My Thoughts on Computing in General
I am hardware and operating system agnostic -- I believe it should both actually work (operate) and be predictable (systematic). If it can't manage those, then it still needs tuning up, or the person needs a different combination of hardware and OS...
We can learn a lot about the future by studying the successes and troubles of the past.
My Thoughts on Linux
Favorite Distro: depends, what do you need to use it for?
I'm a big fan of Live CDs or virtual images until a person is sure what they would like to see out of their computer.
I favor debian for remote upgradability, knoppix for introducing windows-soaked newbies (although ubuntu live cd seemed to please them better at my most recent netlounge), a Bring-A-Box (installfest, installathon, whatever you like to call it) meet for introducing techie aware newbies, lnx-bbc or
tomsrtbt for rescues (liveCDs are getting better at this too), and
SuSE for a coherent installed setup when people like rpm format but don't like Red Hat. If they do like Red Hat then at least they should decide between Enterprise (RHEL,
CentOS) and desktop (Fedora) varieties. I haven't tried Slackware in the current century. I first enjoyed Ubuntu as a plain install on a PPC platform and use it on PCs now too. Since
MacOS' modern vintage is a UNIX under the hood I haven't felt the need to make Mac dual boots lately.
I often point people towards non "name brand" distros for special purposes, by way of
Linux Weekly News' Distributions page or
freshmeat.net.
First Linux: Point 99 patchlevel... uh, was it 10 or 14, I forget. But I didn't install that; my hubby did, on our triple boot 386 - the other two being Windows (3.1, with DOS beneath) and OS/2.
First Distro: Soft Landing Systems. 45 floppies. Ages to download. Wow, a real installer.
First Linux geeky thing done for pay: install Red Hat 3.03 in front of 4 other techs so we could all cover dumb antivirus questions from Linux dual booters.
My TWiki Links
My Personal Preferences
- Show tool-tip topic info on mouse-over of WikiWord links, on or off:
- Set LINKTOOLTIPINFO = off
- Preference for the editor, default is the WYSIWYG editor. The options are raw, wysiwyg:
- More preferences TWiki has system wide preferences settings defined in TWikiPreferences. You can customize preferences settings to your needs: To overload a system setting, (1) do a "raw view" on TWikiPreferences, (2) copy a
Set VARIABLE = value
bullet, (3) do a "raw edit" of your user profile page, (4) add the bullet to the bullet list above, and (5) customize the value as needed. Make sure the settings render as real bullets (in "raw edit", a bullet requires 3 or 6 spaces before the asterisk).
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