41 lines
2.2 KiB
Markdown
41 lines
2.2 KiB
Markdown
[[!meta title="Nico Schottelius and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)"]]
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### Why did I become a FOSS developer?
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In 1998 I was running Windows 95 on my brand new computer (Pentium
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1, 166Mhz) and it randomly crashed. This was very frustrating. So I
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asked my father, whether there is something else available.
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And his father gave me a set of SCO Unixware floppys and cds and a
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packet labeled "Suse Linux 11/94". The SCO package had a blue/white
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cd box and looked nicer, so I began to install Unixware my computer.
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But it did not work, because SCO did not support IDE disks and the
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computer had only an IDE disk builtin.
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After about two weeks trying around with SCO, I gave up.
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Frustrated I continued to use the old operating system.
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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 I 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, I thought.
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On the next day I 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. I were shocked, but still tried to do it the correct. I
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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 I 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, I 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.
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[[!tag foss net schottelius]]
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