[Malvern] An introduction

[Richard Forster]

Hello

I met some of you on Tuesday and thought it was about time I got around
to making some better introductions. So here is a concise(ish) history
of my Linux experience.

I started with RedHat 4.1, I bought the boxed set at a computer fair in
Glasgow in February 1997. The Kernel was 2.0.27 (I think). X wouldn't
even work beyond 320x200 because my graphics card wasn't supported in
anything other than the most basic of modes. Getting a cdrom to mount
was a major achievement.

In the summer of 1997 a new version of X came out which did support my
Mystique 200 card. I remember taking a large stack of floppy disks home
from university and installing the new X release manually. I got it
right first time and never looked back from there.

I've been running Linux as my main OS since the August/September 1997
(ish) and have mostly used RedHat through the various version numbers
(now Fedora of course).

A hard drive crash in Easter 1998 saw me reinstall without any other OS
on my machine. At this time I did have Win95, WinNT 4 and RedHat ?
(probably 5.0 or 1) installed. Now the Win95 would just crash a lot, the
WinNT didn't crash much at all but didn't always find my network card,
while the Redhat installation found everything and work just fine.
I had multiple hard drives in the machine at the time and interestingly
the hard drive which crashed (which was a real, mechanical crash with
grinding noises etc) didn't crash Linux. I think this was because it
held /home and swap partitions, ie none that were really needed for the
core system to run. I couldn't do much with it and could barely reboot
but the desktop was there when I came into the office to find the
machine. Like to see windows do even that!

I stabilised on RH5.2 with the Afterstep window manager in summer 1998
to write my PhD thesis on. Even now, I would still use the same tools if
I had to write a long technical document, namely Nedit to write the
LaTeX code with Xfig and GnuPlot to draw the diagrams and graphs. 
I hated Xfig at first, coming from a windows world of CorelDraw et al
and deliberately tried all the other drawing packages at the time
(including CorelDraw under Wine) but found Xfig was the best tool for
the job as long as I could learn the "Verb -> Noun" method of doing
things as opposed to the "Noun -> Verb" way that is more common, ie you
click the 'move' control before clicking the object you wish to move
within the drawing, as opposed to clicking on the object and then
dragging it around. If you see what I mean.

I've used other distributions over the years, mostly Mandrake or SuSE
which a flatmate favoured. I've dealt with Debian, but not seen any of
the others such as Gentoo or Ubuntu which seem to be quite popular
today.

Nowadays I'm on Fedora Core 3 with lots of the extra bits from FreshRPMS
such as mp3 and DVD software etc. I don't know about other distributions
but I do like the things FreshRPMS offer. I tried to help a friend who
ran SuSE get DVD playback working on his laptop last summer and found
the lack of both official and 'non-offical' (in the freshrpms style) DVD
software made getting it working quite difficult. Or rather, SuSE would
let you play region zero disks but it was very hard to get the
decryption software installed and working. I did manage it though, but
an apt-get/yum/whatever would have been easier.

I also own a Sharp Zaurus, which some of you saw on Tuesday. This is a
full linux machine in your pocket. It runs Apache, MySQL, Python etc.
Inside the leather carry case I keep a credit card sized cdrom of movix,
possibly my favourite linux distribution. Boot any PC with it, eject the
movix desk and replace it with any disk containing (almost) any
multimedia file (ie DVD, cdrom with mpeg or avi file etc) and movix will
play it. 

My other interests of note are good beers and boardgames, I've moved to
Worcester (to work in Malvern) from Ipswich where a group of us were
well known in the real ale pubs for turning up and playing insanely
complicated German boardgames over couple of pints.


I think that's enough for now. See you all at the next meeting.

Rick


-- 
Richard Forster <rick at forster.uklinux.net>