Greetings. An intro is in order.
I'm Ron Enderland, professional geek. I work for a Fortune 500 company doing web development on intranet apps. I also do network stuff (I'm a CCNA) and even a day of help desk per week. We're a small shop.
I got my first PC in 1993, and it came with, of course, Windows. Ten years later, I was a Windows troubleshooting machine. Troubleshooting Windows means making lots of guesses and trying lots of things that may not seem to make any sense. Such it is in the world of closed-source software.
That was one of the things that made it tough to switch to Linux. Troubleshooting Linux issues involves logic. Windows problems rely more on stabs in the dark. When a DLL is overwritten, finding it can be impossible. Many times, a reinstall of the operating system is the only answer.
When you're used to solving problems based on hunches, switching to logical troubleshooting can be difficult.
Yes, Linux problems are frequently solved by tweaking configuration files. By turning services on and off. By changing permissions. The solutions, by and large, make SENSE.
My first foray into Linux involved Redhat 9 back in 2004. I managed to get it installed, but user-friendly it was not. RPM dependencies drove me bonkers. I went back to XP Pro.
Then, VMWare came along. My first use of the virtual environment involved creating Linux machines within Windows. I played around with Mandriva and the Fedora Core releases in VMWare. None of my machines lasted long. I still couldn't get the hang of Linux.
Then, when Ubuntu's Feisty was released last spring, a coworker told me I needed to check it out. I had already learned stuff like Samba sharing, using fstab to mount network shares, etc. But I was still underwhelmed by the ability to easily install and remove applications.
Ubuntu, with its Synaptics Package Manager (and command line apt-get), was the breakthrough in simplicity I needed to finally take the Linux plunge as my operating system of choice. Adding and removing programs was as simple as checking boxes. Dependencies were solved on the fly. And the operating system felt as comfortable as an old shoe within a few days of using it.
I now run Ubuntu Gutsy at home on an HP Pavilion a1483w with an AMD 1.8 dualcore and two gigs of RAM. I also run XP Media Edition in VMWare for when I need to run Windows apps (I depend heavily on Dreamweaver and Paint Shop Pro. I'm determined to learn The Gimp but have yet to.) The XP is what was originally on the machine, and I imported it into VMWare. It took a call to Redmond to reactivate it, no biggy.
I have nothing against Redhat Linux. I run RH Enterprise on my web server. I also own stock in the company. But Ubuntu has turned me (and my less geeky eldest brother) into Linux propeller-heads. I even run Ubuntu on my desktop machine at work. I handle Active Directory issues through my XP Pro virtual machine that screams along on our ESX server. I connect up via Remote Desktop.
I plan on posting my observations here as I continue my quest to learn new technologies. This site has sat virtually untouched for years, it's time for it to get back to work. Please keep stopping by, and add your own thoughts.
