Linux, and what I have done with it

back about 2-3 years ago, when in college, one of my friends in my computer class told me how cool unix was, and having reading a bit about unix systems from the local bbs's text file colection, I was very interested. Then he told me about linux, so I got it. At that time, I had a notebook (486sx25 with 170meg HD, and 8 megs ram). I got slakware, and installed it. I was realy cool, but I did not know shit about using it. And with the SMALL HD, I could not put a full instalation on my box. I could not give up my dos stuff, so I gave linux a 70 meg partition. I used it off and on for about 6 months, mostly just playing with it, since I realy did not know how to use it...and was still living in the windogs world. After my notebook died, due to coffee spilled on the keyboard (lots of smoke!), I gave up on in, since I had no other computer to install it on. Shure I could have installed it on the "family" computer, but 4 megs ram, and 120 meg HD? Let alone other people might want to use it. At that time, I was using kernel 1.2.3

My despise for win95 turned me to winNT. I was very happy with NT, but as soon as 4.0 server came out, I got it, and I hated it so much. Mostly because it has the win95 interface, and along with that the same extra overhead. It ran ok on my 6x86/120 with 32 megs of ram. After installing winNT on my notebook (5x86/133,16megs ram, 1 gig HD), I ran it that way for a month or so, and became so sick of it. It was too slow, and I hated waiting 10 min for bootup. I decided that I would try linux again. Living in my van, and having no $$$$ I decides to FTP it form ftp.cdrom.com I knew slakware a bit, so I decided to download that version. Took me several days to get it. after installing it, and haveing a lot of trouble doing so, I finaly got it to work. I used the umsdos filesysystem (my error). I ran that way for several months, and was very pleased with it. I got quite effecent at using it. I was using kernel 2.0.0. Well, one fatefull day, I booted up, and my fat was all messed up, and since linux was stored on the fat drive, I lost everything. So I had to reinstall. At this point, I had not realy found too many usefull things for linux yet. But I was still running NT on my tower, so I had not completly left the windogs world yet (But was on my way out the door). It was time to reinstall, and I was not shure to put win95, or linux. So I came to a happy medium, a minimum install of win95, and a full copy of linux, and linux was put on an ext2 partition. WOW, was linux much faster that way! after a week, I removed win95 completely, and put barebones dos there (Because I had a dos program I needed). I loved the speed so much, that I simply killed NT on my tower, and threw linux on it. It was like Finaly, an OS that suits me, works the way I think it should, and is fast, and free (this also stopped my warez trading habbit). One thing led to another, and I had no links to the windogs world, cept for one program, PCMiler. But I only ran that once in a while, so that was not much to hold me down. But that one program, is enough to keep a dos partition on every system I own. Although of recent, I got dosemu to work, and PCmiler runs under it! Soon, even that will be gone soon enough.

I recently helped on of my friends insall linux on her notebook, 5x85/100, 24meg ram, and 1 gig HD. it would not boot linux from the bootdisk, or from a preinstalled HD. It took me quite a while to figure out, but I figured out that if I use loadlin, it works. I don't understand why it needs loadlin, but it does. Her notebook runs great, except netscrape causes the system to reset at random times. And it only happens when netscrape is running, so I am thusly blaming it on that.

I recently got a new Notebook, a 386sx/16 with 4 megs ram, and 80 meg HD. It's slow, and ugly. But it runs linux :) I've got an extra 500 meg HD laying about I'm going to stick in it. That should improve everything a bit. Right now, it's my portable dumb term. And I have plans on mounting it on the dash in my van. Mostly to run PCmiler, and so I can use my server while driving. I hope that's legal.