This is part two of my three-part “Discovering Linux” story. Like the last post, this was written up at some point last year.

Who-buntu?

I don’t recall exactly where I first found out about Ubuntu, the rising new star in Linux distros at the time, or what it was that inspired me to download the LiveCD. Actually, now that I think about it, I think it may have been the unknowing “fault” of a poster at a forum I frequented at the time. She would post up her Ubuntu in those “Post Your Desktop” threads, and I was… jealous, to say the least. That should be me, I thought. I was the one who did the research on Open Source and oldschool hackers… why couldn’t I have Linux too?

I do remember downloading the Ubuntu LiveCD, putting it in my computer, and being extremely disappointed to find out that try as I might, I couldn’t get it to play nice with my wireless internet.

Why I also had the Kubuntu LiveCD (Kubuntu being, well, Ubuntu with a different desktop environment), I honestly can’t remember, and why I tried it out after Ubuntu I can’t remember either. I do know, though, that wireless internet worked flawlessly and out of the box on Kubuntu, and that I fell deeply in love with this beautiful operating system that was pleasing to the eyes and that was so very deliciously “open source”… all the ideals I’d found myself falling in love with.

But then I went back to Windows. Because the Linux LiveCD was just a LiveCD in my eyes; I’d never get to actually install it. I didn’t think I was that talented. Besideswhich, I figured I’d need to use Windows for video games. (Never mind the fact that I only very rarely played PC games at that point).

I soon got to a point where I was using the Kubuntu LiveCD anytime I had the excuse, though. Mostly on my laptop; I would cozy down on my bed with the lights dim except for maybe a candle, and do my stuff on Linux. It felt so… right. Does that make me a giant dork? Probably. But hey.

I moved on to the next step in my little obsession, which was the determination to get Linux installed on something. I chose my old computer which I no longer used. One day I pulled it out, popped the LiveCD in, and… failed to get it to boot the LiveCD. Doublechecking the BIOS and trying out Smart Boot Manager literally got me nowhere. So, after several hours… I gave up.

Temporarily.

Happy New Year

I gave it another shot a few months later. Why I thought I could succeed that time when I hadn’t before, I don’t know, but I spent hours trying to get it working. It was something I wanted so badly, I could taste it.

And so it was that about a week later I pulled out my laptop, surrounded myself with penguin plushies for luck (dork, remember?) put in the Kubuntu LiveCD… and clicked “install”.

I partitioned the drive so I would be able to dual-boot Windows and Linux. Afterward I leaned back and took a look at the finished job: Linux, running much more quickly and smootly than it had with the LiveCD. And Windows still booting fine as well. Success?

Perhaps not.

Somehow I had messed up my install, and given myself a gigantic Linux partition and a teeny tiny Windows one. This was the opposite of what I initially wanted. Now at this point, I was still a giant nub and had no idea about partition editors like GParted so I assumed that my only option would be to wipe everything, reinstall Windows, and start from scratch.

I had a copy of Windows XP laying around, so in the disc went into my laptop and after a bit I was good to go. Or so I thought. I had no internet and no sound. See, these were drivers that came pre-installed with the laptop’s Windows XP and they didn’t give them to you separately. I went on a massive search for said drivers, with no luck. Before long, night had arrived, and I went to bed with tears in my eyes, convinced I had ruined my laptop and rendered it completely unusable. I knew I shouldn’t have tried to mess with Linux. I knew I would mess something up. I knew it was out of my league.

I woke up the next morning hoping that it had all been a bad dream. But no, I still had a laptop running a gimped version of Windows XP. I glanced over at the Kubuntu CD. I glanced back at my laptop. I thought for a while.

And then Kubuntu went into my laptop and I wiped XP and installed Linux onto 100% of my hard drive. No more of this dual-booting crap with an OS that I couldn’t get working if it didn’t happen to be installed by default.

And then it was done; I booted up my computer and up came Linux.

The sound worked by default.

The internet worked by default.

It was January of 2007, and that year, I was free.

This, of course, was only the beginning– my desktop computer, which was the one that I used most, still ran Windows XP. That would soon change.

To Be Concluded!

This is something I initially wrote back June of last year. It’s part one of a three part story describing how I “found” Linux and turned into a FOSS nerd. I figured it would be worth documenting partially so I wouldn’t forget, and partially because while I am a geek, I am by no means a programmer, and I figure this makes me somewhat unique among typical FOSS nerds so maybe it would be a story worth sharing.

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Computers

Computers have always been a part of my life. When I was very young, it was the Commdore 64, and then when I hit Kindergarten and throughout much of elementary school career, it was green-screen IBMs. By fifth or sixth grade the school had graduated to Mac, which I preferred over the IBMs for two reasons: Kid Pix, and fireworks screensavers. Why can’t you find any good old’fashioned Pyro! fireworks screensavers anymore? But I digress.

The internet also exploded onto the scene at about this time; I’ll never forget that random commercial in the middle of kids’ shows saying you could now enter some contest or other by “e-mail”. What a strange new word.

Our beloved Commdore 64 at home finally gave up the ghost when I was in seventh grade and we bought a shiny new computer with Windows 95 installed. For the first time I tried out this “internet thing” myself, though I don’t really remember what I did. I do have a vague memory of talking to my cousin on ICQ, though.

The default web browser was Internet Explorer, which disappointed me because I much preferred the browser with the shiny “N” logo that made sparkles when pages were loading, and had an overall more fun GUI, which, back then, is basically how I judged most programs. But Internet Explorer was what came with the computer, and so it was that the Big Blue “E” would become synonymous with the internet.

Our computer was always having issues so we wound up replacing it and reformatting it several times for the next few years and we cycled through virtually every new Windows operating system up until XP, which is when I graduated high school and got my own computer as a present. It came with Windows XP Home pre-installed and I. Was. Excited. Finally a computer of my own to play my own games on and set my own wallpaper on!

I played a lot of Starcraft. Mostly just games against the AI because my internet access at the time was dialup and very spotty at best. I could get internet access at school, and I found myself joining a few forums, but but I never stayed very long because I couldn’t access said forums from home. Things really started to change in early 2004, though, when I finally obtained home access to high-speed internet…

Enter the Fox

The Big Blue E. That’s what I clicked on to use the internet, and use it I did to explore this big new world that had opened up in front of me. At some point earlier, my brother (who got a computer of his own a few years before I did), showed me this new thing called “Mozilla” which he called “The Browser of Champions,” but I didn’t really get the appeal and went back to my Big Blue E.

Until it decided to start being stupid.

Every so often it would suddenly and out of nowhere decide to open up multitudes of copies of itself. I had no way to stop it until it decided to stop, at which point my taskbar was cluttered with dozens or even hundreds of instances of Internet Explorer, and I had to go through and individually close each of them. I was quite vexed by this and went to the aforementioned brother for help, who gave me a solution that I wasn’t expecting, but which turned out to be even better than I expected:

A new web browser. It was apparently still in Beta; version 0.8, I believe, is where I jumped in.

It was called Firefox.

I was immediately hooked. The kinks were all still being worked out, the browser was still somewhat glitchy in several respects, but I was hooked nonetheless. The Big Blue E was ditched and from that day on, it was the still mint-new logo of a fox circling the globe that would then define the Internet.

Perhaps most importantly though, Firefox showed me something that I hadn’t even known existed. See, I like to research things, just to learn more about them, and so naturally at some point I stumbled across something or other about Firefox and I was reading it and discovered a new term: Open Source.

Hackers

My very earliest introduction to Linux was this thing that my brother showed me called Knoppix. From what I understood at the time, it was a CD that you put into your computer that turned you into a hacker.

Let’s stop and talk about this for a bit. Although my personal definition of the word “hacker” has changed throughout my life, I can never remember it being a negative word. At the time that I was shown Knoppix, a “hacker”, in my understanding, was a cross between Neo from the Matrix, and Robin Hood. An outlaw with a heart who stole code from the rich to give to the poor. Someone who was probably scary but was still, at heart, a Good Guy. I have no idea how this picture got painted in my mind. It was possibly inspired by the “I Know Unix” girl in Jurassic Park, a movie that I watched about a million times when I was ten years old. But regardless of where I got this image in my head, it was there, and Knoppix was seen as this shiny, offlimits toy that I should never use because I knew I wasn’t Neo or Robin Hood, I was just an ordinary girl, and to use something like Linux would be like stumbling out of my domain and profaning something that was beyond my reach.

And so other than ogling at it one time I went on with the rest of my life, not thinking about it again until going on one of those wonderful zen moments on the computer of just clicking and clicking and learning and learning about new things, and this time it was Open Source I was learning about and somehow I stumbled across Eric S. Raymond‘s website.

It was then that I devoured the Jargon File and became fascinated with this idea of the true, original, dorky MIT hacker. A geek like me, who was also trickster like Br’er Rabbit who made fun things with computers.

Could I do that?

On that site was a tutorial called “How to Become a Hacker“. I gulped it all down and then got to one of the steps:

“Get one of the open-source Unixes and learn to use and run it.”

I thought back to Knoppix and how alien it had seemed compared to Windows, with its big terminal and an unfamiliar GUI. Yeah, it was out of my league.

So I decided I couldn’t become a hacker, I wasn’t awesome enough. Fair. I was still fascinated with the idea of Open Source, and became relatively involved in the Spread Firefox community for a short time as a way to prove it. I felt like I’d sort of reached a dead-end, though, and because I was still relatively content with Windows my initial love affair with Open Source sort of faded away.

For the time being…

To Be Continued!