.
I moved back to Pennsylvania, stopping in Minnesota to work for a while. All this time, I'm reading linux stuff wherever I can get it. At some point, I have a caseless computer in a wooden drawer that I'm bringing around with me (I'm a bit of a vagabond, so I travel a lot). The thing was an AMD K5 or K6 - anyhow it was pretty slow. I'd been experimenting with a dual-booting setup with Windows and Linux on the same machine - I wasn't quite ready to completely give up my reliance on Windows. By this time, I was quite familiar with dual-booting, disk partitioning, linux filesystems, the fat32 filesystem, the bootloaders lilo and grub, and the configuration of these bootloaders.
I don't even remember how many computers I'd gone through in all of this, let alone all the different configurations of each (add a harddrive here, try a different distro there, etc). I'd get one free from somebody or throw one together from some spare parts I'd picked up or just had laying around. I even bought an old piece of junk from a local computer store for $130 - used it for quite a while too. By this time, I was dual-booting linux and WindowsXP, though for a long time I was using WinXP in a fat32 filesystem so I'd be able to modify it from within linux. And I was using open source software in windows as well - notably the gimp.
Somewhere in there, I started playing with Python which is a cool interpreted programming language. I've always wanted to get into programming more, but have never had the ambition.
I got an 800 Mhz AMD Athlon (already pretty old by this point, but faster than the PIII-450 I was using) from a friend for $100 or something - the motherboard was shot, so I had to find a replacement. The processor was a Slot A which had already been phased out by AMD. I called a couple of local places to see if they'd have an old Slot A board around - one place told me that they had one, but when I got there (an hour's drive) it turned out to be a Socket A afterall and therefore no good to me. I finally found one through a Yahoo search and ordered it - it might have been the very last retail Slot A board ever sold. I got the thing up and running with 256 meg o' ram, and an 80 gig harddrive I'd been carrying around for a while (swapping from one old crappy computer to another not quite as old or crappy).
I had the Athlon 800 for some time - I gave the PIII 450 to my brother John 'cause his PIII 700 got toasted in travel and he said that the 450 was plenty for what he was doing - I just swapped harddrives and maybe gave it a ram boost.
I finally got the time and ambition to install Linux From Scratch on the Athlon. I was staying with the Greene's at the time and they had cable internet, so having my computer downloading all the time wasn't a problem. LFS takes a very long time and a lot of work to install. Basically, you start with a very minimal pre-compiled base install (or you could start from any other linux distro). From this, you compile the basic packages and install them into a clean filesystem tree. As soon as this base setup is functional, you chroot into it, so you compile everything else from within the system that you just compiled. Everything is compiled from source which takes a long time, and there is no package management system in the basic setup - you can install the package manager from any distro you like after the basic system is up and running. Every package can be configured/patched/tailored to your liking. There are many choices to be made as there can be several alternatives for a particular tool. So I got LFS installed - it took a while because I was also working construction full time.
I had LFS working, but there were a few things I didn't like about it - I liked how everything gets compiled from source, but resolving dependencies by hand is a bit straining and things started to get a bit cluttered.
Then I discovered Gentoo. It's like LFS, but the install is automated and it includes what might be the best package management system ever developed. The package database includes just about every piece of open source software you could ever want - the actual source code is obtained from the developer's website or another mirror - gentoo does not keep an archive of source code for all packages. Anybody can make a package for some new software and submit it to be added to the database - so there are packages for just about everything (open source that is).
Then I sold the Athlon to a cousin for $100. I talked her into keeping Gentoo installed on it (it also had WinXP on it of course), but as far as I know, she never uses Gentoo (she still has the computer, it's having some issues though). But it still has Gentoo installed on it.
I did not replace the Athlon 800 right away. I did not have high speed internet at the time and I decided to take a break from tinkering with computers for financial and other reasons (I also did not have a job at this point).
Then I got a job - a job building waterslides. I went to Orlando for a couple of months and decided to get another old computer and install linux on it to serve as a sort of internet kiosk for me and my roommates (5 of us). It was old (don't remember the specs), but it worked - I had a 120 Gb HD in there. I think that I eventually abandoned it in the back of someone's truck - never to be seen again. Or maybe I gave it to someone else, I don't remember. But I got rid of it when I built an Athon64 3000+ with 1Gb Ram, the 120 Gb HD from the old computer and a 160 Gb HD, a dual-layer DVD burner, dual gigabit lan on the motherboard, PCI-X, a super lan boy case with carrying strap, and some other nice features. I built it while on the road after the Orlando job. I installed Gentoo on it of course - this time without WinXP. My Athon64 processor has never run a bit of Microsoft code.
Most jobs don't last as long as Orlando, so I had to leave it at home a lot. I decided to buy a laptop. The last time that I brough the desktop on the road, the motherboard started having some hardware malfunctions. Two of the memory slots don't work anymore and the gigabit lan's don't work at all anymore - I had to get a pci 100 Mbit card. And after the trip home, I'm not sure that the motherboard will work at all because I didn't fully reinstall it after taking it out to see if I could get the lan's to work - I only put 2 of the 9 motherboard screws back in, then brought it the 900 miles home in a rickety cargo van which I'm sure is what caused it to mess up in the first place.
I also got my laptop on that trip, so I don't need the desktop anymore. I think that I'm going to replace the motherboard, shed a tear, install WindowsXP, and give it to my mom and dad. They could use a nice desktop. Their only computer is an old IBM laptop that they pretty much use as if it were a desktop (don't think it's been off the desk in over a year). When I say "they", I mean my dad because my mom doesn't use it much at all. I'm hoping that may change if I give them the desktop though, because most of her family uses email now (including her mom), so it'd be a good way to keep in touch.
Yeah, I still got WinXP on my laptop - only for my gps software. If I could find a linux alternative for that, I'd be set.
I remember when I was first introduced to the concept that there are alternatives to MS Windows. Windows 95 was the top dog at the time and I'd reinstall it every few months in order to keep my system running smoothly. I figured out a lot about installing Windows 95.
Anyway, I was sitting on the toilet reading a computer magazine and came across this article about Windows alternatives. There was FreeBSD, NetBSD, Linux, and maybe another one or two. This was nineteen ninety something, so they weren't too well known or advanced as far as usability on the PC or suitability as a Windows replacement. But they were all free - I'd known about free software, it's called shareware. But I had no concept of open source or free-as-in-speech software and didn't get it until much later on. So I read the article and thought, "Well, that's interesting", then forgot all about it for a while. I may have done some searches on the internet (this was before google's domination as a search engine, so I was probably using AltaVista or something), and I think I downloaded some code, but I didn't know what to do with it or how to turn it into a running operating system.
Then, some time later, somebody gave me a RedHat 5.something CD. He'd gotten it from a local computer users group that had a few people experimenting with linux. I installed it. I figured out how to shut the system down. I couldn't get the GUI to work (I was thinking that maybe I could get Quake 3 running on there). No GUI and none of the DOS commands that I knew work (I was quite familiar with a DOS command line at this point). But, as I said, I did figure out the shutdown command - after rebooting the hard way a few times and corrupting the filesystem. Then I thought, "Eh, forget it" and reinstalled Windows on the system.
Then I went to Alaska. I got an old computer from the Good Will for $50 or something. I had a lot of time with not much to do, so I got on the internet and started reading about linux. I found Debian and started downloading the floppy installation set - it was like 14 floppies or something. This was annoying my uncle whom I was living with because he only had dial-up and only one phone line - but I did most of my downloading at night. I got that base system installed only to discover that you have to connect this to the internet and download more stuff if you want anything useful. So I played with it for a while, but never got it to much of a useful state. I read everything that I could find about installing and using linux and I ordered a Debian Linux Bible that came with an install cd - the only problem is that the old piece of junk computer can't boot from a cd. But I got something working and played with it some more. All this time, I'm learning to use the linux command line quite well, though there were many unix concepts that I didn't quite get (it's really philosophically different from a certain perspective).
I moved around a bit in Alaska, all the time reading about linux if I didn't have a system to play with it on. While living in Kenai, I got Redhat 7 or 8 installed with the Gnome Desktop Environment for a GUI and got it on the internet - used it for email, web browsing, printing, etc. While I was staying with a guy near the town of North Pole (it's not far from Fairbanks), I used his printer to print the book Linux From Scratch (some old version circa summer 2002) - it was a couple hundred pages anyhow - oh, I also printed the Linux Users Guide (LUG) available from tldp.org. But I didn't have a computer to install it on at the time.
I moved back to Pennsylvania, stopping in Minnesota to work for a while. All this time, I'm reading linux stuff wherever I can get it. At some point, I have a caseless computer in a wooden drawer that I'm bringing around with me (I'm a bit of a vagabond, so I travel a lot). The thing was an AMD K5 or K6 - anyhow it was pretty slow. I'd been experimenting with a dual-booting setup with Windows and Linux on the same machine - I wasn't quite ready to completely give up my reliance on Windows. By this time, I was quite familiar with dual-booting, disk partitioning, linux filesystems, the fat32 filesystem, the bootloaders lilo and grub, and the configuration of these bootloaders.
I don't even remember how many computers I'd gone through in all of this, let alone all the different configurations of each (add a harddrive here, try a different distro there, etc). I'd get one free from somebody or throw one together from some spare parts I'd picked up or just had laying around. I even bought an old piece of junk from a local computer store for $130 - used it for quite a while too. By this time, I was dual-booting linux and WindowsXP, though for a long time I was using WinXP in a fat32 filesystem so I'd be able to modify it from within linux. And I was using open source software in windows as well - notably the gimp.
Somewhere in there, I started playing with Python which is a cool interpreted programming language. I've always wanted to get into programming more, but have never had the ambition.
I got an 800 Mhz AMD Athlon (already pretty old by this point, but faster than the PIII-450 I was using) from a friend for $100 or something - the motherboard was shot, so I had to find a replacement. The processor was a Slot A which had already been phased out by AMD. I called a couple of local places to see if they'd have an old Slot A board around - one place told me that they had one, but when I got there (an hour's drive) it turned out to be a Socket A afterall and therefore no good to me. I finally found one through a Yahoo search and ordered it - it might have been the very last retail Slot A board ever sold. I got the thing up and running with 256 meg o' ram, and an 80 gig harddrive I'd been carrying around for a while (swapping from one old crappy computer to another not quite as old or crappy).
I had the Athlon 800 for some time - I gave the PIII 450 to my brother John 'cause his PIII 700 got toasted in travel and he said that the 450 was plenty for what he was doing - I just swapped harddrives and maybe gave it a ram boost.
I finally got the time and ambition to install Linux From Scratch on the Athlon. I was staying with the Greene's at the time and they had cable internet, so having my computer downloading all the time wasn't a problem. LFS takes a very long time and a lot of work to install. Basically, you start with a very minimal pre-compiled base install (or you could start from any other linux distro). From this, you compile the basic packages and install them into a clean filesystem tree. As soon as this base setup is functional, you chroot into it, so you compile everything else from within the system that you just compiled. Everything is compiled from source which takes a long time, and there is no package management system in the basic setup - you can install the package manager from any distro you like after the basic system is up and running. Every package can be configured/patched/tailored to your liking. There are many choices to be made as there can be several alternatives for a particular tool. So I got LFS installed - it took a while because I was also working construction full time.
I had LFS working, but there were a few things I didn't like about it - I liked how everything gets compiled from source, but resolving dependencies by hand is a bit straining and things started to get a bit cluttered.
Then I discovered Gentoo. It's like LFS, but the install is automated and it includes what might be the best package management system ever developed. The package database includes just about every piece of open source software you could ever want - the actual source code is obtained from the developer's website or another mirror - gentoo does not keep an archive of source code for all packages. Anybody can make a package for some new software and submit it to be added to the database - so there are packages for just about everything (open source that is).
Then I sold the Athlon to a cousin for $100. I talked her into keeping Gentoo installed on it (it also had WinXP on it of course), but as far as I know, she never uses Gentoo (she still has the computer, it's having some issues though). But it still has Gentoo installed on it.
I did not replace the Athlon 800 right away. I did not have high speed internet at the time and I decided to take a break from tinkering with computers for financial and other reasons (I also did not have a job at this point).
Then I got a job - a job building waterslides. I went to Orlando for a couple of months and decided to get another old computer and install linux on it to serve as a sort of internet kiosk for me and my roommates (5 of us). It was old (don't remember the specs), but it worked - I had a 120 Gb HD in there. I think that I eventually abandoned it in the back of someone's truck - never to be seen again. Or maybe I gave it to someone else, I don't remember. But I got rid of it when I built an Athon64 3000+ with 1Gb Ram, the 120 Gb HD from the old computer and a 160 Gb HD, a dual-layer DVD burner, dual gigabit lan on the motherboard, PCI-X, a super lan boy case with carrying strap, and some other nice features. I built it while on the road after the Orlando job. I installed Gentoo on it of course - this time without WinXP. My Athon64 processor has never run a bit of Microsoft code.
Most jobs don't last as long as Orlando, so I had to leave it at home a lot. I decided to buy a laptop. The last time that I brough the desktop on the road, the motherboard started having some hardware malfunctions. Two of the memory slots don't work anymore and the gigabit lan's don't work at all anymore - I had to get a pci 100 Mbit card. And after the trip home, I'm not sure that the motherboard will work at all because I didn't fully reinstall it after taking it out to see if I could get the lan's to work - I only put 2 of the 9 motherboard screws back in, then brought it the 900 miles home in a rickety cargo van which I'm sure is what caused it to mess up in the first place.
I also got my laptop on that trip, so I don't need the desktop anymore. I think that I'm going to replace the motherboard, shed a tear, install WindowsXP, and give it to my mom and dad. They could use a nice desktop. Their only computer is an old IBM laptop that they pretty much use as if it were a desktop (don't think it's been off the desk in over a year). When I say "they", I mean my dad because my mom doesn't use it much at all. I'm hoping that may change if I give them the desktop though, because most of her family uses email now (including her mom), so it'd be a good way to keep in touch.
Yeah, I still got WinXP on my laptop - only for my gps software. If I could find a linux alternative for that, I'd be set.
