My very first experience was with a Linux server. I was moving a website hosted on Windows Server (with IIS 5, lots of HTML, and some PHP) over to a Linux server. The cost to run servers back then was crazy compared to now!
In any case, the Windows server could not keep up with the traffic demands of the website at the time, and it would mean burning up a lot of cash monthly @ hardware or find a more efficient hosting solution.
This was the package I moved to at the time and it was a massive monthly saving. lol!
With those specs, Linux was able to push about 3 to 5 times more traffic than the Windows server.
With Windows Server everything was managed via desktop GUI. (probably still today?) There was no option (that I knew of) where I could install CLI only Windows Server and still use the software stack that was needed.
The hosting company I was moving away from was Elosoft. Lo and behold, I just checked their website, and it still looks the same!
In any case, I was blown away by Linux. I didnāt use it on a laptop or desktop for several years. But increasingly I hosted or managed hosting on Linux server as time went by and never looked back.
@hydn You raise an interesting point. Linux servers really do a great job with network traffic, though in the past the various BSD distributions were well known as great server systems. That may be true too, but to me the advantage of a Linux-based environment is that it now has the full complement of server, desktop, mobile, and even in some potential cases, real-time potential (though we may have to struggle a bit to actually find a practical example of a Linux real-time kernel! (Donāt count it out, though; I think that it could be possible).
Just for the sake of interest, more than twenty five years ago, almost all of my graduate research was in the area of system design and management. I made an assertion that Linux would be scalable on mobile devices, and that even if Linux never got traction on the desktop, the combination of a back end Linux server and drivers for mobile devices would eventually cement Linux in the every day ecosystem.
Well, itās not well recognized, but the kernel for all Android and Chromebook designs is a modified Linux kernel. Apple went another direction and took a modified BSD kernel for their architecture - why? Because the BSD licensing was less restrictive and they could grab free software and build a proprietary product.
Anyway, to combination of server and mobile technology together is arguably the strongest statement for Linux technology today, backed by the ability to scale from the smallest to the largest devices.
I was introduced to Linux in the 90s, right about the time I was about to buy a copy of Mark Williams Coherent (a Unix clone). The Linux techies at the University installed SLS for me. It had kernel 0.99.6, After a few months I blew away the dual boot setup and installed Slackware. Iāve been working in IT ever since, and have been using Linux at home and at work. Currently managing RHEL servers in the cloud at my day job, using mostly Debian otherwise.
Sounds like youāve been around Linux since the early days. Slackware as your first full install puts you in a pretty small group these days. Looking forward to seeing you around the community.
Thanks for the add. Although I work with RHEL in my day job, Debian is my go-to for side jobs and other projects.
For the past few months Iāve been working on Maia Mailguard, fixing up the code to get it all working with php 8. Debian is the target platform and receives the most thorough testing, but other Linux distros are supported, as well as FreeBSD.
I decided to do the work after looking around at the alternatives and finding nothing in the same class.
Anyway, itās maia_mailguard_1.05 on github for those interested
Maia Mailguard is an email spam/virus management system, based on spamassassin and clamav, that provides a web interface for each user to access their spam quarantine and set their own preferences. We used this system at Toyota in Torrance, with 4,000 users. The company later contributed the code to the open source community, and Iāve been maintaining it in a github repo.
In the late 1990s, I built a new machine and installed Windows NT 4.0 Workstation. A friend suggested I install Linux on the old machine, and give it a try. I cannot remember the distro. I did install Linux, but I found the desktop software to be lacking, and I reloaded it with Novell NetWare v5.
In the early 2000s, I installed Red Hat Linux. I installed CD burning software which was a major undertaking. Apparently, it was early days, and I spent half a Saturday fighting with layer upon layer of nested RPM dependencies. Eventually, the install died following an update, and even though I had an image backup, I was finished with that.
A few years later, I replaced my Netgear router with m0n0wall (BSD) running on that 1990s machine that once held NetWare. m0n0wall worked great, and eventually I settled on pfSense.
I began reading about ZFS and built a FreeNAS (BSD) machine.
In the early 2010s, Microsoft ended the TechNet Plus subscriptions meaning that my home lab running Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V and Windows 7 was no longer supported.
I read about BSD with bhyve, but Linux with QEMU-KVM appeared to be further along, and I replaced all the Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 with Linux Mint v17 with QEMU-KVM.
Every four years, I rebuild everything with the latest version of Linux Mint. While there have been a few issues, it is mostly boring and reliable.
I canāt remember the year, though I can tell you that Fryās Electronics - a west coast U.S. computer and electronics store that is now out of business - was where I purchased a shrink-wrapped version of SuSE Linux. I used this distro to build a simple file, printer, and internet connection sharing server.
Regarding networking, until the TCP/IP networking features became available on UNIX and PC systems there was no universal networking solution. That changed things in positive ways, then systems were built to work with those solutions.
I first HEARD of Linux shortly after the Linus Torvalds announcement of his little project. As things progressed, I heard more and more about it. On my UNIX workstations I had been using a few of the GNU-based tools from the mid to late eighties on, beginning with GNU Emacs, then as GNU tar and other tools emerged, I used more of them. I think I tried a fairly early version of Bash, but in those early days, ksh could still do more than Bash. It was between 1995-1998 that Bash started to catch up and eventually surpass ksh. I looked at a few early Linux; SLS did not work out for me. Slackware was the first distribution that went well; late 1995 was when I finally got a copy, after 2-3 years of reading about it.
Yeah, softlanding systems was the first distro that was installed (by someone else) on my computer, running kernel 0.99.6. Back in those days, you installed Linux, then spent a couple of weeks downloading software and editing config files to get everything running.
Later that year, I discovered Slackware, and installed it. It was amazing because everything pretty much worked right off the bat.
Anybody remember tsx-11.mit.edu? TAMU or MCC Linux distros? xiafs?
@J_J_Sloan I never used tsx-11.mit.edu, but I joined Digital Equipment Corp in 1985. They had a SLEW of 16 bit operating systems, including RT-11 (a real-time system), RSX and RSX-11M Plus and others. By 1985 when I joined the company, VAX/VMS was their cash cow. Ultrix was, at that time their Unix offering, and they had an Ultrix-11 and Ultrix 32. These were later integrated into Digital UNIX, a 64-bit operating system that, for a brief time, competed with Alpha VMS as their market started to dwindle.
Back to the early stuff, I never really got going with the Softlanding Systems stuff; Slackware was better then, and still really good today. While I donāt have Slackware installed right now because Iām testing other stuff, Iāve had Slackware CURRENT installed within the past year; itās a great environment for compiling and building any kind of software and being my first Linux distribution, it continues to hold a soft spot in my memories and a solid place for the somewhat diminishing cases where I compile and build my own packages; it still does that really well, as it always did.
