lets share hw our love affair wf Linux started

cci[RR]us

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During my industrial attachment, I was tasked to try to use Snort for certain research in non-IDS purposes... then after working on FC3 with Snort for 3 months, I thought that Linux is cool and then I tried Gentoo. Shiok! But there're just some stuff that work better on Windows. Sigh.
 

tazzie

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lwkoh said:
Yellow dog linux will be cool for your powerbook but 4.0 seems to be a little screw up
i'm on 3.01and it is based on redhat

can also try out ubuntu ppc for your power book, the slickness is simply unforgetable
then u will start debianing

u mention support 4 times
how much is the support and what exactly do they support?
how can i contact them in singapore?
u got me wrong... i'm going to be probing Darwin rather than install something else :)

as for support...well, like jf mentioned...we have our own in-house redhat guy. he's employed by redhat, but sits in our office..

jf: cattle prod + engineer = faster patches and customisation others will envy :) i think my engineer has a little too many burnt marks :p
 

lwkoh

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tazzie said:
u got me wrong... i'm going to be probing Darwin rather than install something else :)

as for support...well, like jf mentioned...we have our own in-house redhat guy. he's employed by redhat, but sits in our office..

jf: cattle prod + engineer = faster patches and customisation others will envy :) i think my engineer has a little too many burnt marks :p

a full time engineer will come in very handy
can help me to locate a debian engineer? :D
 

reeed

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Cool, a nostalgia thread !

Does anyone here ever remember the good old days (mid-1990s) when all NUS students were given an account on leonis.nus.sg ? That was a shell account (csh, I think) running on Solaris. It was run in true-blue Unix fashion -- thousands of students would telnet to leonis from a dumb terminal (VT100 emulator) into csh and do their emailing using pine, or using text-mode IRC (ircii), download stuff with FTP, and surf using gopher and lynx. And you could chat up fellow users using talk and ytalk. You could finger them and find out what they were up to, where they were logged in from, etc. Hundreds of users all online at the same time on this single Unix server doing their own thing. Wonderful. This is called 'Community', man.

I never was a student at NUS but I spent much free time using an account borrowed from a good friend, learning UNIX commands and generally being busybody about what everyone else on the server was doing. (ps -ax)

I got my own Unix shell account at university (Aug 1994 -- ahh those were the good old days), again it was a Sun machine, running SunOS 4. It had three 50MHz processors and just 384Mb of memory, and served about 300 users simultaneously, on average. I got a "Unix for Dummies" book because I thought I would never need a reference book, I would not be getting too deep into Unix. ;-) How wrong I was ! I went crazy with the shell (it came with tcsh, and I've chosen this one ever since) and especially irc (it allowed me to keep in touch with my friends back home -- I was overseas).

I thought that Unix was so damned good, I gotta have it at home on my 486 PC (DOS6.22 + Win3.1 then). NCSA Mosaic was the graphical browser in use at that time, the fore-runner of Netscape and IE, and thanks to the hottest search engine at that time (altavista.com), I discovered this cool free Unix called FreeBSD. I downloaded FreeBSD 2.0.5 base files on 12x 1.44" floppy disks from the uni computer lab, and went home and installed it on my 486.

The rest is history... :)

I didn't get to hear about Linux until a few months later, and by then my 'loyalty' was firmly entrenched in the BSD world (SunOS is also BSD-based). The popular Linux flavour back then was 'Slackware' (any of you guys heard of it ??) and I did split my hard disk partition to try it out a couple of times -- didn't like it. Too slack, I guess ? haha.

By the time I left Uni, the era of the Unix shell account was coming to an end. The uni stopped giving us shell accounts, and as a consequence the student community became a colder and less friendly place. People dialled up from home with PPP to surf porn (or whatever), they never had to share a server and resources with other users. They never got the chance to log into a server and do a 'users' to find out if their best geek friend was online, and send him a friendly 'hello' using write(1). They never got the chance to discover how stable a server Unix is (my server uptime was usually in hundreds of days, and the CPU load usually 5+ at any time), instead they contended with hourly BSODs running a half-baked GUI (not even a complete OS) called Win95, and put up with the FUD from Redmond. Poor lost souls.

I fondly remember my early days with Unix. The good old days when all mail in my inbox was addressed to me. Spam wasn't heard of, the word wasn't even coined. So nostalgic I was, I even saved the "dmesg" output from my uni server (the SunOS 4 machine), and another Alpha machine that I had an account on. Maybe another time I'll tell you about the naughty things I did to circumvent the disk space quotas and the nasty evil sysop who deleted my files !!!
 
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jf

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tazzie said:
u got me wrong... i'm going to be probing Darwin rather than install something else

:D...

jf: cattle prod + engineer = faster patches and customisation others will envy :) i think my engineer has a little too many burnt marks :p

:s22: :s13:
 

jf

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ha! hey, cool stuff, reeed... SunOS is BSD-based??? oh wow, i didnt even know that. But i remember Sun all right. :D I had an account on a Sun as well, but more on that another time...
 

tazzie

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oooh....uni....oohh...shell account....ooohh...MUD :)

you know, i ain't as old as many would think, but how i wish i could have such a memorable start to my linux experience. but the truth to the matter was that so many other things have happened in between that i can't remember them any more. i swear, i have this memory lapse where the part of my brain that stores long-term memory never worked in the first place. i can remember as far back as 1998 at the moment, and perhaps a few glimpses before that if someone reminded me with a smell or song.

jf, u dun believe about the burnt marks? maybe i should send u an MMS :p

oh oh, and i dun get why people want another distro in a Mac when Darwin has a few juicy bits not many are aware of :)
 

reeed

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Yes SunOS is BSD-based. See http://www.levenez.com/unix/history.html. Sometime in Feb 1982 SunOS 1.0 split off from 4.1BSD.

That page above gives a lot of very interesting info on the rich history of UNIX. Looking near the bottom of the chart, sometime in late 1991 Linux was born, split off from the Minix branch. Now I also have a little story to tell about Minix. I got to know about Minix while in Uni -- it is a 'mini-UNIX' (hence its name) that had its complete source code in a book by Andrew Tanenbaum, "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation". Minix was able to run on a 8086 (yes, an original 4.77MHz IBM PC) because it was 16-bit and did not support virtual memory. But it was simple enough to be studied and understood.
http://cwx.prenhall.com/bookbind/pubbooks/tanenbaum/chapter0/custom4/deluxe-content.html

I managed to download a Minix distribution (it fit onto a couple of floppies) and again split my harddisk just to install it for fun. It was purely a fun thing -- there was no networking in that particular kernel (although being opensource, some guy somewhere had already written a networking module) and its utility was limited.

I didn't know at that time that Linux is a son of Minix ;-)
Edit: history of Linux here: http://www.pegasus3d.com/linuxhistory2.html

I have been totally bought over by the simple philosophy of Unix that works so well, and fits my way of thinking, my way of doing things so well. If you are not familiar, I would recommend you read http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch01s06.html as well as other links you can obtain from Google (keyword "unix philosophy"). Do this in your free time, slowly so as to digest the concepts. :) The basic principles of the Unix philosophy are a very refreshing change from the usual Microsoft and other commercial (even Apple) FUD that we've been brainwashed with the last 2 decades. They hold true in many aspects of life, not just in computers.here here
 
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jf

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wow, man, a true unix hacker!!! :D thanks for all the info!!!

say... i was just wondering - anybody up for another sticky thread? :D

Update: ai! no wonder the url looks familiar - i once had a copy of this (although incomplete) in my palm in palmdoc format.... ha...
 
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arctos

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This might be off-topic, but I'm a newbie who's been drawn to Linux/Unix ever since I've heard of the term 2 years back (heck, I'm slow, and behind times, I know). Problem is, I'm one of those brought up immersed in the M$ culture, and never had the chance to try it out.

Now finally, I've decided to take the go ahead, and plunge in by installing FC3, then Xandros (couldn't get my hands on more free distributions thanks to my slow internet connection). Wanted to learn more, but haven't any idea where to start.

Anyone here can recommend a good book or site for beginners that guides you step by step through the world of Linux? I know there's alot of FAQs out there by googling, but it's all in bits and pieces.

Help appreciated. :)
 

liangtam

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Have you read the manual for RH9 and Fedora core? I started out only with that, and still only have that as knowledge for now still just for linux
 

lwkoh

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just borrow this book from library, quite alot of juicy tips

linux timesaving techniques for dummies
005.4469 dou-[com]
covers fc2, suse, mandrakebbbbbb
 

cpuer

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I always think that Slackware is a good distro for those who have some linux experience. It's a distro that doens't do much for you, everthing(almost all) you have to get your hands dirty by playing with the configs. The installation is quick though. Only the configuration part is really a good learning process. There's no dependancies check or any package management, if you need a new package that Slack doesnt have, you do it the old way ie , hunt for libraries, dependencies and finally build them with configure/make/make install.

Try Slackware, one of the grand old daddy of linux:

www.slackware.com
 

galeron

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jf said:
hmm, and what is the name of that company? care to share?
hm...this company gets bashed quite often...its name is techmonix...heard of it before? our servers keep crashing...lousy hardware...the maxtors died on me when i was overseas...
 

tazzie

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galeron said:
hm...this company gets bashed quite often...its name is techmonix...heard of it before? our servers keep crashing...lousy hardware...the maxtors died on me when i was overseas...
lol...so issit a problem with the company? or maxtor? ;)
 

jf

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noope - never!!! but thanks for answering my question though. :) Good luck for ur job!
 

szeli

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can i up this thread for conversion to sticky? :)
nice to see so many responses!
 

reeed

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Don't you think there already are too many stickies on the OpenSource forum ? Half the thread listings are occupied by them stickies. Quite annoying.

Perhaps a FAQ would be a better idea for some of the sticky threads.
 
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