I've always said poor people shouldn't deal w Microsoft. Embracing the open source movement makes tech accessible to everyone. Well, once I corrupted the operating system on my laptop (previously a corp laptop that still had the annoyingly bloated corp image), and I didn't have a legit winOS disk, I decided to take my own advice and go open source.

I had no idea what i was doing, just an idea what had to be done. I won't go into the weeks of trial and error I went through breaking the corp image, since I didn't have any admin passwords, and all user options were locked down. But I did it and then I headed down the path to upgrading my old T61 to Linux.

I started w an old Fedora disk my sis had. Very primitive distro and none of my hardware worked. Then my sis (former IT student that kept flunking Linux) gave me a Centos 5.5 disk. Better, but couldn't get wireless,or anything useful, to work. Connected to the internet w a ethernet connection through another PC, and downloaded Ubuntu.

Now we're talking. It recognized all my hardware. I was able to connect via ethernet and wireless w minimal effort. Very comfortable interface.

I've loved tech my entire life. I built my own PC's back in the day, and I've worked in IT depts and sold tech related products. Now I'm hoping to not just use Linux, but to learn enough to make a career transition.

So that's how I wound up here. Hoping to learn and share info and help others discover alternatives to MS.

Nice tale. Howdy and Welcome from just a Biker.

Howdy Biker!

Hi Cranky,

Welcome to LQ!


Hope you enjoy our little community. :}


Cheers,
Tink

Thanks Tink!

The Linux community seems really friendly.It feels like the Mac community before they became a commercial cult. I'm looking forward to learning as much as I can.

Welcome to LQ!

Bought a laptop w/preinstalled Vista woops I mean Win7... and pretty much no useful programs. After years of watching how Windows regularly creates chaos at my job (e.g. "our latest version broke all your spreadsheets? too bad!") I concluded that locking my work or data to Micro$oft's agenda is just plain silly. Micro$oft is forced to trash my O.S every few years or they'll go out of business.

Enough of that. I burned a GParted CD, dual-booted my new laptop Win7/Ubuntu. After many months of never booting into Vista woops Win7 I've concluded I don't need M$ for anything. Today I'm re-partitioning again... single boot, Ubuntu.

On the down side, kernel upgrades make me recompile my wireless chip driver. On the up side, I learned how to shell script that, and then a lot of other scripting stuff. I've got more respect for Linux and less for Windows... I used that darn OS for >10yrs and the registry never made any sense! But until I worked with Linux, I never knew how much I'd prefer to see the same info in plain text files instead.

Anyway, thank you linuxquestions.org for all the help getting me started. I haven't looked back, and I'm loving my laptop more and more every day.

Unfortunately my job will force me to use a crippled OS, so my plan is to focus on cross-platform apps: chrome, open office, etc... now if only I could hook up Evolution email to a Domino server...

- R. Diggity