Adopting Linux

Not everybody makes the move to Linux in the first try. At least I didn't. I first tried back in version 7.04 of Ubuntu. Had to go back to MS WIN. Then 10.04 came along and I am using that version up to this day (June 2011).

Some history

During my middle-school years in Honduras I signed up for a computer course. The basics were taught there. Formatting a floppy, creating files and folders, word-processor use, printing. I took an aptitude test and I scored high on computer-related fields.

Then came High-School. Things were different there. We had programming, network design and analysis, and informatics classes. FoxPro and Visual FoxPro were used in the first year. On the second year we switched to Visual Basic 6.0; did some database driven application with Crystal Reports integrated.

On that second year I came to the US for vacation/work for a month. Bought my first computer. An eMachines w/ 120GB HDD, Athlon XP processor. My stepbrother said that it was the best he had seen in the region so far. Anyway, I was allowed to take home my computer lab floppy. I was always ahead on the VB 6 project. Back in school I assisted my classmates with their program. The debugging I did at home helped us all, even the professor had a little more room to breathe.

I used to take my PC to school for presentations when the lab was in use. Even our graduation's slide show and music were played on that old computer. I still have that case at home. I re-purposed it with another motherboard since the original one fried when I tried to boot Linux from a separate hard drive. Hardware is not my forte.

After graduating from HS in Honduras I moved to Miami. Supposedly to start college. I kept procrastinating and to this day (5 years later) I have yet to enroll.

Update: I did enroll in ITT-Tech (2012 or so) and them suckers were shut down after I decided to drop out because the curriculum was no better than what I already knew. I am hoping to get the loans dropped due to the school pushing to get me to sign paperwork on tour day. Only in Miami.)

The switch

I have moved on from desktop application programming as a hobby to web development. I have successfully made the switch from Mocosoft Windose to Ubuntu (Debian based). I am not much of a game enthusiast so portability is not an issue. Although I could use WINE or some other commercial alternative to run .exe's on Ubuntu. Here's what I use on a daily basis when the need arises:

Music	Rhythmbox
Word-processor	OpenOffice.org Writer
Spreadsheet	OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet
Web browsing	Firefox
FTP client	Filezilla
Email client	Evolution
Simple text editor	gedit
Video playback	VLC
PHP, HTML coding	Quanta Plus, Aptana
Web server	Apache

All this using FOSS – Free Open Source Software. Give Linux a try. I chose Ubuntu because it seemed easy to use. I have my eye on Fedora Core 14, seems to be well maintained. Perhaps one day I will contribute a few lines myself.