
12 years of Linux_Logo development

Origin story

boring, ubt everyone wants to hear

I got my start typing in BASIC games for Apple IIe.  I migrated to GWBASIC
then QBASIC then Turbo Pascal/assembly on a 386/33 My family got.

My first intro to UNIX was a summer job I had in high school, in 1995.
I got to use SGI Irix on a 36MHz Personal Irix with a Mips R3000-class chip
in it.

I always distrusted GUIs, though in the end it really meant is I liked the
command line.  Never used Windows significantly.

The job was making an X frontend to an ancient Fortran 77 program.
Not a good way to learn C or Fortran.  Took me a while to figure out
F77 is column-sensitive, and to figure out how double-pointer indirection
worked.  This was 1995 so the web was new (netscape 1.x for Irix!).  You had
to shock, get references books for the librabry, and when downloading from
the internet had to make sure you weren't leaving the continent (downloading
Samba from australia could take days).

I found Linux that summer, my friend and co-worker John had liked Unix so
much (he got to use the SGI Indigo2... OpenGL graphics, 100MHz 64-bit
processor, 128MB of RAM, 16-bit sound... it was nearly 5 years before I had
a computer that was as good).  SO he had heard about Linux.  He slowly
downloaded over a 14.4 connection slackware disk sets to a big box of disks,
and then installed it floppy by floppy to a 386/25 machine he had.  I came
over and was impressed.  Even more so when he recompiled the kernel!
The 1.2.13 kernel didn't support his CD-ROM drive, so he compiled up a late
1.3.xx devel kernel and had to patch the driver to have the proper settings.
It took a long time to compile, but then we rebooted... and the drive went
crazy, continuously ejecting and unejecting.  Despite the setback, I was
impressed.  Despite the fact that the interface was just twm and some
X-terminals.

The next year when I went to college, I made sure to request an ethernet
equipped dorm room (They didn't all have it yet) and convinced my family to
buy me a used 486/66.  A Linux box all of my own!

Linux Logo

the linux_logo story starts in 1997.  Part of it has roots in the GGI
project, a project way ahead of its timed, blocked by Linus, but finally
being realized today with KMS, etc.

Flame war ont he kernel.  Text Linux penguin.

Make my own program.

Rewrites at 2, 3, 4, 5.

Add-on in Linux distros.  Default on Mandrake, love/hate.

Still maintain.



