floof.org

The linux mascot Xenia is such a big deal for me because
1) shes trans
2) she's a fox
3) she's into Linux

I am
1) trans
2) a fox
3) into Linux

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Light The Unicorn! mastodon (AP)
Xenia is such an awesome mascot. I adore her name!
I don't recall exactly how I got into Linux. I think I'd gotten a copy of Mandrake and then SuSE 7.2, but the big thing was definitely @darac and @dh giving me a copy of Debian (Woody or Sarge) to play around with. :)
@darac Well, I'm pleased to have helped! It was Slackware for me from 1995-2000, then some parallel running switching to Debian around 2001-2002 and I've been there ever since!
Chloé Raccoon mastodon (AP)
@dh @darac Someone brought a copy of slackware 96 walnut creek cd set into the shop I worked in and asked if we could install it. I took a compaq 486sx25 home with it, learnt it over the weekend, and installed it for them on the monday...
@chloeraccoon @darac I tihnk it was 2.3 for me, from a magazine cover CD. I even remember I bought that magazine in WH Smith at Heathrow. I can't remember which terminal, but we were heading out on a school exchange trip!
Karyx Dragon mastodon (AP)
@darac @dh I think my intro to Linux was redhat 3, the pre RHEL redhat, back in the late 90s. Used it on my DEC P75 to share my 56k modem with my housemate. I also had a 486 with freebsd on it :)
@fatedfox @darac Ah, fun stuff! The dial up ip masquerading sad one of my first projects, too!
Karyx Dragon mastodon (AP)
@dh @darac I had one of the few 56k flex winmodems with basic Linux support (yay lucent chipsets!) We managed to get basic DoD working (in the time before surftime). It was quite the thing!
@fatedfox @darac Impressive! I was still using a 28.8k back then, and never did DoD. The single most difficult but if I Internet connectivity hardware I've used, though, was definitely a Connexant AccessRunner PCI ADSL card. Not only did that involve learning ATM and updating a driver multiple times, but also dealing with a pretty poor card in terms of hardware. It still did okay for a good few years though!
Karyx Dragon mastodon (AP)
@dh @darac I think Lucent became part of Conexant funnily enough. That 56k modem was one of the best I ever used, but it sounded like you had a real fight with yours!

@fatedfox @darac I know Alcatel and Lucent all seemed to become one at some point, I wouldn't be surprised in Conexant were pulled in/pulled them in too.

I think we'd just got rid of the AccessRunner before you came over. It was an… interesting thing. ADSL was theoretically supported up to 2Mb/s downstream, but in practice you'd never get anything over around 600kb/s because of the really poor PCB layout and dodgy clocking, so we had to swap out to an external modem when >512kB/s because an option for us.

Chloé Raccoon mastodon (AP)
@dh @fatedfox @darac I was able to hit 1024/265 on IPstream, but I was using the windows drivers, so I probably had an advantage there...
Karyx Dragon mastodon (AP)
@dh @darac A lot of Alcatel / Lucent IP was used in the early days of xDSL. I found an article about it from 1999 :) I'm reasonably certain when we met, you were using external CPE *nods* https://www.eetimes.com/conexant-pairs-with-lucent-to-speed-deployment-of-sdsl-connections/
Darac Marjal mastodon (AP)
@fatedfox @dh I got #MyFirstLinux on a magazine cover. Mandrake Linux sounded good because it was optimized for Pentiums! Then I found the pain of installing RPMs before yum was a thing, and switched to #Debian.
@darac @fatedfox @dh Trouble with RPMs was the entire reason that I wanted to try something that wasn't RPM based. ^^
Karyx Dragon mastodon (AP)
@darac @dh I don't recall ever having a problem with rpm, or the early days of dpkg when Leonerd introduced me to Debian :) Debian did win out for me in the end, it was just more organically intuitive to me, and remains so! (Although my linux interactions now are fairly limited - Y'all run rings around me!)
Darac Marjal mastodon (AP)

@fatedfox @dh It was dependency management that did it for me. As I recall, installing a package consisted of downloading it, then telling rpm to install it and then being told what packages that required, so you'd download those and try again. And again. And again.

Dpkg, on the other hand, seems to have always been paired with dselect or apt to do the legwork for you.

Light The Unicorn! mastodon (AP)
@darac @dh the first one I really dived into was Ubuntu 8.04 I believe. Felt like so much was possible!
@LightTheUnicorn @darac i think Ubuntu did a lot to make things familiar to people, but without making everything completely proprietary. I can see why a lot of people like it.
Light The Unicorn! mastodon (AP)
@dh @darac I did move on to other distros over the years though and fell out of love with the direction it took. Running Arch these days, but it was absolutely my proper start in Linux.
Pippin friendica
@Renbymon 💛💜🏳️‍⚧️ @Darac Marjal @Darkhorse WinterWolf 🇪🇺 Aha! I think my story isn't all that far off that. I started using Unix at uni in 1992, must have started using (and helping develop) MiNT (a fairly unix-like multitasking kernel) on my Atari ST between then and 1995ish, then when I got my first PC in 1996 I used Windows 3.11 on it for a few weeks to see what it was like, then went Linux. I think I started with Slackware but then started recompiling everything myself from the original GNU sources, so I sorta ended up not using any distribution really. But then I was introduced to Debian on the unclaimed/general use PC in my postgrad office and realised how good dpkg et al were and have been using Debian ever since. I've just been doing a bit of googling and it seems I was definitely a Debian developer as far back as at least 1997, and was involved with Debian UK until at least when I helped man their stand at a trade show in 2002, but I'm pretty sure I dropped out of contact with them soon after that and haven't been involved (apart from being a dedicated user) since then. I got both the jobs I've had (in 2001 and 2004-6) due to being a Deb Dev!
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@pippin @darac That's quite an impressive CV!
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Pippin friendica
@Darkhorse WinterWolf 🇪🇺 @Darac Marjal @Renbymon 💛💜🏳️‍⚧️ In a way, Al Mackey helped get me into furry. I'm pretty sure his (then unnamed) Xenia art was one of those things that got furry onto my radar back then! I didn't really have artists I followed, but I do remember spending time scrounging around the web finding all of Al Mackey's art I could back then! Since then I suppose my interests have slid very much away from computing stuff (although I'm still interested, I don't have the passion I used to) and onto furry, particularly fursuits (still obsessed with full-coverage costumes of all sorts after all these years).
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@pippin @darac Well, it really is a small world. I'm pretty sure I've got some of his stuff around on disks somewhere.
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