[Novalug] Linux For Beginners

[Mackenzie Morgan]

On Sat, 2008-11-29 at 22:04 -0500, Ken Kauffman wrote: 
> Essentially two schools of thought:
> 1) make it easy and work your way into it
> 2) jump head first in
> 
> I used Fedora (then Redhat) at first and found that I could do the
> productivity work that I wanted to do.  However, the advanced geekdom
> eluded me despite my general ability to learn techstuff(tm) quickly.
> Once I forced myself to install (including bootstrap) Gentoo linux, I
> learned much much (much) more than ever.

Heh, I was intending a dual-boot when I started.  Didn't know about
Release Notes at the time, so I wasn't aware that Ubuntu 6.06's
partitioner was broken and would destroy NTFS on resize.  Oops.  So I
ended up with an all-Ubuntu system by accident, and that was my version
of "head first."  I didn't know there were kernels available optimized
for different hardware, so I recompiled my kernel 2 weeks in to get
SMP.  

All the people here who've been using Linux for 10 years would find it
silly, I guess, but even 2 years in, I can say it's gotten a LOT easier.
I don't think I want to know what it was like 10 years ago.  Those 2
months I spent trying to figure out my mp3 player?  Turned out libmtp
didn't exist yet.  

6.06 seems so outdated and not-so-friendly now.

-- 
Mackenzie Morgan
http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com
apt-get moo
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