[ale] non-technical Linux question

Mon Feb 17 08:44:24 EST 2014

SCO "Linux"?   I've never heard of that one.  I did work on SCO Xenix and SCO UNIX back in the early 90s.

I had been working with various UNIX systems starting in the mid 80s (I'd been doing DOS before that and did Novell Netware) but they were all adjuncts to my full time job in accounting (early on computers were the responsibility of accounting departments mainly because they were first adopters of PCs for spreadsheets).   In 91 I got my first full time IT job doing various UNIX (anyone here ever heard of Astrix from NEC [NOT the PBX FOSS of today]?) flavors.    About 95-96 I changed jobs and although the main job was HP-UX many of us got Caldera Linux desktops.   That was pretty cool as it contained WABI from Sun so could run the Windows 3.1.1 crud the corporation used, rather seamlessly.   WINE was not a good alternative in those days.   Most of what I've done since then has been with various RedHat/CentOS/Fedora versions though I have also played with Debian on PA-RISC just to see it work.   I've also worked with other FOSS stuff like FreeBSD.

HP-UX
SunOS/Solaris
Dynix
AT&T UNIX
NCR UNIX
SCO Xenix
SCO UNIX (and later Open Desktop - originally TCP/IP and X-Windows were separate add-ons that most installs didn't bother to buy)
Novell UnixWare
Asterix
Qnix
FreeBSD
AIX
A/UX (Apple's original UNIX - very well done - had a seamless interface to their System 7 installed on the same system - I was able to install an interpreter on the System 7 side and our application on the A/UX side and run that way - unfortunately the System 7 folks at Apple support didn't know A/UX and vice versa.)
RedHat 7.3, 9
RHEL 2-6 (so far)
Debian Sarge and Woody
Caldera Linux

I'm sure I've left some out.  In the early 90s it seemed like everyone had their own variant of UNIX and of course the plethora of Linux distros boggles the mind.

-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Damon L. Chesser
Sent: Sunday, February 16, 2014 6:31 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] non-technical Linux question

On 02/11/2014 05:08 PM, Boris Borisov wrote:
> I've read the JD bio from the announcement for the Thursday meeting
> and He says that got introduced to world of Linux in 1993 ...
>
> What is your first encounter with Linux/Unix world?
>
> Mine as far as I remember is maybe 1994-1995 year I found a little
> distribution called Monkey Linux
> http://projectdevolve.tripod.com/text/descript.htm. I installed it on
> the company computer running WIN95 needing no repartition. So I've
> learned few things back there :)
>
> Around the same time I've tried Minix on old 286 Pc at home.
>
>
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> Ale at ale.org
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I got started rather late in life.  I was moving furniture for a living, decided Computers were a good idea.  Started learning in 2000 at the age of 37.  The .com boom busted and I decided I would not be behind any wave in the future.  Did some research, found Linux.  Installed Debian and in only a month had X running!  Woot! Then I figured out there was RH, but they pissed me off when the stopped desktop support and moved only to servers.  Tried Suse, but every time I opened Yast, it would break.  Back to Debian.  As a foot note, that does not piss me off any more, it made perfect sense.  Fedora since (IMHO) 14 has been very good.  I keep testing it, and liking it, but I stick to Debian or Ubuntu for personal use, Fedora for work use (as a desktop, I use it to intetract with RHEV), RHEL for work, CentOS for a proof of concept.
Debian Potato for the Win!

It is kinda of nostalgic to remember how hard it was to "download an ISO" (what ever that was) and "Burn" a CD.  Geeze, this Linux is HARD (hey, no collaged education or smart Prof to point me in the right directions or even tell me what a "disk image" was)!  Then 30 days of tinkering, and re-installing to get X running.  man!  I must have had desire.  My motivator was three fold:  1.  My wife was a programmer, so I could not download windows to learn (illegal copy), or get copies of copy righted code with out paying for it, 2. I had no money, so I could not pay for it.  3. I had no money so I could not get formal education, I HAD to learn it on my own for free.

Sure beats working for a living :)

Now days, you get a CD/DVD of ANYTHING and it just works out of the box.  Even the "expert only" distros.  Now you can concentrate on making it do what you want more than making it work.  No pity for newbs how need help with entering "how to $FOO" in Google.  When I was young (in
computers) you did not even Google, you yahooed! (I can still hear that
yodel form the commercial).   Most of your help was from users groups or
user lists or IRC rife with RTFM (which I hate).  I hate it so much I opened up an IRC channel to help newbs (and I was one myself).  Best thing I ever did.  Forced me to RTFM for the other newbs to get them help.  Over IRC, I raised up two high schoolers to become sys admins, one for a major PC MFG, one for a financial firm.

School of hard knocks, not as rounded as an education, but you remember what you learn.

--
Damon L. Chesser
damon at damtek.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/dchesser

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