36 lines
2.2 KiB
Markdown
36 lines
2.2 KiB
Markdown
[[!meta title="Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)"]]
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[[Nico Schottelius|about]], the author of this website, is a FOSS developer.</p>
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<h3>How did he become a FOSS developer?</h3>
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<p>In 1998 he was running Windows 95 on his brand new computer (Pentium
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1, 166Mhz) and it randomly crashed. This was very frustrating. So he
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asked his father, whether there is something else. And his father gave
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him a set of SCO Unixware floppys and cds and a packet labeled "Suse
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Linux 11/94". The SCO package had a blue/white cd box and looked nicer,
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so he began to try to install it to his computer. But it did not work,
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because SCO did not support IDE disks and the computer had an IDE disk
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builtin.</p>
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<p>After about two weeks trying around with SCO, he gave up. Frustrated he continued to use the old operating system.<br /></p>
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<p>About one week later he was again extremly frustrated, that this
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operating system was crashing so often and he remembered, that there
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was another cd set (one source code, one install cd) to try out. After
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about 4 hours he had Linux running. That was really really easy
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compared to SCO. It felt strange, so new, so fast. And it contains only
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text. Strange, like DOS before Windos, he thought.</p>
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<p>On the next day he read in the book that there is something called
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"X11" available, which can destroy the display, when wrongly
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configured. He was shocked, but still tried to do it the correct. He
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searched for vertical and horizontal refresh rates and found them after
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some hours searching in the handbook (they were labeled differently
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compared to the SuSE Linux handbook). Created the configuration and
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typed in "X<enter>". Wow, it works. But why is it grey and black?
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Really gross. But after typing 'startx' it looked much better.</p>
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<p>The next confusing thing was that there were no drivers for the
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cdrom. Nothing to load. After about two weeks he found out that they
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are already integrated into the kernel and that one simply needs to
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"mount" them. And after that experience, he was totally convinced by
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FOSS, because the FOSS people solved the driver issue much cleaner than
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the cdrom vendor or Windos itself. The whole system has been running
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very stable and it has been really easy to change things (like
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/etc/issues), it has been open. <br /></p>
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