MY STORY
Ubuntu
Written by Jaap Woldringh
T
his year (2020), it’s 20 years ago that I first discovered Linux, picking up RedHat 5.1 (a number of CDs and a manual) for a small sum at a computer meeting. Installing it on the hard disk was very difficult, as the 540 MB HD was so encoded as to enable me to run my copy of Windows, which was not able to recognize a disk larger than 504 MB, if I remember this well. But after a few tries (it was as if the install program learned from the failures, and every next step the install went better, until: bingo:), I had Linux installed on my computer.
enthusiastic was the load of free software that came with RedHat, you just name it and, somewhere on the CDs, it was there, to install and play with. Most of the available software I had no idea of what it was for, but in the manual there was a short description, which sometimes I understood. So I played, and made many
mistakes, and learned and learned. Problems with the printer, the videocard, sound and what not. But also: the computer itself just worked, and in Windows I have never experienced that bliss. (I had to use first DOS, and later Windows, for my work (teaching). Never did I use these by choice. Before that I “tinkered” with my
Acorn Atom, and BBC B microcomputers. To even “reprogram” the hardware itself with a soldering iron, which was fun, as a member of a computer club, for the Atom. I even had to abandon the Atom, as it had changed out of recognition, poorly documented: The Atom was changed, among other things, to think it was a BBC microcomputer. But not quite. My Windows was always broken “because of my tinkering”. If Linux was broken, I just reinstalled it, and played some more with it. Or tried to find out what broke the system, but was not always successful. And had to go the easier way.
When I learned more, I discovered, and was very much surprised AND impressed, that the large HD was no problem at all for Linux. It was only a problem for my Windows (3.11, the computer was a Pentium 4 of 1992) at the time (so I still had to use the encoding program, that jiggled the disk parameters such that Windows was made to believe the disk was a much smaller one).
RedHat offered free updates for a year (from the top of my head, may be confused with later trials of, for instance, Fedora, Suse and Mandrake), but all experiences ran down to the same thing: installing updates was very slow if they numbered more than just a few. So after some time, I tried other distros, among them, and the best and most beautiful of them
What made me really full circle magazine #165
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