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