Hi Everyone,

The first time I came into contact with unix/linux was in 1994 in College on 486DX 16Mb machines. I went thru college without really learning much about the system except for the bare minimum: copying/moving/deleting files using a friendly editor like gedit. I think it was FreeBSD.

At my first job in 1998 I used it lightly with SCO Unix. Only in 2000 did I ever try a home install. That was SUSE 6. I
stuck with it for a few weeks before being abandoned. I took notes on what I learnt and the corresponding commands. Finally, last October I tried RedHat 8 and found it a much more enjoyable experience. Earlier this month I upgraded to RedHat 9. I'm glad to say that I'm here to stay and learn more about it. I'm a slow learner but I intend to stay around this time.

* Dell Inspiron 2650 Laptop 15" 1.8Ghz, 384Mb, 30Gb sharing with XP
* Successes:
- Accelerated Video using Nvidia Drivers for GeForce Go2
- Internet access via winmodem
- NTFS support
- Seti@home via SebiSeti Cache Manager via command line
- CDRs using cdrecord via command line
- DVD / Divx / Mpeg playback via MPlayer
- Regularly compile source programs & install

The above convinced me that Linux is a fun and useful environment to be in.


* Learning Tutorials:
- SAMS Linux book
- SAMS Shell Scripting in 24 hours (very easy to pick up)
- PERL (only did a few chapters, but wow very like C)
- POV Ray tutorials (excellent)
- Tried PostGreSQL (simple test database, but prefer Oracle9i)

The shell scripting I found the most useful after revising the basic commands


* Weak points:
- Have yet to understand compiling / upgrading the kernel
- to yet use cron jobs or services (basic understanding)
- file management (ie, keeping tabs on what files to remove (efficiently) obsolete programs)


Well a little about me: I'm 28 yrs old and I'm from the south coast of Ireland near Waterford city. I like to be in the computer industry and love PC Hardware. I'll take this chance to say hello to you all. I have found everyone on these forums very helpful and friendly. I joined LinuxQuestions.org in February this year. The amount of collected experience and information here is impressive! I read most posts here appreciate the knowledge I gleem from these. Any posts that I feel I can answer I usually try to help. Names that I am familar here are: nakkaya, MasterC, discostu, Tucker and jeremy