(Update, April 2006): Thankfully after five years, I am no longer a member of HantsLUG.
What to say? I’m 21, and am currently studying at Southampton for a BSc(Hons) Software Engineering. This means I get to learn lots of interesting theory, using the fabulous and wonderful Java [1] programming language..
“But what about Linux?”, I hear you cry. Well, ok, ok. I admit it. I love it. I initially started out in 1996, installing the then new, all singing-and-dancing Slackware 2.0 distribution. It came on floppies (a multitude of them, too). I spent ages installing it.
I stayed with Slackware for a good few years, before upgrading to RedHat [2] version 4, whereupon I was able to install and use their default X installation. For its time, RedHat (RH) was an amazing distribution, introducing into the mainstream the RPM (RedHat Package Manager) format, that would both become widely used, and widely slandered.
That didn’t stay on my machine for very long, I have to say. While it was very pretty, and had nice buttons and things, it was rather a resource hog on my poor 486. So I then got a P75, which at the time was incredibly fast. I installed onto that a number of distributions (Corel, Yggdrasil, Caldera, SuSE), before installing Debian Potato.
Hence I have been on the upgrade from Potato ever since. It hasn’t been a complete transistion. I did use SuSE for a good number of years, but soon went back to Debian, this time with Woody, but that was short-lived as I went straight to unstable (Sid) [3].
Why Debian? It is community-led, unlike the commercial distributions (RH/SuSE, etc.) and thus the level of response and input that one can give is high. But the most important feature of it is its stability and package management system. Unlike other distributions (Slackware is more BSDish [4] in operation and uses a weak .tgz package management system) this uses a .deb system and as such one is not caught up in a well known situation with RPM-based distros called ‘dependency hell’ [5].
I’ve been a member of Hants LUG for a few years now, and am on a number of changing mailing-lists. My window manager (when I use one) is fvwm [6], based on RH’s AnotherLevel package (but written in Ruby [7]). I also write for an on-line magazine [8].
When I’m not sat in front of the haunted fishtank, I play the piano and violin, and I like to read all kinds of fiction, but mainly Agatha Christie (and other murder detective fiction), contemporary literature (Iain Banks, Ian McEwan). I also have a very keen interest in geology and chemistry.
[1] No, really.... [2] The community driven distribution is called Fedora. [3] http://www.debian.org [4] http://www.slackware.org [5] http://linuxgazette.net/issue71/tag/3.html [6] http://www.fvwm.org [7] http://www.ruby-lang.org [8] http://linuxgazette.net
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ThomasAdam (last edited 2006-04-07 13:09:46 by 88)