GeekLinux

Over the last few weeks I have heard many good things about the file manager emelFM2.  After hearing Dave Yates and Chess Griffin mention emelFM2 in their podcasts I finally did install it and I must admit, it seems very fast, clean, and simple to use.  Up to now I have most often used Midnight Commander, Nautilus, and Konqueror.

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So why another Linux blog? Well….that’s a little hard to explain, but I’ll try. I have been a Geek most of my life, I have enjoyed hacking things since I was old enough to crawl, my parents enjoy telling stories about how I use to get into things, in fact some of my earliest memories are of taking things apart just to find out how they worked. Like so many others Geeks I did not fully blossom as a Geek until I got my first computer in 1983, an Apple IIe. I had exposure to other Apple computers too, my neighbor had an Apple II he use to let me use and my Dad purchased one of the first MacIntosh computers as soon as they came out; I also had exposure to IBM PCs in college and at work. I couldn’t wait until I could finally afford to buy my first PC. That day arrived on 12/3/93 I purchased a blazingly fast 486DX33 IBM Clone with 4 MB of RAM and a 200 MB hard drive running MS-DOS 5.0 which I later upgraded to MS-DOS 6.22 and then finally to Windows 3.1; life was good. But then came Windows 95! Oh the hours, days, weeks, and months to get that OS patched and tweaked. Around this time I distinctly remember having the feeling that “there must be a better way”! I was big into the BBS scene, one of the BBS’s I was on was becoming a real ISP. I quickly became a member of this ISP and was given access to something I had never seen before, a Shell account, that Shell account ran on Sun Solaris . At that time I was working as a CAD Designer for a company running EDS Unigraphics which was running on top of HP-UX. During this time I learned basic Unix commands, how to install software updates, and how to do backups. After leaving that company I went to work for a company that was still using dial up. I was lucky enough to have a chance to help shop for an ISP and get the Ethernet setup. The ISP we selected supplied us with a Cisco router and a firewall running OpenBSD. During this time I learned basic router commands and I learned even more Unix type commands in OpenBSD, and I was doing most of the Windows Systems Adminstration for this company. I was getting more and more frustrated with the constant support issues with Windows. In 1997 I started to hear that Linux was ready for the desktop so I dicided to check it out. After several attempts I was unable to get all my hardware running so I gave up Linux for awhile. In 2000 I took a training class on UNIX Administration. Even though the class was on UNIX the school used Slackware v8.0 for the class. The instuctor handed out CD-R’s of Slackware v8.0 and the hook was set. I installed Slackware v8.0 on an old PC and kept practicing command line excerises on that Slackware box and later setup a Debian Woody box. Meanwhile my ISP upgrade my Shell account to OpenBSD. I followed the advancements in Linux fairly closely over the next few years and I am finally ready to begin the final switch leaving Windows behind on my personal workstation. This blog will be a journal of my struggles in making that move. I am currently running Fedora Core v5 on a P4 1.5GHz with 384 MB RAM and a Celeron 1.0 Ghz with 256 MB RAM.

So why did I write all this? Well, I think that it is usful to blog the struggles of someone migrating away from Windows toward Linux. Even though I work in a Windows world I am attempting to go Linux every place I can. At home I now use Linux for all my Internet and email. I also use it as much as possible for music, word processing, html editing, etc.

I hope you will check in here from time to time and watch my progress in becoming full time Linux, first at home, someday I hope, at work.

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