How I came to Linux and how I have used it When I was about 10 years old, my mother and my brother and I went to America. We flew to San Francisco where friends of us lived and travelled through all the National Parks and other sights in the California/Nevada area. At that time, there were three things that impressed me: One was that people were actually driving that kind of cars I only knew from watching my favorite show at that time, Knight Rider. The second was the computer our guest family had. It had only one mouse button, and the floppy drive was built into the tiny monitor. On the computer we could play one game called "Bricks" and another, much better one, called "Lode Runner". Of the eight days we stayed at their house i spent about 12 hours playing that game, and that was the first and only time I actually suffered from what would later be called RMS (Repetitive Movement Syndrome). The third one was from a slot-machine at the camping site in the center of Monument Valley National Park. The video game was called "Super Mario Bros." and my brother and I spent about 20$ in two days at that machine. We were 10 and 8, and that was a lot of money. This was in August. In November of that year, my brother and I saw an advertisement of a game console called the Nintendo Entertainment System. It was an offer for upcoming Christmas. Packaged with the console came THAT GAME!! We had to have it. Our mother was against it, but we managed to get it for Christmas. This was how I got hooked on games. Zelda, Kid Icarus, SMB2, Zelda2, Tetris, Bubble Bobble. Fast forward. At one point, the NES wasn't enough. Amiga was the way to go now, and somehow we managed to get that. Who had an Amiga was king. Some people would have IBM PCs (the 8086 and 80286 kind), but they were far inferior, because Hercules and CGA and Tandy and XGA just couldn't cut it against 64 colours and four channel stereo sound. They had hard disks, but on those hard disks were crappy games. This is why I never deemed the IBMs to be worthwhile, even after the Amiga died. R-Type. Pirates! Hero Quest. Kings Quest I-V. Archon. Giana Sisters. Ports Of Call. I cracked a game. I wrote a virus. I composed .mod music. Fast forward again. 1995. I left my home town to study. In one building of my Uni they had a room full of computers all configured to access the grand new thing called the "Data Highway". You had to have a thing called "Trumpet" for accessing email, and two programs to get information, "gopher" and "Mosaic". With Mosaic, however, there were no pictures. To have Pictures, you had to use "Netscape" version 3, which crashed all the time, but it got much better when "Navigator Gold (Netscape 4.01)" got released. But I didn't use the "web" much. I used telnet. For people of my home town had chosen to study Informatics, and set up a thing called a BBS. That was a cute thing where you could chat and had discussion forums and stuff and it was neat. I used it to keep contact with the people I knew in my home town, and met a bunch of other people there, a lot of which have become good friends, and one of which has become my girlfriend. All was great and cuddly. Then, one day, 1996, two very bad things happened. One was that windows 95 was released. The other was that a very good friend of mine decided to give me his old computer because he upgraded to a Windows95 compatible one. That was the first IBM-compatible a.k.a PC I ever used. This was the specs it had: CPU: Intel i386/16, with "turbo" it had 24 MHz. 12MB RAM FASST7000 SCSI controller 130MB SCSI hard disk (it's true, I still have it. This was a LOT!!! of HD space at that time.) SoundBlaster Pro Creative 2xspeed CD-ROM drive Tseng Labs ET4000 VGA controller with 1MB VRAM 1 12" black-and-white monitor. That was out-of date at the time, but it had some high-end shit in there! Software: 1 Disk with MS-DOS 6, 12 Disks with Windows 3.11 for Workgroups on it, 5 Disks with MS Word for Windows on it, one disk with Graphics drivers, 1 disk with SoundBlaster drivers. It sucked. Big time. Just like I was used to with that IBM-compatible crap. I played with it. I installed Windows 3.11 and WinWord, but did not have a use for it, as there were no game which required windows, and I didn't have use for word processing. What I did have were games. Only they wouldn't load. Because 640Kb are enough for everyone. So I tweaked. AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS galore. At the end, I had 15 options to boot, all had different drivers loaded, in different order, and with those options, any game would load. It was just that at the time I got into OS tweaking I didn't want to play any games anymore. I was hooked... So back I went to the web, and in lycos search I typed :"windows OR DOS alternative" and it said: OS/2 but OS/2 said IBM, so I went to my trusty BBS and I went to Usenet, and it said: Linux. Then I bought the book "Linux for Dummies", ISBN 3-8266-2725-3 written by Craig and Coletta Witherspoon and John "Maddog" Hall. The book included an evaluation version of S.u.S.E. 5.2 (can anyone please tell me what these letters stand for? please??) It took about 15 hours to install it with the 2x drive. It took two weeks until I had X running. (one mistake in XF98Config and the system locks hard, and fsck on 120MB takes about 12 minutes). A wrong mode-line would really, positively fry my monitor in a fraction of a second. But I did it. I did it with only the information in the book, and on the man pages and HOWTOS contained on disk. At the point the fishgrate thingy and the X cursor finally appeared I felt like... I will never, ever forget that moment. (BTW, I had upgraded from the ISA ET4000, which was relatively unproblematic, to a VLB ATI Mach32 / 2MB card, which was a real bitch any time; if you dont believe me, look at libvga.conf from svgalib!) As I said I was into tweaking. What I had was not enough (though I could blindly name IRQs and ioports of any chip on my board) so I got myself a modem, and upgraded. I blindly mixed tarballs, SuSE rpms, redhat rpms and others. It broke my system. I fixed it. I broke it again. I fixed it again. Then I got fed up. Yast(<1) would override all my tweaks every time it ran. By the time I installed RedHat 5.3 I had a i486/DX2-100, the coolest chip Intel ever built, with 64MB RAM. (There were 486 that went up to 120MHz, but they were not by Intel, and DX4s, and I think there was a AMD DX4/150) All was coochey. I moved, and my new flatmate had a Pentium 166, SCSI drives, a Matrox card and -- OS/2 installed. I asked him why. He said Windows95 sucks. He said OS/2 was cooler, plus it runs everything win95 and NT runs. Two weeks later, he was running RedHat along with OS/2, and by the time win89 came out, OS/2 was dead, sadly, and we both were at RH 6.2, although upgrades were really a pain. Two months later, his MOTD read "this computer is 100% FAT free". OS/2 ran on FAT. We set up a Debian system on a dual-Pentium 90 (what a cool crate, it had EISA slots!!) for a firewall and masquerading router, and I found Debian awfully awkward. But is was a "stable" release, and we had to update about 7 packages in two years. I ran RedHat from 6.2 to 7.3. I continued to tweak. In between I hosed my system by doing strip * in /usr/lib. I hosed it again by installing Rawhide packages whose dependencies weren't available the next week while the things that depended on them were. I reinstalled 8.0. They included the new Gnome. I had been a fanatic gnome vs. KDE defender. What they did was rape. Everything I liked gnome for was removed. Everything I hated about software had been made (irreversibly) default. That was when I installed Gentoo. I was thrilled by the idea of compiling by source, because I knew dependency hell, both the redhat and the Debian variety, and was thrilled by gentoo not having an installer. I still hold this as one of he finest virtues of gentoo. As a seasoned Linux guy, installing was a snap, even after sifting the install guide only briefly. I am still only beginning to comprehend the coolness of USE flags. Unfortunately, it seems to go downhill. I see posts wanting to remove the UNIX fs structure, I see the troubling trend of an installer gaining sympathies, and i see posts of people installing (Gentoo) Linux for the sole reason that they heard it was "cool". But I will rant about this at some other time. Yesterday I found a file in my /home/nephros/work/mine/poems/ It had a ctime of 12/08/96. I love Linux. Peter Gantner a.k.a nephros 03-09-2003 Appendix: Computers I have owned: de-commissioned: Intel i386/16 (24 "turbo") OS: DOS 4.01-5.11, Win 3.11, SuSE Linux 5.1 Intel i486DX2/100 OS: RedHat Linux 5.1-6.0, Windows 95, 98, 98SE Cyrix x586-166+@133MHz OS: RedHat Linux 6.1-6.3, Windows 98SE AMD K6-3D/400 OS: RedHat Linux 6.3-7.0, Windows 98SE Intel Celeron 700@1GHz OS: RedHat Linux 7.1-8.0, Windows 2000 (briefly), FreeDOS, BeOS R5 currently owned but unused: Apple //e NES Amiga 500 Digital PC2000, Intel Pentium 133 IBM PC300GL Intel Pentium 166 OS: FreeBSD RELEASE 4.4, upcoming OpenBSD current: Dual AMD AthlonXP 1800+ (modded into MP) OS: Gentoo Linux 1.4_rc1 and up, no native Windows 786MB PC2100 DDR RAM ASUS A7M266-D motherboard SiliconImage CMD680 ATA133 Controller Creative SB Live! 5.1 Digital MSI/Medion GeForce3 Ti200 64MB-DDR, TV-in/out Davicom DM9xxx 10/100MBit NIC LITE-ON LTR-52246S, ATAPI CD-R/RW JLMS XJ-HD165H, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM ASUS CD-S500/A, ATAPI CD-ROM QUANTUM FIREBALL CX10.2A, 10GB ATA drive Maxtor 6Y060L0, 60GB ATA drive