Hi. I'm new to these forums, and relatively new to Linux. That is, I'd successfully installed a Linux distro on a spare drive a number of times starting with Red Hat 5 or 6 back in 1997, but I'd never really used it enough to feel like I actually knew what I was doing. I'd install the distro, play around with it for a while, then get frustrated due to my inability to figure out how to get simple things done, like burning a CD or playing a video file, or mounting and unmounting floppy drives. In fact, the very concept of having to mount and unmount drives was a bit daunting. The MAN pages didn't seem to help much. It was like they were written by geeks for geeks.
I read a lot about the Unix and Linux disk partitioning methods and the general architecture of the file system and permissioning systems, and I understood it in concept, but found the actual application of it difficult. It seemed like there was always some command I was missing, and I've have to go find it and download it and compile it, oh my. Then LVM emerged and I felt even more lost when it came to carving up my disk space. All the terminology seemed so unfamiliar to me given my DOS and Windows background. Eventually I'd get tired of being stumped all the time, so I'd give up and go back to Windows so I could actually use my system for normal stuff.
So even though I've been playing with Linux a little here and there for a number of years, I am still pretty much a nearly clueless newbie.
Then just a bit more than a year ago, I started playing with Knoppix, then Damn Small Linux, then I installed Fedora Core 3, then Debian Sarge. I used the AMD64 flavors of distros where possible and discovered that there are some packages that weren't available for AMD64, or they just didn't seem to install all that cleanly on my AMD64 platform. I had a lot of fun, but I still didn't really feel like I could actually use Linux on a day to day basis as my main desktop. I had little successes here and there. I managed to figure out how to load digital images from my camera and use Gimp to edit them. FC 3 gave me LVM partitions, and even though I didn't much understand them, I managed to carve out a few logical volumes to try different distros. I discovered that FC 3 came with at least a modicum of graphical utilities to help with things like editing files, changing file permissions, mounting and unmounting devices, and so forth.
I wanted to be able to boot either Linux or Windows from a boot loader, so I painfully figured out how to setup Grub in the boot partition of my Linux drive and managed to make it boot FC 3 or Debian from logical volumes on my Linux disk, or boot Windows from another physical disk. This drove me to the console command interface more than ever before, and I started to appreciate the powerful, if arcane and borderline incomprehensible, Linux commands.
I managed to get the 0.9 version of Damn Small Linux running on a USB pen drive with the help of folks on the DSL forum. I discovered that while FC 3 easily recognized my gigabit NIC, neither Debian, nor Knoppix, nor DSL did. I figured out how to get a driver from 3COM and install it on a floppy so I could load it during boot up of Knoppix and DSL and Debian. A future objective I have is to get it included in my DSL system on my USB pen drive so I don't need the floppy. That, and the driver for my 2915abg wireless NIC on my Thinkpad would make it much more useful. I still can't get any Linux distro to let me operate my ATI Radeon 9600 on my two side-by-side CRTs as an expanded desktop, as I do with Windows (I'm so spoiled, it really annoys me to have my desktop confined to a single monitor.)
I managed somehow to upgrade FireFox once on my FC 3 system, but I never was able to successfully install the Java 1.5 code, despite reading a zillion web sites discussing how to make it work, and fooling around with it for endless hour upon hour. Now I've upgraded my FC 3 to FC 4, but it is still the 1.4.2 JRM that is installed. Bummer.
Now I want to try Slackware and FreeBSD on other logical volumes on my Linux disk, so I still have a lot of learning to do. Meanwhile, I going to make my FC 4 system useful and get really comfortable with Linux so I can abandon Windows altogether. I'm also in the process of teaching myself C programming just because it is something I've always wanted to do. I have been programming in other languages for 30 years, so I don't think it will be all that difficult for me. Hey, I mastered "Hello World" right off the bat!
Alright, that was a lengthy intro, but I just wanted to give you an idea where I'm at with Linux. I'm sure I'll be asking a lot of questions for things that I can't find by searching the forums. Maybe one day I'll wake up and discover that I'm actually comfortable with Linux, that I know what I'm doing, and that I can help others too. That is, in fact, my goal.
