## hpr1881 :: My road to Linux

 I went against my own recommendations from my previous episode 
and used Rehearsal Assistant, because it can rename files inside the app. 
Well, turns out it records at 8 kHz and encodes it as 3GPP.
Sound quality: Yes, it's at a terrible sample rate, but you can 
hear what I'm saying and at least I'm Holding It Right.
There's no problem with sudden drops in 
level.
Do as I say, don't do as I do. Use
Urecord,
which is obviously 
pronounced you record as in telling someone to record something, not 
you record! as in insulting someone by comparing them to a vinyl disc. 
Don't say as I say.
Slirp can use either SLIP or 
PPP. I think I used Slirp with SLIP, and there was some other connection 
method that provided PPP directly without logging in and running a command. 
Maybe their getty even understood the PPP blurb and just went directly to 
pppd. Anyway, my Amiga-side software didn't support it. When I switched to 
Linux I was able to use the other method and just talk PPP directly and 
authorize using CHAP.
Debian didn't support Amiga
until Debian Hamm, which was released in 1998. So I didn't have much
choice but to run Watchtower and compile my own stuff. By 1998 the Amiga was
already gathering dust in my wardrobe back at my parents' place, while my PC
and I were preparing to travel the seas with the Swedish Royal Navy and
hang out (not really) with David Letterman on Saint Barths.
Wikipedia says that 
yes, it was Bruce Perens who tried to get UserLinux going, but they claim 
Ubuntu killed it. I don't remember UserLinux getting any traction at all. I 
think it's more accurate to say that Ubuntu put the last nail in its coffin. 
LWN seems to agree: The 
immediate cause of death was an inability to deliver software. Today there 
still is no real delivered product, over three months after the release of 
Debian Sarge.
But the same article reveals that I was completely wrong about Bruce 
trying to gather existing vendors together: It was occasionally 
confused with UnitedLinux by people familiar with the Linux market. 
UnitedLinux is the old Caldera, Conectiva, SUSE and Turbolinux 
initiative. Yeah, I was thinking of the one with Turbolinux in it. 
That name rings a bell. But I thought Turbolinux was Finnish. Apparently they 
were Japanese. Or actually, 
apparently they are Japanese.
Ah yes, Best Linux, that was the Finnish one.
I know that guix
is pronounced geeks. I just don't know it in my heart. Just 
like I actually think GNU/Linux is the better descriptive term, but I keep 
talking about the Linux ecosystem* etc, where 95% of that ecosystem is 
abstracted away from Linux by glibc and runs just as well on 
FreeBSD.
* Yes, you may hate the term ecosystem. I happen to think it's an 
apt** analogy.
** You see what I did there.
Links

https://www.linux-m68k.org/faq/saynotowatchtower.html
https://microca.st/clacke
https://quitter.se/clacke
https://hackerpublicradio.org/eps.php?id=1877
https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=urecord&fdid=cc.co.eurdev.urecorder
https://slirp.sourceforge.net/
https://www.linux-m68k.org/dists.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UserLinux
https://lwn.net/Articles/151642/
https://www.turbolinux.com/
https://wayback.archive.org/web/20020201162513/https://www.bestlinux.net/en/
https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Introduction.html

