On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 09:28:02PM -0800, [email protected] wrote: > Richard has a long commute. He lives out past Estacada, even.
Near Springfield MO, apparently. A bit of googling revealed this thread from April 2011: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/groups/south-west-missouri-linux-users-group/ Apparently "amsweitzer", about 30 miles west of Richard in Lawrence County, is talking about setting up "SWMLUG" ... which I suppose could double as "Single White Male", an amply represented portion of our community. Windows comes out of a box, linux comes out of a community. One of the best parts of Linux is hanging out with other Linux users, swapping CDs and hardware and lies. While some of us are quite happy being Moody Loners with Keyboards, it can be fun to sit down in pairs or threes and attack problems together. Sometimes it is essential; if your only computer is hosed, how do you google for repair ideas? Much easier with helpful friends. Richard is certainly welcome on this list, and there are a few ancient CP/M geeks on it. Another Portland CP/M geek, Jim Willing, moved to Yates Center, KS, to run a bowling alley. Perhaps Jim is still around, and ready to drive two hours east for SWMLUG. I suggest Richard picks a distro that offers both "texty" and "gui" ways to get things done. Do the config with the gui, in the beginning. Then see what files the gui changes. That gives two views of the same information. Avoid like the plague any distro that keeps configuration in non-standard files, filters them through a GUI, to make write-only linux configs. There are a very few files like that in Redhat distros, more in some of the oddball "user friendly" distros. Ubuntu is a good way to get started. The community is helpful and welcoming of newbies. After that, the various clones of Redhat Enterprise are interesting, mostly because CentOS is the engine underneath so many application specific distros - a lot of production software ported to CentOS. After that, if Richard is feeling ubergeeky, skip Debian and others and go straight to Gentoo - build your own binaries from source. Unless Richard wants to go all the way to programming with solder. Starting out with RHEL/CentOS is like learning to drive on a bulldozer. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
