15 november 2018
My UNIX journey
How did I get here, on my current quest to learn UNIX?
the beginning
It all started in the summer of 2008 when I took an intro to computer science class in the (at the time) sparkling new computer science building at Purdue University.
The course introduced me to baseline concepts such as abstraction layers, the Von Neumann architecture, etcetera. The class was held in a computer lab with pretty decent Sun Solaris workstations running either CDE or Gnome for a window manager. We spent most of our time in CDE and it immediately reminded me of Dennis Nedry's Silicon Graphics workstation in Jurassic Park.
One thing our TA said that stuck with me was his preference for the command line and why it was important that we learn how to use it. He said that using a GUI was like being a baby, pointing things and making indistinct noises to get what we wanted from our computer operating system (mother). Using the command line was learning how to talk, how to ask the computer to do things in a language we shared.
Later that summer as my GeForce 8800 GTS was showing its age, I decided to install Ubuntu on my personal computer, a system I put together out of discrete parts bought on newegg. It was a purpose built gaming rig paid for with funds from a summer job, an AMD Athlon X2 system that was more than enough to compile programs and do my javascript homework on. I kept the Windows Vista partition for gaming but spent most of my time on Hardy Heron torrenting movies, playing music, and browsing the web with Firefox. Most of my experience from my class was just intro to HTML and javascript so I didn't really have the toolkit from school to tinker on my first linux build, but through the package manager and xterm was able to tweak, expand the audio capabilities, and even moved the whole install from GNOME to KDE.
While at home for summer in 2009, my mother upgraded from her PowerBook G4 whose hard drive had given up the ghost and whose battery had a life of about 25 minutes to a shiny new unibody Intel MacBook Pro. I took the G4 on as a project machine and successfully opened it up, replaced the hard drive, and installed a fresh copy of OS X Leopard. However, I never replaced the battery nor did I replace the very janked up power adapter that would only intermittently charge the battery. I brought that laptop to school and left my linux box at home that year. Most of the time I never bothered opening the Terminal app, as at the time a 6 year old PPC Mac was old, but not out of the realm of possibility of being a daily driver. The modern web kept getting slower though, and I returned to my PC, but this time using Windows 7.
Here is where my UNIX journey went into a sort of "sleep mode" for the next 7 years or so.