LinuxQuestions.org - Hello everyone! Bonjour!

Hi everyone,

I'm a Linux newbie.
I'm a French Canadian expatriate living in the USA.

My first experience with computers was with an old Color Computer in the mid 80s a gift from a relative. My cousin upgraded to a Coco3 and gave me his old Color Computer with the chicklet tablet.

The only thing I was able to do with this computer was do a little script in basic to make the screen print some sentence or words that would scroll. Type in some games that were from Radio Shack. Boy do I remember typing for hours and finally when the game we would get a cursor and a few pixels of graphics for a game!
I used this computer for about a year in 1986 then something burned in it when I left it on.

Favorite Game: Clown & balloons

I graduated to a 386 Packard Hell in 1991 running windows 3.1 (gift from my dad, I was 15 at the time)
Connected to BBS back then. Best games I played during this time were: Trade Wards, Stunt Driver (We would play directly over modem me and a friend)
This computer I gave to my sister when I went to college in 1993. She used it for 3 years.

In 1996 I bought my first computer with hard earned money. A Cyrix processor, YIKES!
Windows 95 and dreadful winnuke! (How long did it take Microsoft to patch that security breach?)
Learned some basic html with the web. (made my first page on geocities)
Favorite Games: Duke Nukem 3d, Quake, Diablo, Warcraft I & II.
Favorite Applications: POW WOW Tribal voice
I used this computer until 1998. I met my wife online with this computer.
(I gave it to my sister when I moved to the USA in 1997)

I used my wife's computer for a bit when I moved to the US.
My wife had a Pavilion 166MHz WITH MMX! Woha.
and we used it for about a year.

I then proceeded to purchase a Pentium III 500MHZ in 1998. Landed my current job on it in 2000 thru Monster.com
Favorite Game: Asheron's Call for 2 years.
We shared that computer for a bit and the old computer was put on the shelf for a month or two. I then bought some CDs for Redhat linux release 5 at walmart and wanted to see what linux was. Unfortunately I was never able to get the computer configured to work and boot up, it might of been hardware failures or just me being ignorant.

I learn most of my basic Linux skills configuring perl & php scripts between 1999 and now. I purchased a domain name for my wife as a gift. She wanted to start an on-line community for women (non-profit). We were hosted on a linux server with others. 30$ per month for 100Meg of space etc..etc.
We did that for a couple years. The downtime we would get was unbearable sometimes (caused by others on the server with bad scripts) and we eventually shopped elsewhere.
We moved somewhere else and the support sucked (was non-existant).

I purchased a Celeron 1.2 gigahertz in 2001 ran windows xp until 7 days ago. (this is the computer I am currently using with fedora release 3)
I purchased a Compact Laptop 766Gigahertz in 2002. Used it for a year roughly and then installed Redhat 8.0 in 2003 the hardest thing to configure was a USB wireless interface.
I gave this computer to my Mother in 2003 so that we could keep in touch over the internet.

;) So we then proceeded to get our own dedicated server to run her online community that was growing pretty quickly. This was my first major exposure to Linux (red Hat 7.3). We have run the website for 2 years on this dedicated server. I have learned alot in those two years. I am maintaining the server using putty. I had to have 2 or 3 hard reboots during that time. The last time was because of a hardware failure caused by a video card on the box. (go figure)

We purchased a 2.3 celeron in 2003. (wife is runs xp on it)
At work I used an IBM thinkpad 2 Gigahertz with xp.

I installed Fedora Core 3 about a week ago. I am using KDE as a graphical interface.
So far I had a few hiccups but nothing that can't be fixed using google.

I am enjoying linux and I plan on continuing to use it and learn it.
I use the computers as a hobby. I am not a tech type of guy.
I learn all that I know about computers on my own by trial and error the hard way (the only way that works with me it seems).

P.S. My switch to linux is because I am sick of having to deal with spyware, malware, exploits. The wife was using this computer and got a browser hijacker malware installed and I was unable to remove it. Well actually, I removed it installing Linux. ;)

I do not play games anymore as much as I used to.
I enjoy time with my kids & wife.

-smnoel a Linux Newbie & looking forward to learning the ropes!