How Did You Get Into Linux and Open Source?
 

Inspired by the latest episode of Bad Voltage, LQ would like to know: How did you first get involved with Linux and/or Open Source?

--jeremy

See also, the official LQ poll: What Was Your First Linux Distro?
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ro-4175467184/

--jeremy

It was College and I took an intro to Linux class...it was using Fedora Core 4...the rest, they say, is history.

I attribute my interest in OpenSource to the BBS days and share/freeware. And also needing a compiler that was free (gcc) for DOS.

I needed an os that would run on a pentium 2 with 96MB RAM. A friend suggested Slackware 10.2

When I graduated from high school 98, one of the graduation presents I asked for was Linux CDs.

(The plan at the time was to go to university to major in computer science, and I wanted to be ready).

I started to use Unix SGI Irix 6.5 and SPARC Solaris 5.8 for my thesis. Then I bought Red Hat 5.2 CD and I installed it on my overclocked Intel Celeron 300A at night time (drinking lots of cups of coffee).

CAE Linux
 

started working for a nonprofit doing engineering work. realized how much quality open source technical/analysis software there is, and how painful it was to search for Windows ports, etc. Then I found CAELinux.org, a distro pre-packaged with an array of mathematical and mechanical engineering software. with that I started to dabble. the rest came from needing to rescue various crashed windows harddrives with a Knoppix disk.

Back in the BBS days, I wanted an inexpensive C compiler for MS-DOS and later very-early MS-Win, remember Mix C ?

I was impressed with what an inexpensive product could do, compile without objection, a program I originally wrote on Unix. Even Lattice C and some of the other "Big Name" C compilers couldn't do that ( Lattice almost did it, only complained about whether or not I appended an L to Long constants ).

I was introduced by a friend to { Share | Free }-Ware. From there it was things like MKTS, PC-Unix, until finally the same friend mentioned Slackware. Ironically, it was that friend who, years earlier, debated with me on BBS forums; he insisted that a { Share | Free }-Ware/OpenSource OS could never exist!

These days I do 99.99...% of my professional and personal work on Linux. I know of quite a few software developers who, even though they may develop on MS-Windoze, they use Cygwin to make things easier.

In 1989 I bought (for work), a control system with a UNIX MIS. It was hate at first sight but I had to soldier on. Help was 2000 miles away.

At home I installed Linux to try to get a better understanding of this strange beast.

In 2000 we switched to a Windows based MIS which frankly worked much better (The MIS not the OS!) However as Windows got worse with every release I was tempted towards Linux and after about a 6 month dual booting period I made a complete switchover in (I think) 2004. This was at home. My employer stuck with Windows and even switched away from Openoffice.

Messing about (the best way of describing what I do on computers :) ) with DJGPP, Cygwin, and Msys + MinGW on Windows XP. Made me realise there was another, more interesting, OS to play with.

In 1995 my main OpSys was OS/2 and had been for a few years. It was a wonderful system with one caveat - Device Drivers were not plentiful. I learned Assembly in hopes of writing my own. Soon after, IBM announced "10 years to EOL"so I began to look for alternatives.

The most obvious was Win95. I was "late to the party" but I bought a copy and installed it. It was sorta OK. However in a few months I bought a new mobo which had an AGP slot and Win95 would not support it. I read that just one lousy file was needed - USBSUPP, basically a DLL and inf combo about 32KB in size. I tried everything and finally phoned Microsoft.

I was told I could buy the file for $50 US !!! OR "if I was really smart", I could buy Win98 for $85. Microsoft never got another dime from me after that. Then I found Linux.

I had wanted to try Linux since 1999 as I always heard great things about it but wasn't skilled enough at least in my own eyes to try an install. Around 2003 or 2004 I downloaded a Knoppix live cd and was blown away by how a cd could hold a full featured operating system that seemed, even running from a cd, superior to Windows. I finally mustered my courage in early 2007 and took the plunge with Ubuntu. That lasted about 2 weeks as I found it not to be as user friendly as advertised and lacked way to many configurations options. I then tried Pclinux which I still use as the anchor on my multi-boot system although I have used Slackware as my main system for the last few years.

I had heard about this Linux thing and wanted to try it, but didn't want to risk borking the family computer; I had only the "family" computer and my personal laptop.

Then a fellow at work closed up his home side business back in 2005; he would buy surplus computers from his wife's employer (a local university), slap Windows on them, turn them into what he called "granny" computers (email and web-surfing), then sell them to "grannies" for $50.00.

He gave me three surplus computers: Two IBM 300s (the original 300 MHz Pentiums) and a something or other I forget. I put Slackware on one of the IBMs and got it working (I tried something else first and couldn't get it to install; installed Slackware three times that first day until I got it right). Then someone told me that I could use it to self-host my website, which was a members.aol.com site at the time and the only reason I had not canceled my AOL membership several years before.

I got my website working with the help of no-ip.com, and started a blog. Six months later, I took the big step of switching my personal laptop from Windows XP to Slackware. Haven't looked back.

I got the other IBM working with Slackware and shipped it to my daughter with instructions about how to log in and startx. She used it for years, at least until she got married and her husband bought a new computer capable of playing and editing videos (the IBM 300 CPU could play audio, but not video), and I never got support call one.

Sorry to disappoint. No computer back ground till 2008 when I was in my 50's.

Hated Computers. Figured they gave the law a faster way to do a background check on me. Same for everything else, govt,jobs,loans.

Then discovered ebay and motorcycle parts for sale on ebay.
Had a Compaq 1540DM with a broken hard drive. Pentium 1. 64MB of ram. 2gig IDE hard drive.
Money was not a option since I had a low opinion of computers.
Beer and Motorcycles had a bigger priority for funds.

I am self taught. No computer education. But I know some developers I can call bros.

Found that Puppy 2.14 would boot and run on that compaq and login to my ebay account.
The rest is history.

Now I am a Linux Distro Team member on a couple of distros. Found out I had a knack
for understanding how linux file systems are organized. I had no bad computer habits
to hold me back. No pre assumptions to go by (eg: Windows power user).

Still have to use Windows 7 to run http://www.mastertune.net/system.htm
to tuneup these newer motorcycles with fuel injection and electronic ignition modules.
Linux has not advanced to being useful at interfacing with motorcycle electronic computer
modules yet. DRM I guess.

I still hate computers, but learned to live with them. They make good radios/stereos and stream movies OK
in my motorcycle shop.

Funny thing is. My wife is a power windows user and knows how to use DOS on up.
But now. When her Windows breaks. I fix it with Gnu/Linux. She was the one who
gave me that Compaq and told me about Ebay, the Internet, and motorcycle parts.
She showed me how to turn it on and boot into Windows 98 that was originally on it.

If not for that. I still would be computer illiterate.

Been a Windows user for years, was nerver particularly happy with it however. So at some point back in the late 90's, I decided to see if there was anything else available. Bought a few CD's (back when you could still get linux CD's at Staples and Office Depot) since I had dial-up, and started trying everything I could with highly limited success (never did find a distro that I was able to get my modem to work in). Eventually when I moved to where I could broadband, I started downloading distro's, and of course had much better success. Shortly thereafter, I found Libranet, which was the first distro that I was able to get pretty much EVERTYTHING to work perfectly on. I was hooked, and began to actually use Libranet more often than Windows. Libranet passed into history like so many others, and I distro-hopped most of the "easy" distro's for a while. Eventually, because I at the time supported linux servers at work, I was sent to class to get my RHCT. With the learning from that, I made the switch to Debian proper as my primary OS, although I still distro hop on some other hardware I have.

In 2000 I became involved with Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Specifically, use of the raster-based geospatial analysis software, ERDAS Imagine. Training included delving into the OS which, at the time, was Solaris on Sun workstations. Macro language and Vi along with Spatial modeling and 3-D fly-by over Landsat5 scenes I mosaicked after selecting three-band combos for best display of data and then making one-band 256 color images to be underlain by Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) were but a part of my job.

After five years of doing this, I burnt out on making NT4 and W2K perform on modest workstations via registry tweaks primarily. Following a six-year hiatus, I got back into using PCs and swore to myself I would not use Windows ever again. But Solaris was in limbo at the time, so my next choice was GNU/Linux. I have been using Linux ever since.

Through my mother. She's been in the IT sector since the late 70s, so at one point, when she got fed up with Windows, she decided to go back to Linux, and I kinda followed suit (I was about 6 at the time)

Getting involved like contributing or getting involved as using it?
If latter methinks it was RH 5.1 given to me by a friend of mine. Year was 1997 I believe. It was extremely steep learning curve. I remember to get Gravis Ultrasound working I had to patch the kernel. Kernel source download took 14 hours with analog modem. All documentation was in English and I knew less than 10 words in English when I started. So I was learning a new OS and a new language same time ... Compiling a new kernel on a 40 MHz 486 took another 12 hours.

I was kidnapped by an Alien Bobcat and when I woke up next day I was using Slackware 13.37. I can't lie.

Regards.

I tried Linux in 2003 after hearing of it, but wasn't interested enough then to put in the necessary time and effort to figure it out. I got involved more seriously in 2005. I accidentally locked up my hard drive, and a Linux user showed me how to make a Knoppix liveCD and at least rescue the files. I abandoned Windows permanently in 2008.

yes, my first contact with linux was when i was trying to rescue a virus-damaged windows laptop, maybe 2007.
but it took me another 4 years to change to linux - the catalyst was "customisation", i blushingly admit, but seeing my non-nerd girlfriend writing her thesis on a ubuntu laptop that looks so cool by default, and has a torrent client installed and integrated into the system, is what made me change. i never looked back. it's good to be in control of what's happening on my computers.

I started with Mandrake 5.1; soon after, I tried Slackware 7 and I've been using Slackware ever since.

Got a second habit computer - came with win98 preinsralled. One of my friends wanted to give me win XP CD's but then for some reasons he did just forgot. Then another one of my friends gave me knoppix CD. Worked like a charm. Needed 2weeks to figure out the monitor resolution though. The monitor only supported 800x600 resolution. Realised right away the importance of reading man pages and boot instructions. Wanted a -real-time is though. Installed Ubuntu - that was a lot of work - then stuck with debian for about 6 months.
Eventually found slackware. Found home.

I was using a Sinclair QL and needed more software, but wanted to keep my custom programs. The answer was a Q60, which double booted the QDOS OS and a port of Red Hat to the Motorola 68060. When I switched to a PC, I naturally installed Fedora 1.

Just the instinct.

i had the same problem with windows.
people always forget that installing windows from scratch is a much bigger pita than installing linux.

@rigor wrote:
I sure do! Great little compiler. Bought it and their database program. Used both for several years. I'd first gotten the Borland C compiler, version 1 for U.S. $99.00. I couldn't believe I could get one so cheap. Then I found the Mix C! Both were very good products. In a way, I kinda miss the old 'shareware' days.

enorbet wrote:
I also used OS/2. Bought all the reference manuals. Was the first GUI programming I ever did. Still like that OS. I went up through 'Warp' even. Kept it until I gave the machine away.

First found out about BSD and Linux from the old Walnut Creek CD's. Had a subscription so I could get the OS/2 stuff. When I first read about these, I had no idea what they were. Being completely ignorant, I decided to buy the Slackware set they had. I've had some flavor of Slack ever since. Even used FreeBSD and NetBSD on a different machine for awhile. Bought the first Slack set in '95.

I first became aware of Open Source software in 1992-1993, while working for a small commercial BBS called DSC (an acronym for "The Datamax/Satalink Connection") as a programmer. I developed an interface between the NCSA Telnet & FTP clients and the PCBoard BBS system. The DSC BBS became a small ISP called Voicenet. They decided to run Solaris, and I became the SysAdmin of it because I was not a Windows person. The First Open Source OS that Voicenet used was OpenBSD, which ran well on old Sparc2 and Sparc1 machines, (better than the early Solaris 2.x versions, in fact). We experimented with Linux/Intel to run mail (Qmail) and Usenet (INN) servers, and we sold webhosting with Apache on Solaris/OpenBSD/Linux, as well as IIS on Windows. I was trying to develop a TIVO-Like appliance based on Linux, ALSA and the Happauge Card when I was laid off in 2003.

I had forgotten all about Mix-C! What a great value it was, I wonder what ever became of it? I used Mix-C to teach an Intro to 'C' course at a High School Adult Ed Night Class in the 1990s, it was perfect. I think it was called 'Mix/Power-C' when I got it, I may still have the manual & floppy someplace.

At high school (The Bronx H.S. of Science, started in 1993), we used X stations to access the internet. The backbone of the system was an IBM server running AIX, and that was my first encounter with UNIX in general. I actually enjoyed using it, and got to know it. When I went to college, I learned about this thing called Linux, a dude on IRC from Canada explained to me how to install Red Hat Linux (ummm... in the 4.x or 5.x series at the time), compile the kernel for use with my sound card and compile BitchX (of course, needed an IRC client). All this on a 486. It took forever.

I was hooked. Never looked back.

Oh, let's see... 1961 (still in high school), IBM tabulation equipment (programming with jumper wires on phenolic boards -- large, heavy boards). 1972 Honeywell GECOS mainframe, BASIC and FORTRAN. 1975-ish Cromemco Z-80 boxes running Cromemco's version of CP/M, later running Cromemco Cromix, a Z-80 multiuser multitasking Unix look- work alike, later Cromemco dual boot systems running Z-80 Cromix and Unix System 3 (on Motorola 68030 (with separate memory manager board). Still have one of those, still works (running Unix in 1MB of RAM on a 96MB disk, too).

Later 1988-ish, Motorola 68040 Unix System 3 (system administrator and software engineer).

1990-ish, Solaris (software engineer, data base designer and developer).

Bought a Dell box with Win98 and about 1997-ish (do not remember these dates), installed Slackware 3.x (I'm pretty sure) and dual-booted; Win98 rapidly got set aside and ultimately trashed altogether.

Series of Dells since, all Slackware, up to Slackware 64-bit 14.1 on my main work machine and lap top, Slackware 14.1 32-bit on two old Dell Dimension 8400 that are headless data base servers (one MariaDB, the other PolstgreSQL, like PostgreSQL more than MySQL/MariaDB).

Looked at Ubuntu, scrap that. Looked at a couple of others, scrapped those. It's really been Slackware-exclusive since the first install. I'm embarrassed to note that I have VirtualBox on my main work machine and -- rarely -- boot Win7 on it for work I just can't find in the Linux world.

Haven't looked back.

In the mid 90's I was using OS2 but needed a way to share a modem. I found diald and put it on an old machine running slackware. Fun! and a new world.

I was using Open Source at work (University, SPARC workstations) before Linux was bootable - there's an early version of a manual page I contributed dated 12/12/1992, and we were using various open source tools including emacs, RCS, other commmand line stuff - and then when Linux became useable enough I installed it on my home PC in May 1993.

I started working in an engineering lab circa 1996, and we used data acquisition software that ran in a Unix environment. I first saw GNU/Linux during this period when a co-worker introduced me to it. Later, in 2004, I installed my first dual-boot system, which was Suse 9.1 with Windows 2000.

I was taking a class on Windows NT security and the instructor gave me a copy of Red Hat Linux. I don't remember if it was 6 or 7, still have the disks somewhere. Since then I have used Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise, White Box, Debian, Knoppix, Damn Small, Suse, and a few others that were forgettable. Ubuntu has been my go to for a while, though I really need to suck it up and try Slackware.

Eric

I had undergone an Amdahl course "UTS for FE's" and was exploring UTS (Amdahl's Unix) on Mainframes.
A colleague introduced me to Minix. I did development on the Mainframe during the day and took the sources home on floppy and modified them to run under Minix on the PC.

I saw Linus' announcement of Linux in the Minix newsgroup and downloaded the first kernel, running it on a Toshiba laptop with 2 floppy drives. Before the ext filesystem, used Minix's bootlace and shoelace to get Linux booted and running off hard drives, OLVWM to get X running where modelines had to be worked out with a ruler to measure screen dimensions and a calculator plus some fiddling to get the display to fit.
The first distro I used was Manchester University's MCC, followed by Slackware and others.

Worked on Linux on Mainframes and SPARC.

SuSE 8.0
 

Back in 2002, out of morbid curiosity I bought a boxed version of SuSE 8.0, went to the local LUG and tried to make a go of it with mixed results. In 2006 I found a cd of Ubuntu in the lunchroom and have been hooked ever since. Currently using Manjaro.

Had problems with a flaky PC. Had to reinstall the OS several times. Got tired of having to call up MS every time and ask them to release the key. It felt so degrading and stupid. (Not sure if their system works that way now or not...)

Found a site called debian.org. Ran Debian for a few years, then Gentoo, then Debian again.

I eventually turned into a Stallman-style free software fanatic, so I can't go back to Windows or Mac on principle. (Even if I wanted to do so.)

One thing that really kept me hooked is the free development environment. Need a compiler for language X? Download, install. Need some library? Download, install. Need the docs? Download, install. Get bored with language X? Uninstall. You can try anything any time because it doesn't cost you anything.

Coworker
 

A coworker had a copy of SLS or Slackware and we loaded it on a Dell 486/66. I had used Xenix since about 1985 and Solaris since 1991 but this was different. A free, powerful, UNIX clone that was ENTIRELY Open Source. Another contractor said Free BSD would be the O/S of choice and that Linux would go nowhere. I knew otherwise. In 1994, I moved my desktop to Linux and haven't used another desktop for development since (oh, wait, one brief stint doing some Windows stuff on another computer and network).

My buddy had just gotten a random Linux Live CD from some Baghdad marketplace and spent all his free time conjuring magic with his computer and it piqued the hell outta my curiosity and I was kinda jealous of the cool stuff he was learning! So, in 2005 I bought a book on SUSe from Amazon, started out with a dual-boot WinXP/SUSe, but quickly dropped the WinXP, and I haven't ever looked back. Even those lost weekends when I'm trying to fix something I broke, I wouldn't trade. It's just so gosh darned exciting to try out all the distros and programs and desktop environments. And now that I jumped to KDE I don't think I could ever go back.

6 CDs of SuSe
 

I was going to school for software engineering. I had a prerequisite class that I was near the end of. My Windows XP gave me the famous "blue screen of death." So I called a hacker buddy of mine who gave me 6 CDs of SuSe Linux. (Ouch.) Of course, having never used any of the *nixes before, I had a lot of trouble installing it. I did just get my final project done, and still managed to get an A in that class.
A few days later, I call him up and say "Man that Linux sure was a tough install, especially since I had to put CDs in and out of the tray so often. He just laughed and laughed, especially since Knoppix had just come out with one cd that ran live.

Yeah Stateless. That's the beauty of it. If you buy an office quite from M$, you feel like you have to use it. if you download a free one and don't like it, download another free one. I useLibreOffice mostly, but for word docs, I use AbiWord. it's super fast and light.

Early adopter of UNIX -> Linux
 

Was working for Bell Labs in the early 1970s and this new software called UNIX running on DEC machines was available as an alternative to IBM mainframes. Years later, naturally progressed to Linux after retiring from corporations that provided UNIX and Solaris.

I knew about Linux for a long time before I actually got into it. Unfortunately at the time I only had dial-up and even the smallest distros of the time were still too big for me to download. However, as soon as I got my broadband (10Mbps) connection hooked up I downloaded Red Hat (9?). I had issues running it on my legacy hardware so I installed Debian, then finally settled on Slackware 9 a few days later. Within a year I switched to Linux as my primary OS. Now I only run Windows in VM for compatibility checks when I design a website. .... Or those rare instances I have time to play Crysis (1, 2 or 3); all the rest of my gaming is done via Steam on Linux.

I currently run Debian Testing on my laptops and servers for easy maintenance and on-the-fly mission-specific software installs. I run Slackware 14.1 on my workstation for the flexibility and stability (Debian is a bit slow to incorporate proprietary drivers into their repositories, if at all :rolleyes:).

If it were not for LQ.org, I would not be nearly as proficient as I am today.

Fred Langer, editor of Byte magazine, mentioned that he had come across this great little operating system named 'Puppy Linux' that ran in RAM.

I tried it and away we went!

Dick Rounds

slackware
 

I was almost finishing my PhD (1996) and I was introduced to Linux after being working with Unix. I came back home with 10 floppy of the Slackware distribution... a lot of machines and distributions since then..

I do engineering analysis and related programming, mostly in Fortran. For years I worked under Windows, but the compiler I had was just too primitive for large scientific code. Of course, the computer security types got carte blanche after 9/11 and all but disabled engineering analysis capabilities under Windows. And then, the code editors and computer graphics under Windows weren't very good either, though perhaps they are better now. Where I work, the Windows network doesn't even allow access to the DOS prompt, or whatever they call it now. So, when I was offered an SGI unix box (later a linux box), I jumped at the chance.

Before there was Red Hat or any other, with kernel version 0.9 in 1993. Then Caldera, Red Hat, SUSE (and SLES), Puppy, and Ubuntu. (And _way_ before that was CP/M, MP/M, MS-DOS/PC-DOS, OS/2, Windows from 2.0 --> 7, and various other environments.)

A fellow blogger at My Opera was always singing the praises of Linux. At the time, I was blogging via cellphone. When I finally decided to 'upgrade' to a 'real' computer, I made a point of finding one with Linux pre-installed. The only one in existence here in South Africa, the Acer Aspire One 110l (aka: zg5)
Linpus Lite turn out to be a stripped to the skeleton version of an obsolete Fedora variant. I replaced that with the unofficial Ubuntu Netbook Remix. (later superseded by Ubuntu Netbook Edition)

When Canonical put Unity on that, I simply switched to the full desktop version, only to have them force Unity on that one release later.
Then I found Openbox and searched for a distro based on that. Which is how I ended up with Crunchbang. :D

I was working on a PhD in the early 1990's doing a lot on numerical work. The research group had PC's running an early version of Window's that needed very frequent reboots for all kinds of reasons. I got access to Sun computers running Unix and got used to Unix that way. Then found out of the SLS distro, copied the boot disk, tried it on a lab PC. Linux was very stable and very similar to Sun Unix. Finally I bought a PC that would run Linux and this has been my main OS thereafter. Still using Slackware that replaced SLS.