A Little History . . .

        Before I go off spewing the tips and tricks that will make this blog, you might want to know a little more about me and how I got into FOSS.         As I said before, I'm a college student—community college student, to be exact. Like many of my peers, the only OS I really knew was Windows, back when I was just an average computer user. I took a typing class and two programming classes in high school, but over the recent years I took a much larger (and perhaps broader) interest in computers and computer-related things. It wasn't until around the Fall of 2006 that I seemed to be really (really) serious about computers, however. At that point, I was mostly just looking forward getting Vista and Office 2007 the following January. I got a new graphics card since it was on sale. But I didn't actually ravenously rummage through the Internet to learn as much as I could about computers yet.         When I finally got Vista and Office 2007, I was certainly impressed by the eye-candy, but I certainly experienced major problems as well. Admittedly, I had followed the instructions of Microsoft tech support and upgraded Vista over my (crapware-laden) copy of XP, so that didn't help at all. On my own, I fresh installed Vista a little bit later, and that got rid of some problems. But then I got some extra RAM to boost the performance of my computer, and unbeknownst to me it seemed to be the cause of many a Blue Screen of Death! I didn't do anything about the RAM, though; it wasn't until later reformats, which I came to habitually perform every couple of months, that Vista didn't crash any more.         All this while I had been sitting on the conflict of whether I should install my graphics card (which I was worried I'd do wrong), or have a professional do it for me. It took me half a year to finally decide, but I'm a cheapskate, so I installed it myself after researching a little more into the process. I had been concerned that I'd render my computer unusable since it might not display anything on the monitor any more, but nothing went wrong. This, the RAM issue, and my experience reformatting my OS (which was a pretty advanced thing for me at the time :P) all boosted my confidence in regards to working with computers. Next, I wanted to try out lots of software to experiment with them and learn in the process.         I would download free (and trialware) utilities mostly, but I also went from Internet Explorer to Firefox too :) I liked to read more about the various workings of Windows, such as the registry, and I finally felt comfortable modifying it (but only because nothing bad happened when I did :P). I also learned about Ubuntu and other free and open-source software. However, it wasn't until I just got fed up with software activations (those frequent Windows reformats were a problem) that I seriously considered using Linux as my main platform. I'd off-and-on been using Ubuntu LiveCDs to test it out, but at this time I used it like crazy and wanted to learn more and more about it. I started downloading tons of FOSS for it, and if there were Windows versions available, I would use them in Windows. For documents and other office-related files, I started using open formats (i.e., .ods, .odt) for new files, and I converted old files to open formats. Microsoft will not own my stuff!         That pretty much leads to now. I am certain I will move over to Ubuntu (or another Linux derivative) sometime this year—I'm just not sure when yet. My wireless adapter currently doesn't work in Gutsy, so I'll need to either work with "ndiswrapper", wait for Hardy to come out (assuming the wireless adapter will work with it right away), or find another Linux distro that supports it. Other than that, though, I think I'm pretty much all set with the transition: I'm familar with OpenOffice in both Windows and Linux (though in some ways, Gnumeric beats Calc); I'm familiar with using the terminal to install software (although I prefer to use Synaptic in Ubuntu when I can), copy and move files, and access files and folders with root; and once I can get my wireless adapter to work, I'll be able to access the Internet (which, honestly, at least 90% of my work depends on). I wish more hardware vendors would provide official Linux support, but I'm happy to say that even without their support, I'll be moving to Linux soon :)