How did you get started?

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oldhat

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Please share your personal experiences. How did you get started with Unix, BSD or Linux?
 
Slackware on stiffies, 486 DX. Waited many hours for a kernel recompile.

Telnet (and later ssh) to various mainframes on Campus, got a webserver running in user space on a System V machine. Hacked into the library mainframe (on which the book ordering and management system resided as well as a book lookup system). Pressing tab twice to see list of available commands then tried them one by one.
 
I used to read the phrack magazine back in the day. Linux kept on popping up. I ordered slackware CD set from somewhere cannot remember from where but got the CDs in the mail and rest is history.

One CD was slackware the other was TLDP only. Fun times, bug bit never looked back.
 
War Games cool hacker and Amiga scene eventually lead to me reading phrack magazine as well, bought a hardcopy of 2600 magazine in London in the 90's as well.
 
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Slackware, in 1998 it was our file server.
Also later on managed to port some parts of our application (c++) so it can serve cgi calls (it was for our issue management system)

Then moved to work for shop that only did Unix (SunOS, SCO and HPUX).
Great fun building and porting apps to work on all systems.
One day after "optimizing" make files and removing some libraries app started crashing (I think HP box) just to find out that one of libraries contained malloc version that initialized memory to 0 and without it whole thing went kaboom.

We had set of shell scripts that were replicating build envs across different platforms for new versions, quite difficult to maintain so ported it to python (I think it was still before version 2).

Met some really good people, I think one is working for Facebook really top notch developer.

At the same time started playing with Mandrake Linux, did some fixes for KDA debugger.

Now for many years boring days of Windows dev..................
 
Dabbled with Ubuntu before uni but learnt about Unix like OSs in uni, specifically with Minix. Spent a few years as a .NET developer after uni and the last couple of years with other things, specifically on Arch Linux.

A colleague recommended Arch as my first full time Linux install and it was very much me trying to hold the wind from blowing up my skirt for a long while but it got significantly easier to troubleshoot over time.

Couldn't really point to any specific learnings, only knowledge accumulated over time through exposure and practice.
 
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OSX was really the true start but only used it minimally in command line.

Later around Ubuntu 4.0 I think did a lot of volunteer work with the Shuttleworth Foundation and only then starting see the real potential and started fiddling more on a personal level.

The journey only truly started when a startup I worked for changed to the open source mandate and doing things for free or as near as and we swopped out VMWare for Proxmox and started running Ubuntu as daily drivers instead of Windows.

That’s when you really learn when you have to find the answer and can’t just switch back. Became so every day part of my skill set that I took a job pretty much as a *nix nerd covering everything from RedHat to HP-UX and SunOS at various customer sites…bizarrely while working from a Windows machine.

Started nerding even harder with Docker and AWS etc and here we are still working in *nix daily.
 
A part from hours of rtfm I spent a lot of time on the Tuks Linux user forum and the GLUG mail list. Definitely worth mentioning them as time went on I met a lot of the guys IRL in the industry which was cool.
 
The first time I heard about Unix was when I was 13 years old, at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg campus. Our lecturer did not show up, so a few of us went to search for him. I soon found him in a section the the campus that I was not familiar with, in a darkenned room. He and a few students were hunched over a terminal, typing commands and getting a string of error messages. One of the students asked if he should call the professor, but the lecturer replied that the professor was not familiar with Unix. That was how I got to know it was a Unix system.

About 5 years later I saw an advertisement in a computer magazine for Sun Microsystem's Unix workstations. The high resolution GUI looked so professional to me at the time.

After a further few years, having just upgraded my Amiga computer with a Motorola 68030 processor, I remembered that that Sun workstation had used the same cpu. This got me wondering if I could get Unix for my Amiga. This took some time as I did not have internet access at the time(around 1994). However, I soon discovered that a few PD Libraries(companies that copied and sold public domain/free software at a nominal fee before internet access was ubiquitous) could supply NetBSD!

A few weeks after placing an order, a package arrived that was larger that I expected. It included a stack of 3.5" discs and a single A4 sheet of printed instructions. Following the basic instructions as best I could, I soon had a second hard drive suitably partioned and the development environment set up under Amiga OS. Now all I had to do was compile the BSD Kernel, boot loader, etc! This took many weeks for me to get right but I did eventually get to boot into BSD. Disappointingly, it was just terminal access.

Months later, having orderd a further stack of discs, I finally had X installed and spent many days messing with xrandr to get a decent ouput. By the time I had a 800 x 600 display, and everything else set up to my liking, I found no real need to actually use BSD. Just before deleting it off my system, I had a look through a few discs labelled 'Extras' and discovered XKobo. That game had me hooked.
 
Got a copy of redhat version 2 or 3 many moons ago.

Installed it and started at screen for 2 days before I figured out what username to put it.

(This was in the days before internet and BBS's!)

Learned as I went along and ended up installing countless linux servers (mainly CentOS back then) with scalix for mail / asterisk for pabx.
IPcop as firewall as it supported multiple WAN interfaces.

Still have a few clients running servers I installed 10+ years ago.
 
Started with Gentoo, taught me how the OS works inside and out while teaching you to build a OS from scratch.
 
Bought a netbook in university days that came pre-installed running a version of linux. I gave it a fair trial, including benchmarking performance of a bunch of apps that were available for both windows and linux at the time. Wasn't enjoying the performance overall and switched to windows. Haven't done more than dabble with linux VMs since then.
 
Started off with Slackware 3 in 1996. Strangely my local music shop had the CDs, maybe they had been slipped into an order by mistake. Got the discs home and spent a while figuring out how to install it. This was a different process back then, when one first had to make a proper inventory of the hardware in the PC beforehand, and in some cases take note of the jumper settings. The music shop carried on getting the OS updates on CD and would phone me when they arrived so I could pick them up.

At the time I had been using the Unix-like Aegis OS on the Apollo workstations at work and was curious how this new Linux thing would work out. At work went on to using HP-UX on the HP machines and IRIX on the SGIs before switching to Linux as it matured further.
 
Played around with Mandrake for a while, then forgot about it until around 2008 when I tried installing Gentoo. Failed spectacularly, and didn't go back to Linux until 2012. Installed Ubuntu 12.04 (if memory serves), and been using Linux ever since.
 
Downloaded a copy of Mandrake Linux off and IRC Warez bot.

Promptly formatted my Win95 instlall and proceeded to install Mandrake - only to find out it was disc 1 of 2 and that I need to re-install Win95 to grab the 2nd discs ISO... FML...

From there it was really Ubuntu, Aircrack, Netstumbler and wardriving that got me in to using Linux (internet was expensive then!).

From a hobby, to earning me a salary. I owe a lot to open source.
 
For me it was System V Unix at university and Slackware at home in the 90’s. I can’t recall which one I used first.

All the coursework after 1st year was Unix based. In my 2nd year and honours year I worked on the Silicon Graphics machines running IRIX. My first job was based on multiple flavours of Unix too. My current job is all Linux.

I haven’t met Torvald yet, but I do know a few key Linux kernel people. I’ve also had the (dis)pleasure of meeting Richard Stallman.
 
cguy said:
For me it was System V Unix at university and Slackware at home in the 90’s. I can’t recall which one I used first.

All the coursework after 1st year was Unix based. In my 2nd year and honours year I worked on the Silicon Graphics machines running IRIX. My first job was based on multiple flavours of Unix too. My current job is all Linux.

I haven’t met Torvald yet, but I do know a few key Linux kernel people. I’ve also had the (dis)pleasure of meeting Richard Stallman.
Click to expand...
Stallman try and eat your toenails? :whistling:

 
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