Linux and UNIX and command lines (oh my!)

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knghtbrd
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Linux and UNIX and command lines (oh my!)

Post by knghtbrd »

I'm POSIXitive that the non-Linux/UNIX folks would probably appreciate us migrating OUT of the welcome thread if we're gonna yammer on about random distributions and flavors of such things, especially before we get on to discussing DE's, preferences for MTAs, debating who hates Electron apps more, and agreeing about how vi-type editors are superior to emacs. 🤣
Boggo wrote: Mon Jan 16, 2023 8:21 am
knghtbrd wrote: Mon Jan 16, 2023 8:15 am
Boggo wrote: Mon Jan 16, 2023 7:03 am SCO
I am truly, deeply sorry for your sacrifice. May it burn in the unquenchable fires of the abyssal plane for a thousand eternities as is the just fate of every patent troll.

(The "normal" people who use OSes out of Redmond and Cupertino are sitting there wondering what the hell we're on about, you realize…)
this was well before then, it's when they were the Unix you could actually get without bankrupting the company
I'd assumed as much, but still. As with another company that was once pretty cool, revenues slip a little and some people at the top are stuck for a creative way to maintain revenues, so they burn every last shred of good will and respect they ever had. A sad outcome, but one that has been repeated more than once.

I came to Linux from my ISP's shell (SunOS and later Solaris) and OS/2. I came to OS/2 because I was a BBS guy and it just ran the board better.

My first love was the Apple II, though, having spent my childhood with them at school because I'm legally blind and at that point if you wanted a computer that would talk to blind kids in school, it was an Apple II with an echo! I used a II+ first in school at the age of three, playing a simple math game probably intended for children twice my age. It was there and I was precocious. I loved it, it had spaceships and what little boy doesn't love those?

When I came to Linux, it was because Netscape 2.02b was very long in the tooth but it was also all we had. IBM announced that Netscape 4 was coming to OS/2 … but that while it was now free to Windows users, it'd be a paid upgrade for OS/2 users. I was incensed by this! But I already used a BSD-derived network stack (even Windows does, but of course MS did it their own way…) Most of the apps I ran were CLI tools ported from Linux anyway. I'd have to learn this bash thing, but it was basically the same as ksh wasn't it?

So being a manly man who was totally not a wuss and knew his stuff, I got me a Slackware CD from CheapBytes … and couldn't really use it due to a bug in CheapBytes discs I didn't really know how to work around. My ego took the hit it probably deserved, and I tried Red Hat 4.0, the distribution for wussies that would set up XFree86 at install time so I could run a GUI installer for babies… And my hardware didn't auto-configure because in those days it almost never did. I didn't know how to set it up manually. Hit #2. Apparently I had a lot more to learn than I thought.

Ran into a guy who suggested I give Debian a shot. It installed a text-based system, and I could ask on irc for help with X. It was a couple weeks before I got the help I needed since I had to have a good multi-resolution setup and some effort to configure fonts and colors I could actually see, in addition to manually defining parameters for my video card.

By that time I'd already managed to hose and reinstall the system three times (libc5 to glibc2 upgrade when a normal system update involved throwing deb files in a dir and running dpkg -iEORGB over and over until it stopped spitting out dependency errors. You cannot do a libc5 → glibc2 upgrade that way, you will hose the system. I said three times: The first two were within 12 hours, I wanted to run testing that was new and shiny!

The third time I got some help. Someone walked me through the process and I wrote down what I did. A little editing and I posted what I'd done. It became the basis of Debian's bo 1.3 → hamm 2.0 upgrade instructions over a year before I became a Debian developer. I did that and I still hadn't got myself a working GUI yet. That came in time, though, because good people helped make the community better.

I don't feel like Debian, or frankly any Linux distribution for that matter, is so friendly and welcoming to people who are like I was today. They're too big, and anyone who's done direct user support can tell you what a train of really clueless and kind of obnoxious people can do to change your disposition in a hurry. It's too bad.

I've gotta say, I appreciate that there are pockets of the TTRPG community that're like Linux was 26 years ago. A lot of them, in fact. I didn't have access to one of those pockets when I first got my shiny new 2E books way back when, but I kinda knew sort of how things worked because I tinkered with a computer game system on the Apple II called Eamon.

<keanu>Whoa.</keanu> It's all connected, isn't it?
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Boggo
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Re: Linux and UNIX and command lines (oh my!)

Post by Boggo »

Ugh did you have to bring up POSIX I feel dirty just writing the name.
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CptClyde
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Re: Linux and UNIX and command lines (oh my!)

Post by CptClyde »

lol saw the title about Linux/Unix and had to take a look.... but sadly tldr (too long didn't read it all). But just thought I should congratulate you on your most excellent taste in software including Slackware and unix and vi.
It is all FreeBSD, Slackware (a little Gentoo) for me...... and of course vim.
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knghtbrd
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Re: Linux and UNIX and command lines (oh my!)

Post by knghtbrd »

CptClyde wrote: Mon Jan 16, 2023 11:44 am lol saw the title about Linux/Unix and had to take a look.... but sadly tldr (too long didn't read it all). But just thought I should congratulate you on your most excellent taste in software including Slackware and unix and vi.
It is all FreeBSD, Slackware (a little Gentoo) for me...... and of course vim.
I used Slackware for all of about two hours. I could run it today, but I could run anything today. I wound up with Debian and keep coming back to it no matter what else I use. I used Gentoo on a laptop in 2003 or so and it drove me to buy a Mac… 🤣 (okay, that's not fair.)

The story: Gentoo, laptop, fast boot, because hibernate was broken. Midterm, prof hands me a CD with a word document. OpenOffice to the rescue!

Code: Select all

tjcarter@aiko:~$ oowriter midterm.docx
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
My response sounded like I was doing drive repair.

Recompile needed, takes 38 minutes on my desktop, but this is a laptop. After 20 minutes of panic, antiword to save the day to extract the text! Exam time 1/3 over, and I can begin… (I was done in 25 more minutes…)

Conclusion: I need real MS Office while I'm in school (again, circa 2003). So … Mac.
Seven
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Re: Linux and UNIX and command lines (oh my!)

Post by Seven »

Ah! Slackware. The joy of installing with 9 diskettes.
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Boggo
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Re: Linux and UNIX and command lines (oh my!)

Post by Boggo »

Seven wrote: Tue Jan 17, 2023 7:32 am Ah! Slackware. The joy of installing with 9 diskettes.
a mere 9 HAH! OS/2 was more than that!!! (and free when I got my copy IBM was so desperate to get people to actually use it in the early-mid 90's our sales rep gave me 6 copies to do whatever I wanted, complete boxed copies, manuals and everything, I think I still have 1 around here somewhere(but no computers with 3.5" drives))
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Solomoriah
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Re: Linux and UNIX and command lines (oh my!)

Post by Solomoriah »

I was doing Slackware back in the day but SuSE sent me a free package and I tried it and I liked it, and I used that for several years, even bought two subsequent boxed sets. Then I found Ubuntu, and I preferred it until the day everything started turning into a snap. It's annoying.

Debian on servers, and has been for years.
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knghtbrd
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Re: Linux and UNIX and command lines (oh my!)

Post by knghtbrd »

Solomoriah wrote: Tue Jan 17, 2023 9:20 am I was doing Slackware back in the day but SuSE sent me a free package and I tried it and I liked it, and I used that for several years, even bought two subsequent boxed sets. Then I found Ubuntu, and I preferred it until the day everything started turning into a snap. It's annoying.

Debian on servers, and has been for years.
At Free Geek we used Mint on machines. Since the machines were all recycled/donated, they were 3+ years old, so the fact that Mint starts feeling long in the tooth hardware-support-wise by .2 and .3 was fine. Mint uses Ubuntu, but they fix most of the worst offenses including snaps. 😉

During the pandemic, until I more or less left retired from FG (which has since decided it wants to be a very different kind of organization, sadly) I ran Mint on my personal machine, I've got a lot of respect for the Cinnamon desktop for being just … usable. Bit much for my needs, but still.

I like SuSE! There's a reason it's one of the most popular distributions in Europe, it's just comfortable to work with. I also appreciate their effort to make it easy for people to produce 3rd party packages for everything. I think flatpak is going to win out as the best way to do that kind of thing (at least for GUI apps) but the effort is appreciated.
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Re: Linux and UNIX and command lines (oh my!)

Post by Solomoriah »

MATE Desktop for me. I loved Gnome 2 and hated Gnome 3 with passion.
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leon
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Re: Linux and UNIX and command lines (oh my!)

Post by leon »

In 1994, my first job out of college, we were trying to build a web app for mortgage brokers. IIRC, we were stoked that the server we had to dev on had a soundblaster, which had a SCSI port. That mean we could get CDROM and install Slackware 0.9 via disc instead of floppies. We drove out to Walnut Creek CDROM to get the disc. It was ridiculously early to try something like this. I was writing CGIs in C for the Cern server using the free Ingres database.

I switched from Windows XP to Ubuntu in 2006 because I didn't want to switch to Vista when it came out.

One of the best things about Ubuntu is running LEMP directly on the desktop. Nearly every other dev I work with runs docker on top of OSX. They regularly complain about how slow it is, how their laptop fans are always spinning up. They are tired of me offering to fix all their problems by installing Linux.
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