greek0.net: Linux and me

This page was originally intended to be about the setup of this server, but something must have gone wrong while I was writing this, since I got quite off-topic.

How it all started (a.k.a. Configuration Nightmare?)

This machine is currently running Debian GNU/Linux. I have used Windows for a long time, but I've always been interested in Linux too. Some years ago I got Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (woody) from a friend, and installed it on this machine. I had tried some other Linux distributions long before, but I never kept them installed because of various problems and the fact that I only had one computer. So I could only start Linux or Windows, and since I also liked to play games I always used windows. But that time Linux was running on a separate machine, and with Debian I finally managed to get everything working.

The last sentence is actually a bit misleading. The configuration process took about half a year grin. At first I went on-line via my windows PC using Internet connection sharing. During the whole process #debian.de on IrcNet was a great help for me. At first X didn't work, so I had to use the console. This lasted for some months, until I got a new graphics card (via eBay for 8 euros). After some additional configuring it finally worked. Then I managed to setup pppd to connect to the Internet via my ISDN Terminal Adapter. At first I thought the configuration would be hairy, because I didn't use a normal modem, but actually it was quite easy. So I could finally use my Linux PC as Internet gateway. Then it took me some more time to get the email system running correctly. Aside from these major tasks I always did some little editing of my configuration files to make working on the computer more pleasant.

At first it may sound like a nightmare. Half a year for configuring a system. Who would ever want to put that much work into a computer?

The answer is quite easy: in reality it wasn't all that terrible. In deed I found it to be a quite nice time. I didn't configure all the time, perhaps the first few days to setup everything in a nice way. Then I just started playing around with the configuration when I was bored. Getting one major thing (like the ones mentioned above) to work took perhaps 1-3 days, and it was always a great feeling when it finally worked as expected. Another thing to keep in mind is that you only have to do all this once. Since then I've set up several machines with Debian GNU/Linux, and mostly it was just getting all of the configuration files from this machine and perhaps applying some little changes. A complete setup takes about 3 days this way (again, not 3 days of work, but 3 days of doing something on the machine, noticing some annoyance, and fixing it. So with some consideration this could perhaps be done in a few hours). What's also nice is that once you've got a working configuration, it basically works forever. I've never experienced anything breaking on my system without me changing something.

In the beginning everything was strange, but as I got more and more experienced with the Linux way-of-thinking things became less difficult. It was a kind of learning process to get used to the way you do things in Linux. I read lots of stuff, manuals, papers, how-to's, tutorials. I somehow got used to reading documentation, which is quite a major step in my opinion.

In the end I think it runs out on perhaps the most fundamental difference between Windows and Linux (or Unix based systems in general): On Windows you may get things working faster, but you often have to invest some energy to keep it running. On Linux systems getting something to run may be a bit tedious, but once it's OK, it will run forever (more or less).