The Slack World, Issue 2, 2005. Persona Grata

Issue #2, June 2005

Persona Grata

There is no need to introduce Floyd L. Davidson to regulars of alt.os.linux.slackware. To all others (are there any?), we just recommend to read on and to check two posts by Floyd L. Davidson included in the current issue of The Slack World: one in the SlackWisdom column, another in SlackTips.

No more wasting time on introduction! Just read on. We bet you will enjoy the interview kindly given to us by Mr. Floyd L. Davidson.

The Slack World: 0. When did you begin to use Linux in general and Slackware Linux in particular? How did you get to know about Linux? How did you find Slackware and why did you choose it? Have you tried other Linux distributions?

Floyd L. Davidson: I started looking at the code Linus Torvalds was posting some time in 1992, within a few days of when he first made it available. My home machines then were AT&T UnixPC 3B1's, and a lot of Linus' code was generic unix, and very useful. By late 1992 it became obvious that Linux was not just functional, but also a long term project that would be around for awhile and it was going to remain a "unix", not just something close. It was time to switch. It was in December 1992 that I decided to do that.

I'd never owned an Intel based system, so I had to buy an IBM-clone. A lot of research followed, and it was late February 1993 that I got all the pieces put together and first actually booted a Linux kernel. That was on a 486DX-33 cpu, with 8Mb of RAM and a 200Mb hard drive. It took about a day to realize one mistake: another $450 for 8Mb additional RAM was required, because X took up the first 8Mb and everything else ran from of swap! (16Mb was an astronomical amount of RAM, and the price was too high to think about.)

Later, when the price was lower, I upgraded to a 486DX-66 and 32 Mb of RAM so that I could use (X)Emacs, which ate the other 8Mb... :-) With 32Mb of RAM all was fine as long as I didn't try to edit image files. For the rare occasions when I did that, by that time I had more disk installed, and actually had 190Mb of swap space. Editing images was possible, though slow.

But... that was a veritable supercomputer of my dreams from years before. A unix OS that I had the source code to, a color monitor with 1000 pixel resolution and a cpu many times faster than the 1 mips equivalent that once seemed the definition of a "real computer".

1. Do you have an opportunity to use Linux at work or is it solely a pleasure to be taken at home? Do people at your company use Linux? (What do you think about the thread "Linux is not ready for desktop?") Do you have friends or neighbors who use Linux?

Obviously a person who has used Linux exclusively for over a dozen years can't relate to the idea that Linux isn't ready for the desktop. :-)

I run Linux on everything: a firewall, a server (smp), a workstation (smp), a development system (smp), and on a laptop. Obviously I like dual cpu systems (since about 1998). Of course Linux is also the OS on my current toy of choice, Linksys WRT54G 802.11g wireless radios.

Since I live in a very small town (4600 people), except for net friends I know only a few people who have ever used Linux. (I don't know of anyone locally who even codes shell scripts, so computers exist for me in the network community, but not in my home town community.)

I am retired, but when I was still working, prior to 2003, I did use Linux at work even though it was not "company approved". One of the more hilarious moments in my entire career was when I just offhand mentioned to a particular project engineer in Anchorage that I'd bought a separate plugin hard disk for my company laptop so that I could run Linux on it to get some work done when traveling. I didn't think much of it as I said it, but the man fairly choked, turned pink, and nearly rolled under his desk giggling! He finally blurted out "You boot Linux on a company computer!" He saw that as being absolutely symbolic of my relationship to the company culture...

Of course in the telecom business it was only ten years ago that any computer was suspect. I sent shock waves through multiple levels of management in 1993 by getting the head of Engineering to sign off on a project to connect an AT&T 3B2-600 to a toll switch (a Nortel DMS-200). It was never to happen, because it scared too many people.

2. Any LUG where you live? If yes, are you an active member of it? Which distribution do most of the members use?

I live in Barrow Alaska. Most of my neighbors are Inupiat Eskimos. We don't have a Linux User Group here, but there is an Eskimo Whaling Captain's Association... Rather than get together and chew the fat about operating systems, we have something called Nalukataq here in late June. I'm writing this on the last day of May, and the spring whaling season is just finishing up. In June, Nalukataq is when each successful crew celebrates by feeding the entire community at an all day festival. Usually crews group 2 or 3 together, but we have may 4 or 5 of these each June (the quota is 22 whales, so if they caught them all, a 3 per it would be 7 celebrations!).

Nalukataq is an all day chew the fat session with the neighbors. And bowhead whale is really good stuff too!

3. Have you ever tried to convince someone to try and use Slackware? What happened afterwards?

On Usenet I've advocated that to some, but it's not for everyone (and neither are Microsoft or Apple). In person I've only run across one person who was a likely candidate. My youngest son has always used Microsoft systems, and while I never spent any time advocating that he use Linux or Slackware, he has certainly been aware of what I use. So I was very pleasantly surprised to discover that he has implemented several Linux servers in his current capacity as a network administrator, and chose Slackware as the base distribution.

4. One can find very nice and interesting photographs at your web site. The photographs were made at different places in Alaska. Could you please tell us about their history? Did you travel over Alaska (a dumb question) or did they appear in the process of your work?

Well, I worked for what is now ATT Alascom for over 33 years. For two different periods I was part of the traveling crew. One benefit was getting to visit perhaps half of the villages in Alaska. As retirement approached, I moved here to Barrow, and for 5 years maintained the Alascom earth stations across the North Slope. It was clear from the beginning that most people will never be able to see what the North Slope looks like, and that I had an opportunity to photograph some of it and make the pictures available. Now that I can't add to it, of course I wish I'd made more effort at it...

5. Ayaz: For me, life with Slackware is a big black console, and I love it. What is your personal `feeling' or impression of Slackware?

It's a good starting point. Slackware is closest of all the Linux distributions to the Unix way of doing things. That appeals to me. Patrick Volkerding takes care of all the mundane boring details, and I am able to play only with whatever fun parts appeal to me today. Unix systems administration is my idea of fun, so what I actually use isn't a stock Slackware, but more like a derivative.

That makes upgrading a major operation though. I recently upgraded from a Slackware 8.0 based system to Slackware 10.1. By the same token I had moved to the 2.6 kernel when it was still a beta release. That was odd, because with every major release back to 1.0 it has been several minor revisions before the kernel stabilized. The 2.4 was probably the worst, and wasn't usable until something like 2.4.15. Slackware 8.0 was distributed with a 2.4.5 kernel and when I installed that it was nothing but trouble until Linus fixed the swap problems at one of the 2.4.15-pre releases.

6. Ayaz: I've heard that you code in C, or like to. Have you written any C applications for GNU/Linux in general? Or, did I hear wrong?

I do a lot of C programming for relaxation, and have been for more than 20 years. A few things have been released under the GPL, but nothing of any significance.

My current project will almost certainly be released to the public, and might even be worth something. These Linksys WRT54G wireless routers are just an awful lot of fun, and run a Linux 2.4 kernel on a MIPS 200 MHz cpu. The source code for the firmware, and tools to cross compile it, are all under GPL and available from Linksys (Cisco).

But... they use "busybox", which has only a slimmed down version of vi for an editor, and I'm an emacs person. So what I'm doing now is working on an emacs (based on the MicroEmacs 3.7 public domain code) for use with embedded systems (i.e., to link with the uClibc Standard C Library rather than the GNU glibc). The Pico editor started the same way, but that isn't the direction I'm going. This is bare bones, but retaining the feel of an emacs.

7. Finally, could you please share a Linux tip or trick of your own with us? Any useful scripts that you might have written?

Well, there's a section of my web page that isn't accessed from the homepage, which has a few snippets of source code,

http://web.newsguy.com/floyd_davidson/code/

Another item, not on that menu, is

http://web.newsguy.com/floyd_davidson/code/sensors

which might be very interesting for anyone who wants to graph the output from lm_sensors. (I also have a Crystalfontz CF633 and use the same setup to graph temperature probes, plus weather data gathered from NOAA on the net using wget. So what is on the web page is the tip of an iceberg.)

Otherwise, of the source code that is available from the menu, the terminal code is the most useful. It was written as a set of appropriate examples for learning serial port programming. That is necessary because "Serial-Programming-HOWTO", the howto on serial port programming, is a disaster.

Thanks a lot!!