[NBLUG/talk] 10 year anniversary Linux thread

Troy Arnold troy at zenux.net
Mon Jun 2 22:42:51 PDT 2008


Great idea, Kyle...

I'm not sure when I first started hitting the NBLUG meetings, but ls -lat
in my home on shell.sonic.net shows a .pgp directory created in July '96.
(Now what IS that passphrase?).

I actually started a bit earlier, with a shell account on a poor, horribly
overloaded old machine that some of you certainly remember fondly:
nermal.santarosa.edu.  Always a command-line junkie (anyone remember
4dos?), I was fortunate to pick up loads of tips and tricks from the
santarosa.edu crew, many of whom later became the Sonic.net crew.  I
learned about backticks when Dane Jasper mentioned using them to clean up
after a tarball bomb in the wrong place (rm `tar -xvf file.tar`).  I went
through /usr/bin checking out every tool and Neal "scoop" Attinson's FAQ
showed me how to chain them together.  Scott Doty's enthusiastic account of
sloppy window focus is what finally got me to persevere for hours (ok,
weeks probably) until I had X up and running.  Those of you subject to my
non-sequiters in #nblug can blame Scott for the sloppy focus love...
 
So, what drew me in?

I loved the "everything is a file" philosophy of Unix and the tight little
tools that did one thing, and did it with excellence.  Those things simply
let me get more done, and enjoy the doing.

As a young wannabe hacker, being able to type 'make' and have a bunch of
cryptic stuff run across your terminal was a pretty big draw too. :) I
remember Dustin gave a talk on building a custom kernel... I thought,
"that's cake", went home and booted a fresh kernel on just the second try.
[Nice talk, dude !]

The last big thing was really the community that those folks (Eric
Eisenhart and Dustin Mollo were a huge part of it too) introduced me to: A
whole world of helpful geeks taking delight from cleverness and elegance;
that the "how" something is done can be as important as just getting it
done.  And the idea of freedom.  That information and ideas are free, and
that you should be able to shoot yourself in the foot as many times and in
as many ways as you'd like.

I heard an awful lot about Open Source before I "got it", but once I did,
my friends couldn't make me shuttup ;-)

I have to say that the NBLUG community remains pretty awesome.  I'm 3,000
miles away yet I still like hanging out with you guys :)

-tarnold at nermal.santarosa.edu 




More information about the talk mailing list