Welcome to the home page for Steven Edwards
- This is my homepage, there are many like it but this one is mine.
- No. Really, I have other pages on other sites but this is the only one where I feel
mostly free to speak my mind about most subjects. The reason? I own the box its hosted
on and I pay for the bandwidth. This means I can host my own ads to try to cover bandwidth
costs without having to worry about pissing off some third party. Deal with the ads, or
even help a brother out and check some of them out.
- So you might ask "What will I find here?" On this site you will find interesting stories
about my time working in Information Technology, Computing History, The Wine and ReactOS
Projects, and a whole host of other subjects.
- You might also ask "What will I not find here?" For starters you won't find an open forum
where you can comment on my rantings. Maybe once this site is making a little money to
cover my time and enough enough people request it, I will install some sort of comment
system. For now if you have something to say, email me at winehacker _at_ gmail _dot_ com
and if your comment if interesting enough I will post it.
- 20071025
Hardware upgrades and my first (sort of) network
- I was actually going to write this article just about my first major hardware upgrade,
however upon thinking about it a bit more I remembered there were two parts in to the story.
The first part was the hardware upgrade. The more interesting part of the story is acquiring
a 2nd computer and the faux-network I setup after the hardware upgrade.
- Lacking decent bandwidth, I spent most of my time working on my brothers Pentium 133
system that was in another room. The 9600-baud modem I had in Zero just did not cut it for anything beyond IRC. During my research I learned about some of the hardware upgrades that were available to me at the time so I decided to hit one of the local computer stores. It was there that I purchased a used 14.4 KBS modem, a 486 DX2-66 overdrive chip, 8 Megs of additional EDO memory and a Direct Parallel or LapLink Cable.
- I was now ready to get online and explore the world of Windows 95. Once again another wipe and reinstall later, I am running a new OS (without sound, damn windows broken PnP) and am in the slow lane on the Information Super Highway. These were the days of the 28.8 modems so needless to say this was more an experiment in the name of science, than a plan to use a functional system.
- Shortly thereafter I started doing some contract work for an independent consultant who was an old school HP3000 COBOL Hacker. He asked me to give him a hand with some dos scripts he was working on plus do some stuff on his network. This was my first real chance to actually get paid for using my new skill set, so needless to say it was quite an exciting time. The person I assisted, was gracious enough to let me apprentice under him for several weeks while I configured his network that consisted of a Windows NT 4 BackOffice Server, a Win95 workstation and a Win 3.11 workstation that was mainly a dumb terminal to the HP3000. As payment for these services I received a stipend for my time and more importantly a 14inch CRT monitor and a 486/SX 33 laptop.
- With the addition of the new hardware my pinto known as Zero now had a shotgun driver. I called it LAPTOP. The original idea I had was to just use the Laplink cable to interface with my brothers system, but as his was across the house, Laptop proved to be a much better match for Zero. It was not long until I had both of them running Windows 95 and established as a faux-networking using Direct Cable Connection. Of course, Windows 95 being what it was at the time, required the Dialup Networking 1.3 update to even be able to properly establish a direct cable connection. Shortly there after I learned from a friend about Proxy servers and established a WinGate Proxy on Zero. With a little bit of tweaking, Zero and Laptop were able to share the internet connection and my first real home network was born...and God was it ever slow.
- Next up, finding Wine, Running StarCraft on Linux and a little bit of felonious computer crime.
How I got started with Linux (1996)
- Posted 20071025
- My first computer was a 486/SX 33 Hand me down from my brother when he purchased
his Pentium 133. My first system that from here on out, we shall call ZERO (as I do
not recall what I personified him with) was crude even by the standards of his day.
It only contained a 200 meg hard drive, 4 megs of on board memory and a 9600 baud modem.
The system also contained a 4x cdrom connected to a Pro Audio Spectrum 16 Sound Card that
claimed with the Sound Blaster 16 compatible. The last part is important in my decision
to use Linux.
- My first attempts at running Windows 95 were met with limited success due to the
restricted nature of the hardware, so I spent some time playing with DOS 5.0, 6.22 and
Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. Shortly thereafter I learned about FreeBSD when reading
on the Internet and decided I would give it a shot. Unfortunately at the time I don't
think they even had a CD distribution and the only way to install was via the network
or floppy disk sets.
- Undeterred I also learned Linux was similar to FreeBSD so I decided to give that
a shot. I visited my local book store and bought a copy of "Using Linux", This book
was like the bible to me as explained not only the commands and file-system
structure, but also the history and design of important features of the system such
as X windows. The publisher was both a gentleman and a scholar, because they decided
to ship three different Linux distributions with the book. It contained RedHat 4.2,
Caldera 1.3 and Slackware 3.0.
- Due to constraints of the hard disk I was unable to install a working copy of RedHat,
Caldera had a driver issue with the PAS Sound Card and Cdrom leaving me with only one choice
...Slackware. The bitch of all distros. It has been called the most BSD like of the Linux's or
the most Unix like.
- 1. It uses traditional BSD style init scripts
- 2. The packaging system is basicly tar and gzip
- 3. Documentation really only consisted of the GNU info system and man pages.
- Of course my luck being what it is, I was unable to install a fully working system with X windows
and the man pages, leaving me with the choice of either, a working graphical environment or a command
line only interface. Tough choice...man pages or GUI..Gui or man pages. I did what any true geek would
do and over the course of the next few months I worked in both environs by constantly reinstalling the
system to get the best of both worlds. Thus began my trek in to "Using Linux"
- On a closing note, what sold me on Linux over Win95 at the time was the sound card.
The sound card had the option of either being hard set of IO/IRQ or using PnP mode.
For some reason using the jumper for PnP did not work under Win95 however, removing
the jumpers and letting Linux probe for resources worked.
- Next Issue: Hardware Upgrades =)
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