On Thu, 16 Aug 2001 01:39:23 Eric Pareja wrote:
> I'm starting my writing and would appreciate your input.
Here I attempt to chronicle events as they happened, in
chronological order. I have not indicated exact dates,
since at my age, it is hard to remember those.
I am also posting this in the PLUG mailing list, so that
the oldies can fill in the missing facts.
Sometime in 1992, we called the first organizational
meeting of TeX Users' Group of the Philippines. The
announcement of the meeting might, in fact, have been made
on FebNet. Jonathan Marsden attended this meeting.
Months later (I'm not sure of the date) Jonathan came to
Ateneo and installed Linux on one of our early 386's in the
Computer Science Lab. While he installed, I watched.
Since I did not do the install myself, I quickly forgot
how he did the install, and could not repeat the installation
process, myself. The version was some early patch level of
Linux-0.99. This was easier to use than our SCO Unix 3.2
and so was of great curiosity to the faculty.
A few months later, I visited Jonathan Marsden at Asian
Theological Seminary (street parallel to Timog) with a box of
diskettes, and copied all eight or ten diskettes of the SLS
(Soft Landing System) distribution from his portable PC.
This was the version that I installed for my C programming class.
The machine was an 386 with 8MB of ram, and I had between
10-20 students. The 386 was hooked up to our network on the
same bus as a 16-port terminal server. Linux was then 0.99pl13,
I think. The students telnetted into the Linux box via the
terminal server using Wyse termnails. I think I was the first
in the Philippines to use Linux in a network for educational
purposes. It was not yet the official release version, and
everytime a student needed to do a C compile, he had to advise
his classmates, who would stop whatever they were doing.
Linux was always running out of file table entries (whatever that
meant). Yet we persisted on using this system, because gcc on
Linux (then) was so much better to use than cc on SCO.
Sometime later, a close friend in the US, Samuel Kho, who later
on worked for Microsoft at Bellevue, sent me the official
10-disk SLS distribution with Linux 0.99pl13, with original SLS
labels. I still have some of the SLS disks, but they do not
contain SLS anymore.
In 1994, I attended the Cebu Internet conference, when Ph.net
(the Philippine education domain) connected to the Internet
for the first time. Immediately after the conference, I made
sure that I got a copy of the IP addresses of all the important
sites (Linux archives in particular). On Good Friday 1994, I
was back in Ateneo QC, downloading the latest available Slackware
distribution from sunsite.unc.edu. There were no nameservers at
that time for Ph.net, and our only connection was via San Carlos
in Cebu. It is a good thing the San Carlos sysads did not
password the root account, since they were still intoxicated by
the success of the Cebu conference. Also Ritchie Lozada promised
to help administer the San Carlos site (*.usc.edu.ph) from
Ateneo QC, and so Ritchie had to be allowed to log in as root
(and so was I).
So it turned out on Good Friday 1994 that I must have been the
craziest the person in the Philippines to want a complete Linux
distribution and to actually download the latest release from the
Internet.
At about this time, also, I registered at the Linux counter.
I must have been the first in the Philippines to do so.
After the Cebu conference, the schools were busy setting up their
internet connections. Linux boxes were being put up all over the
place, to be used as Internet servers. We almost came to the
conclusion that (1) UP sysads must be love-starved, since they
named their servers after sexy models, (2) Ateneo sysads must be
drinkers, since they named their servers after beer-house food,
and (3) DLSU sysads were not creative, since they named their
servers vax1, vax2, vax3, etc. DLSU also used Linux boxes but I
am not sure if they called them linux1, linux2, etc.
This choice of names for Ateneo servers must have been disappointing
to the Jesuits, who must have secretly wanted to name them ignacio,
francisco, ricci, faura, etc. It is hard to break tradition, so
the names pusit, sisig, inihaw, stuck.
In 1994-95 I had work to do, I was system administrator of the
Mathematics Department network, which at that time, was the only
academic network outside of Computer Science in Ateneo. We were
running Novell 2.11. It was time to convert the network to Linux.
The users at the PC/Windows 3.11 workstations hardly noticed the
transition. They were still happily working on their TeX/ChiWriter
/WinWord documents, not realizing that this time, they were using
a Linux fileserver which at the same time was our departmental
mail server. The mail server math.admu.edu.ph was a Linux box,
while our University mail server pusit.admu.edu.ph was a DEC Alpha.
Linux was all the Mathematics Department could afford. Besides,
TeX on Linux did a better and faster job than TeX on DOS/Windows,
and that made the Mathematics faculty happy.
In 1994 or 1995, we met at McDonalds New Frontier and drafted the
objectives of the Philiipine Linux Users' Group (PLUG). The
named PLUG was coined by Kelsey Hartigan Go.
And so that was how it was in the early days. I could be wrong,
but we are mere humans ...
PMana
_
Philippine Linux Users Group. Web site and archives at http://plug.linux.org.ph
To leave: send "unsubscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To subscribe to the Linux Newbies' List: send "subscribe" in the body to
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
