Ebrius Disputatios

My first Linux Distro was Red Hat 6.0. I bought it at a Staples Office store, in Larchmont, New York. I couldn't wait to test it out. At that time Windows 98 was in season and Windows XP was on the way. Back then, Red Hat had a full graphical installation setup which was really ahead of it's time. One could make partitions or one could use the entire disk. Initially I tried dual boot setups but I didn't like that system long. I decided to install a hard drive bay on my PC and installed Windows on one drive and Linux on another when I was finished using either one I'd just switch bays. That worked very well. At the time Red Hat and rpms was all I knew, that was my world and I loved it. At that time, 1998, there were very few, free Office productivity suites for Linux. There was AbiWord and Gnumeric, which worked well but they were missing key features and were not exactly ready for daily driver status. We had modems back then and the fastest of them were 56K baud. Then Sun Micro Systems made their office Suite, Star Office available for Linux and Downloads were free. At the time, if I remember correctly, The tar or zip file, I don't remember which, was around 150MB that was a huge file to download over phone lines at or below 56K, it took hours to get that fucking file. I decided to browse the popular computer stores at the time, Staples, Radio Shack, and CompUSA, for software. I found Corel Word Perfect For Linux and scarfed it up.

The Box came with several CD-ROMs and along with Corel Word Perfect, came a product called Corel Linux. I didn't give it much thought at the time, because I was more interested in installing Word Perfect on my Red Hat System. While doing the installation, I observed that along with the rpms, there were some other files that ended with the suffix deb. I didn't know what those were. I later found out that those files were for installation on another Linux distribution called Debian. Now at that time I was also a computer hardware technician and working in that field gave me income as well as the acquisition, of spare parts. I bring that up because, since I had spare hard drives I could install and test out other distros and architectures, including the BSD's and such. Anyway, I was curious about this Corel Linux so I wanted to install it. However, before I begin, let me tell you about Corel Word Perfect for Linux. It was usable but it was unstable, and Corel was actually using Wine to run their binaries. Which made Corel Word Perfect slow too, because it wasn't being run natively. Which is why I wanted to try Corel Linux. I thought that since Word Perfect and Corel Linux were fabricated by the same company, they would somehow work in concordance. Which was true. It turned out that Corel Linux was Debian 2.2 Potato. On it's own Corel Linux was smooth and stable after all it was a ripped off version of Debian. However as soon as I installed the Word Perfect packages it went batty. It seemed that the deb versions of Word Perfect, were also running on Wine. So I experienced the same pitfalls as I did running Word Perfect on Red Hat.

Since I was now exposed to a Debian derivative, I started liking how it worked and enjoyed using it more that I did either Windows, Red Hat or Free BSD-3.5. As soon as Debian 3.0, became stable, I now had a DSL connection so I was able make an installation CD and get started learning the Debian way. It's been my goto distro since, to this day. I've played around with many different distros, It's what Linux users do, however, I've always ran Debian from that time on.

While I have quite a few computers, I do enjoy tinkering with Raspberry Pi's. I think I may have six of them. My first three are the 3B+ versions. The others are the 4B-pluses. Here again I get the chance to learn different systems simultaneously. I've noticed that even when running, at the time, Raspbian there were glitches and weirdness experienced from time to time. I've noticed the same types of bugs and glitches using Debian, Raspberry Pi OS and Ubuntu. A reminder, I'm referring to the Raspberry Pi at this time. All these pre-mentioned OSes work just fine on traditional hardware. I have noticed that I did experience stability on the Pi, when once I installed Fedora on it. Fedora was the first distro to release a 64 bit OS for the Pi a few years back and I tested it and was impressed. I just didn't want to relearn Red Hat Linux all over again. Which leads me here. I was beginning to think I had some bad hardware because of the unusual little bugs that I would find, so I wanted to test other distribution's ports for the Pi.

The first one I tested was the Manjaro Linux port. I installed it right from the Raspberry Pi running Raspberry Pi OS, using rpi-imager and installed it directly to a hard drive. There were a few options, one was a fully developed KDE install, a XFCE version and my choice, which was a lite version without the GUI. At first boot, I was impressed. The Manjaro port was intuitive and well coded. It booted directly from the USB hard drive and it was smooth and stable. Now I'd like to disclose that I wasn't a fan of Manjaro or Arch for that matter, which had nothing to do with them really, it's just that I wasn't ready to learn a new distro just then. My Pine Phone is the Manjaro Community Edition and as quickly as I could, I installed Mobian. So, for me being impressed with Manjaro running on a Pi, is huge for me. Naturally I was expecting something to fuck up and pressed my luck often. Only nothing. The little engine just could. I still have Debian boxes here in the shop doing their jobs, indeed, I still have the Debian install on it's hard drive just sitting idle. Working with Manjaro gave me loads of insight and experience on how to have my way with an Arch like system and so, not satisfied to run Manjaro if I could run Arch, I decided to bootstrap it to the Pi. It wasn't exactly smooth sailing at first, because it failed to find the USB drive, although I must admit, that when installed to a SD card it's flawless. That wasn't good enough for me so, I copied /boot to /boot.orig copied the /boot contents from my Manjaro system and copied the /lib/modules/$KERNEL from the Manjaro to the Arch. It booted up then. Eventually I fixed it so that now it's running the Arch Kernel in the repo and I installed it using pacman. So it's working great. It's as rock solid on the Pi as the Manjaro Linux port is. I'm really impressed. Now I can seem to keep my hands off of it. Sometimes I have problems installing some of the same packages that I know I've installed on my Manjaro disk. All I do for that, is, fire up my Manjaro system download the PKGBUILD using yay, then I transfer it to my Arch Linux box and build it using the PKGBUILD that I know works and that has been working fine. So it's good to keep similar systems around for that very same reason.

My point is, I was a little hasty in my judgement of Arch Linux and Manjaro and I had essentially rejected them as not being useful to me. I was wrong again, happily so and the distros I refused have become my saviours and favorites to currently work with.