How did you get into *nix?

[PhaZe]

Greetings,

I came across an older computer that I haven't in a while and decided I want to get familiar with the unix operating system.

My question is how did you get familair with the OS? Curiosity? Economical reasons?

Also, what would you recommend as the first unix distro for a person who has only used windows?

I have some spare time so I want to follow the lessons at http://www.linux.org/lessons/beginner/l1/lesson1b.html . It may be silly but it's better than bothering someone every time I get stuck.

Thanks,

Jonathan

 

[QuixoticOne]

I got into it back in the 80's since some folks at universities / schools were nice enough to set me up with access to some of the minicomputers they ran UNIX and its precursor operating systems on. I learned a lot just out of my curiosity and desire to learn more about powerful computers and programming languages.

I'd suggest Ubuntu desktop for a first LINUX distribution, it is sort of geared for new / non-technical users and has a large support community. Under the hood you should be able to do most anything with it that you could with any more "industrial" LINUX distribution, it just gives you some easier GUI tools and guides and more automation to optionally help shield you from the configuration aspects that you don't want to understand in depth.

Enjoy and good luck!

 

[Nothinman]

also, how does the asterisk work as an abbreviation for *nix?

Poorly. It's supposed to be a pun on using a wildcard to match all types of unix. But to be technically correct you'd really need a regular expression and then no one but hardcore people would get it. =)

My question is how did you get familair with the OS? Curiosity? Economical reasons?

Curiosity mainly, a friend of mine mentioned it at school so that and the fact that Win95 sucked hard got me interested.

Also, what would you recommend as the first unix distro for a person who has only used windows?

Ubuntu definitely. Some people prefer Fedora or SuSE but I'm a huge Debian zealot and Ubuntu is based on Debian.

 

[leingod86]

PCLinuxOS 2007 and Ubuntu are excellent starter distros

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

also, how does the asterisk work as an abbreviation for *nix?

Poorly. It's supposed to be a pun on using a wildcard to match all types of unix. But to be technically correct you'd really need a regular expression and then no one but hardcore people would get it. =)

.+(nix|bsd)

Is that better? I know it leaves out Solaris, but there are probably a bunch of niche unix variants that I'm missing, too (like Hurd).

 

[Nothinman]

Actually no because Linux isn't spelled Linix. =)

 

[Sunner]

My brother introduced me to DEC UNIX at some point.
Went from there to Solaris.
Then Linux.
Then more Solaris.
Then BSD.
Then More Solaris.

To be continued...

 

[JohnOfSheffield]

I've run SCO unix until the UKAF changed to a mix of Linux and BSD.

I do have a partition to run games on at home but i't's rarely booted to so i think i'll just remove it, i have absolutely no use for Windows otherwise.

 

[Netopia]

I originally was playing with the now defunct BeOS, which has a mostly posix compliant terminal. I later started playing with Red Had 2 or 3 (something around there) and then curiosity and building on what I already knew kept me going forward. I run a handful of Linux servers, Fedora and Debian, and still feel like I know little compared to many on these boards.

Joe

 

[xSauronx]

Originally posted by: JohnOfSheffield
I've run SCO unix until the UKAF changed to a mix of Linux and BSD.

I do have a partition to run games on at home but i't's rarely booted to so i think i'll just remove it, i have absolutely no use for Windows otherwise.

i have to boot into windows to do homework for *1* class :-/ because the guy requires everything be done with office 2007 formats

i toyed around with linux a few times over the years, but i was a gamer, and it didnt suit me.
i started using it regularly just over a year ago, as i worked for a wireless ISP doing client-side network configurations with our equipment, and some troubleshooting and needed something with better networking capabilities.

id always told myself when i quit gaming, id try linux full-time, i don't regret the switch. i usually use it just on my laptop, i have a tower that i play around with stuff on some.

 

[Markbnj]

Got into it casually just out of interest and curiosity, mostly stemming from posts I read here by people like nothinman, Brazen, and n0cmonkey (who, by the way, I haven't seen around here in a long time). Fooled around with Ubuntu for awhile and then got a chance to join a project team working on a big legacy system that runs in AIX, but has been ported by us to Debian for dev purposes.

So now I run two Debian installations here at the home office: one sid, on which we do dev, and another Etch on which I run bind9/squid for my home network, and do some other things as well.

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Actually no because Linux isn't spelled Linix. =)

oh, duh, I don't know what I was thinking.

edit: maybe this is better: .+(n(i|u)x|bsd)

 

[pm]

I was working on my master's project and was having trouble coding it for Windows (Windows 3.11 at the time) due to the memory model. I switched to using HP-UX and recompiled the code and had a vastly easier time dealing with memory issues. Once I had the program running on HP-UX, I started creating shells scripts to munge the input files when I ran into parsing issues to work around them quickly and then I learned SED and from there, I got my program working quickly... which was a huge improvement on the roughly 2 weeks that I'd spent trying to figure out the i386 memory mapping system under DOS/Windows 3.11.

When I graduated, I got a job at Intel and they were Unix-only at the time. I was thrown into the water with the sharks (deadlines) and a distant shoreline (the end of the project) and learned as quickly as I could.

Now I love Unix, and can't picture doing my job under Windows... unless I'm running Cygwin.

 

[PhaZe]

Interesting stories. I will definitely install linux in the next few days after I lose my excitement for my new T61 laptop

 

[Red Squirrel]

I used to run my websites off a windows 98 server with easyphp setup, until I heard about linux and how much better it is for servers then used that, then my isp shut me down so I got real hosting then I just ended up using linux as a home internal server for my own personal stuff. Now Linux pretty much runs my network. I use winxp for workstations though. I'm not really anti-ms when it comes to workstations but servers, I prefer linux for its flexibility and reliability. (though gotta admit win2k server series are still rather stable)

 

[skriefal]

I don't remember how I discovered it -- but I do recall purchasing multi-CD sets from Walnut Creek CD-ROM circa 1993-4. They'd have various Linux distributions spread across the discs -- LSL, Slackware, Yggdrasil, etc. 'Twas back in the days of kernel versions 0.99.x and 1.0.x. I had used DEC Ultrix prior to that, and that may have been where my interest in *nix originated.

*nix = Ultrix, Posix, HP-UX, Irix, Minix, Linux, etc. Not all of these end in 'ix' but most do contain an 'i' and an 'x' somewhere in the name.

 

[MovingTarget]

I simply read about them here on AT and had a friend of mine that had set up a server/router using OpenBSD. (Not linux, but still..) I started tinkering around with knoppix and a few other livecds at first. After a while, I decided to get some of my older hardware up and running with linux since I hated windows 98 and couldn't afford another legit OS (to buy a proper license). I eventually started to learn my way around from there. I bounced back and forth between many different distributions including debian, ubuntu, gentoo, Mandrake, etc. Later on when I got to grad school, I found that our entire dept was set up running SuSE. 10.2 was kind of a pain with the package/repository management, but when I upgraded to 10.3, I never looked back. To this day I do not run a single windows machine. I do still enjoy my Mac though...

 

[drebo]

My only major Linux forays are for business reasons.

I sell a phone system which was written and designed to run on Linux. So, once we started working with Asterisk, it was rPath linux for a long time. Working with vanilla Asterisk was a pain in the ass. We went through a few distros, finally settling on one built around CentOS 4.

So, my linux is all command line.

The phone system itself is pretty slick, though.

Oh, PS: I HATE LINUX.

 

[Nothinman]

Oh, PS: I HATE LINUX.

Then you're doing something wrong. =)

 

[drebo]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Oh, PS: I HATE LINUX.

Then you're doing something wrong. =)

On the contrary, I simply prefer my dealings with computers to be intuitive, and linux at its most basic level is anything but intuitive. To try and argue otherwise would simply paint you as someone who has only ever used it as a GUI-based consumer operating system.

 

[Nothinman]

On the contrary, I simply prefer my dealings with computers to be intuitive, and linux at its most basic level is anything but intuitive. To try and argue otherwise would simply paint you as someone who has only ever used it as a GUI-based consumer operating system.

Nothing is intuitive to everyone but in most cases Linux software is a lot more logical than it's Windows counterpart and follows some semblance of standards.

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

On the contrary, I simply prefer my dealings with computers to be intuitive, and linux at its most basic level is anything but intuitive. To try and argue otherwise would simply paint you as someone who has only ever used it as a GUI-based consumer operating system.

Nothing is intuitive to everyone but in most cases Linux software is a lot more logical than it's Windows counterpart and follows some semblance of standards.

As someone who primarily uses it as cli-only server roles, I would have to agree with Nothinman.

The only reason the Windows-way is more "intuitive" to you is because that is what you originally learned on. It did take me a while to "get" how linux (and linux-based apps) do things, but once you break out of the Microsoft-box, it makes way more sense.

 

[child of wonder]

First got into Linux while going to Tech school. The Linux class covered RH 7.2.

Later on I got offered a consulting job at a family friend's business because I could work on PCs and they had a Linux server causing lots of problems.

That was 3.5 years ago and I've learned a lot since then.

 

[Cogman]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Oh, PS: I HATE LINUX.

Then you're doing something wrong. =)

He didn't read the man pages :|

 

[Markbnj]

Originally posted by: Brazen

Originally posted by: Nothinman

On the contrary, I simply prefer my dealings with computers to be intuitive, and linux at its most basic level is anything but intuitive. To try and argue otherwise would simply paint you as someone who has only ever used it as a GUI-based consumer operating system.

Nothing is intuitive to everyone but in most cases Linux software is a lot more logical than it's Windows counterpart and follows some semblance of standards.

As someone who primarily uses it as cli-only server roles, I would have to agree with Nothinman.

The only reason the Windows-way is more "intuitive" to you is because that is what you originally learned on. It did take me a while to "get" how linux (and linux-based apps) do things, but once you break out of the Microsoft-box, it makes way more sense.

I also primarily use Linux through the cli, but I don't think either system is more "intuitive." Either one has to be learned. Windows is more gui-complete, because MS spent billion$ to make it so. Linux is more logical and less patchwork, because it wasn't hobbled by decades of legacy installations. Linux is not ready to be dropped on most consumer's desktops, but it makes a great base for canned devices that aren't as open to reconfiguration as a desktop. Over time it will not be competition on the desktop that threatens MS, but the slow evolution of the desktop into something else that we have a hard time accurately predicting.