Mr. JMW

My first ventures with Linux were about 3 years ago (or so) with Redhat 6.2 and Corel Linux. I didn’t get very far. I got them installed, even dual-booting Windows/Linux. But I couldn’t get my sound card setup, ethernet was a problem. And I couldn’t even figure out how to do the RPM thing and install downloadable software. I spent time trying but with little success, so I just stuck with Windows and didn’t touch Linux for a while.

Then, I came across Knoppix. This is a distro of Linux on a Live CD meaning, you pop in the cd, boot up the PC and your running Linux. No installation process, no HDD partitioning, nothing. The first time I booted up Knoppix, my ethenet worked and I could see all my files on my Windows partitions. It was really cool. But I still didn’t really use it much because the Linux environment was still foreign to me.

In college, while working on personal projects, I played around with Cygwin. Cygwin is almost like a “Linux emulator for Windows”. It lets you run many open-source (meaning FREE) programs for Linux, on Windows. Many of the programs freely available for Linux are extremely powerful and useful. Running the equivalent software developed and marketed for (M$) Windows would cost $$$ (and some times a lot of it).

Then, I graduated college with a degree in Computer Science (without any serious Linux use if you believe it) and started looking for a job. In the mean time I started a project that a Linux machine would be perfect for, so I started researching Linux again. I was looking for the best distrubution, one that could run on old machines and one that is widely used. I found Debian to be what I was looking for. It met all my requirements and it is one of most popular and highest acclaimed distrobutions. But somewhere I got the impression that it was 8 CDs and hard to install (which is not the case at all). So I worked on other aspects of my project and put this on the back burner.

Then I got my first real job programming in Java on Linux and was introduced to Ubuntu - Linux for Human Beings. The best part about Ubuntu, is that it is Debian based (meaning that under the hood, its mostly Debian parts).

In my job interview my boss seemed to already know I was the one for the job. He knew I had limited experience with Linux and told me it would be piece of cake. “Some people say its hard, but its just like Windows” he said. My first day we installed Ubuntu on my work machine and he gave me an overview of the Linux root folder structure. The /etc , /usr , /bin , /dev and other directories and what their approximate equivalents were in Windows. He also told me some other Linux basics. Some I knew and some I didn’t. But he was right, with all I learned in college, and some Linux basics, it’s a piece of cake.

I showed my boss my Fujitsu B3010D Laptop and he really liked it. One of the first things he said was “You want to format it and install Linux on it?” I politely declined. But as I’ve been using Ubuntu and getting used to the power of Linux, I see that the only thing that is really keeping me from switching at home, is certain commercial software not available for Linux. Like Visual Studio .NET and Studio MX 2004 to name a few. In other words I’m tied down.

I’m still new to Linux but I’m currently on Ubuntu nearly 8 hours a day and I’m learning fast. My first assignement was to research Ghostscript and how to use it in with Java. Next I began working on a project in Java/Swing using Netbeans. Currently I’m working with JSP using Netbeans. All of this is on Ubuntu so I’m getting more firmiliar with Ubuntu and the Linux OS environment.