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Jun. 7th, 2013 03:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolariI've been playing around with *ix since my University years. UTSA had a Bash shell we used for text-only internet, and my first ISP switched over to AIX from BBS software. This was early 90s.
Around 1998 or so, I found a CD of Red Hat 5.2 at Wal Mart for $5. I picked it up and tried it out. It didn't work well, it was chintzy and failed me on every level that wasn't command line internet. I gave up, and continues to use my shell account in Rhode Island and Chicago for my needs.
I tried Fedora Core 4, and it worked for a bit, but blew out a scanner. That was some serious hardware and I figured if it was damaging hardware I wouldn't use it anymore. Plus, things just didn't work out of the box easily and involved a lot of downloading RPMs and fiddling with obscure code I didn't understand to get baic functionality.
Between then and now, my friends![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
soltice and strangelv__ (and to a lesser extent my friend drkbish) all tried to get me to switch over to Linux. Knowing my love for DOS and Command Line work, Tess suggested Arch Linux and Rat Poison for a purely command line setup. Scott suggested Slackware. Strangelove, ANYTHING BUT WINDOWS.
I used Ubuntu Live when my laptop died . Liked it, but not enough to use it as my primary OS cause I was still hurting from having to purchase a new scanner. I kept a live disc for backups and to fix Windows when it went kersplat.
I inherited a really low end laptop from my father, that worked terribly . At Tess' suggestion I installed Arch Linux and Ratpoison and it worked - but was TOO Command Line. When it worked, though, it worked great...but using a command line for every GUI program was a bit overkill. She suggested XFCE4, which didn't work, but only because the laptop, which was already on its last legs, went kaput.
Then I got a little eeePC. It was running Android, but nothing else. I put a crippled version of XP on it, and it worked fairly well if slow, but quickly ran out of room. I tried Ubuntu - it didn't fit. I tried Arch - it didn't fix. Until I realized Arch was flexible enough to put just the boot files on the 2GB hard drive, and the actual userspace on an 32GB SS Card. And it worked! It didn't just work, it worked like GANGBUSTERS.
Eventually, this lead to Ubuntu on my main PC, which I didn't like until I finally realized how to use su -i to get superuser access on an install that never let me set a superuser password. I liked it a lot, but the user interface sucked.
Tess again suggested XFCE4, which looked chintzy on the small PC, but looked LOVELY on the main PC, especially once I learned to customize it.
I love it. Linux (which I still, to this day, misprnounce as Lynn-ux) has really come a long way from the days of Red Hat 5.2. And yet I can still run PINE (Or Alpine as it's called these days) from the command line, while running Gimp in X Windows.
It took almost 15 years, but I finally made the switch. :)
Around 1998 or so, I found a CD of Red Hat 5.2 at Wal Mart for $5. I picked it up and tried it out. It didn't work well, it was chintzy and failed me on every level that wasn't command line internet. I gave up, and continues to use my shell account in Rhode Island and Chicago for my needs.
I tried Fedora Core 4, and it worked for a bit, but blew out a scanner. That was some serious hardware and I figured if it was damaging hardware I wouldn't use it anymore. Plus, things just didn't work out of the box easily and involved a lot of downloading RPMs and fiddling with obscure code I didn't understand to get baic functionality.
Between then and now, my friends
soltice and strangelv__ (and to a lesser extent my friend drkbish) all tried to get me to switch over to Linux. Knowing my love for DOS and Command Line work, Tess suggested Arch Linux and Rat Poison for a purely command line setup. Scott suggested Slackware. Strangelove, ANYTHING BUT WINDOWS.I used Ubuntu Live when my laptop died . Liked it, but not enough to use it as my primary OS cause I was still hurting from having to purchase a new scanner. I kept a live disc for backups and to fix Windows when it went kersplat.
I inherited a really low end laptop from my father, that worked terribly . At Tess' suggestion I installed Arch Linux and Ratpoison and it worked - but was TOO Command Line. When it worked, though, it worked great...but using a command line for every GUI program was a bit overkill. She suggested XFCE4, which didn't work, but only because the laptop, which was already on its last legs, went kaput.
Then I got a little eeePC. It was running Android, but nothing else. I put a crippled version of XP on it, and it worked fairly well if slow, but quickly ran out of room. I tried Ubuntu - it didn't fit. I tried Arch - it didn't fix. Until I realized Arch was flexible enough to put just the boot files on the 2GB hard drive, and the actual userspace on an 32GB SS Card. And it worked! It didn't just work, it worked like GANGBUSTERS.
Eventually, this lead to Ubuntu on my main PC, which I didn't like until I finally realized how to use su -i to get superuser access on an install that never let me set a superuser password. I liked it a lot, but the user interface sucked.
Tess again suggested XFCE4, which looked chintzy on the small PC, but looked LOVELY on the main PC, especially once I learned to customize it.
I love it. Linux (which I still, to this day, misprnounce as Lynn-ux) has really come a long way from the days of Red Hat 5.2. And yet I can still run PINE (Or Alpine as it's called these days) from the command line, while running Gimp in X Windows.
It took almost 15 years, but I finally made the switch. :)
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Date: 2013-06-08 05:17 am (UTC)I've been a SysAdmin ever since.
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Date: 2013-06-08 05:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-09 08:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-09 07:23 pm (UTC)In Windows 7/2008 PowerShell comes as default, and any administrative thing can be done from the command-line. You can install it all the way back to 2003; it's not really intended for home users, more for server administration, but the same is true for the Linux command prompt. Definitely something worth learning if you ever get back into PC support. I'm actually behind on this because i always lean on Cygwin, but every now and then one of our support guys posts some script they did on PowerShell and it pisses all over anything the UNIX shells can do.
Of course, for the setting to be available in PowerShell, it has to be available in the first place, and while Windows continues to be king of hardware/driver tweaks due to 3rd party support, they have started to suck a lot for general UI. When i went to Windows 8/2012 at first i was bowled over how ridiculously fast it is and how slick it looks, but that turned to pissed when i found out i had to have fat window borders and couldn't even choose their color. I get why they want to do it - they're going the MacOS route to force consistency - but it sucks when you have to do registry hacks or buy shareware progs to do things that were normal in previous releases (i have to download something from xda-developers to make a tile? really?)
Glad you're digging Linux. I remember using Xfce during the GNOME/KDE wars when Slashdot called it "Xfaeces", it always seemed cleaner and nice. Cool to see it's still kicking, and taken seriously now.