Members Introductions

[cowboy]

Better keep him, downloaded a dictionary of text terms..lol

[DaddyX3]

Better keep him, downloaded a dictionary of text terms..lol

I'm a text illiterate - it takes me longer to read, I have to sit there a few moments and try to decipher

[fath]

thanks moooooooooore I wait for Ultimate Edition 1.7

[TheeMahn]

thanks moooooooooore I wait for Ultimate Edition 1.7

Will be a while before you see that Gamers is next

[DaddyX3]

Feel free to introduce your self to all the admins / moderators & other members here.

[jmilo]

I thought I'd pause for a moment and say hi, since there is a thread here to do that...

I've been around a long time as a computer enthusiast, my handle was General Idea since the early 80's (in case there are some fossils that know me). From the C64 days of DMBBS and my Apple IIGS (1st home computer to display 1024 colors), to the 386/486 days with WWIV bulletin boards (I ran Synchronet with 3 nodes and a whopping 1gb online!). I remember the first file I retrieved from "the internet" by emailing the username archie on my favorite bbs with the filename on the subject line. I remember when I first saw a friend installing linux - it was a slackware distro on a TON of floppies. Years ago,I first installed mandrake 7 on a multi-homed k62 500mhz to use as a router/firewall. I never really used linux for anything more than a very specific appliance-like role, preferring instead to stick with a Windows (or sometimes Mac) environment for my personal desktop or server/network OS.

Since all of the happy reminiscence above, I've worked in IT for a decade. Lots of system administration,maintenance and on-the-spot programming, from AS400's and RPG to legacy windows systems and pickBASIC, to Windows NT (which really rocked, IMHOP) and C++ to Debian and CentOS servers and JAVA development. Still never used linux for my personal computer. Lots of my friends and colleagues went though a wild-eyed phase at one point or another where they would rant to me about how much they loved linux and would never willingly run a windows OS ever again. I always had a huge CD spellbook of software and utilities that I preferred, all of which ran only on windows.

I recently bought a seemingly POS desktop computer at Circuit City (open-box special) - an Acer T690. I had no problem with the brand name as I have always appreciated "what's under the hood" hardware-wise. It came with Vista Home Premium, OEM, preinstalled and activated. I suppose this was a floor model as it had a horrible desktop wallpaper and the hostname was circuit city - still ok, it was a sweet deal for such small money.

Vista was horrible, it ran like an absolute pig (HD access light flared constantly!) on a nicely equipped machine with a Pentium dual-core processor, 2 gigs ram and a decent SATA drive. I figured it might be running poorly because of something it went through as a floor model. I used a handy bootcd to write zeroes to the drive 7 times over (good practice when buying a used computer) and reinstalled vista using the OEM product key on the side of the case.

It still ran like a pig...for two days... then it gave me a dialogue screen telling me that my serial number was not valid, with two options - the automated phone system (which would pi$$ me off to no end) or to buy another product key online (I would sooner cut out one of my kidneys and set it on fire atop the acer tower as an obscure ritual sacrifice to the computer UI gods, lol). Nothing else that I have ever encountered on a computer has ever annoyed me quite as much as this.

I minimized the offensive dialogue and did a quick google search only to learn that I was about to enter limited functionality mode (the MS version of "a world of pain" as per the Big Lebowsky). I had also read a nice article earlier that day on Slashdot.org from a guy who really loved the new Ubuntu release - gutsy gibbon versus vista. So rather than reboot, I fired up a torrent and downloaded gutsy gibbon.

The next reboot, rather than see if I was in limited functionality mode, I booted from cd and checked out ubuntu for compatability. The sound worked immediately, I gave it a wep key and was on firefox checking my gmail in under a minute. All I could think is "this is pretty sweet"... Feeling good about hardware support, I clicked the install icon on the desktop and browsed the net while it spun up the disk (also pretty sweet). I stumbled across a torrent for Ultimate Edition 1.5 with a great text description by TheMahn... I snagged the torrent for the moment, thinking that it might be way better for me to get up and running with than the regular ubuntu distro (even though Ultimate Edition 1.5 is Feisty Fawn based and I am currently running gutsy gibbon).

Having run gutsy gibbon for a week or two, I am very happy with it - I do have some issues I've been tinkering at with little success. I have an xorg.conf issue with my video mode - I'm stuck at 800x600, tried to run Envy, but it gives me errors. Pretty sure I have an integrated ATI 256mb card and I'm not too worried about it, I'll get that right. I've always been very handy with various command line interfaces so "apt-get install" is about as easy as it gets. I've tried to grab codec packages (xmms2?) to get my machine to play an mp3, still doesn't work right. These are just a few small gripes out of the box, they are all well documented, even by the helpful users on this forum.

I ran across a link on a digg article somewhere today that brought me here, to this forum. I am currently downloading Ultimate Edition v1.6, and cannot wait to burn it up and do a clean install. I actually downloaded and burned up Ultimate Edition v1.5 a few days ago, before I knew 1.6 was released.

At any rate, I've written quite the scroll here - and that's totally unlike me....
But I want to acknowledge that this is clearly the most useful linux distro by a wide margin. I am quite sure that there are other Vista users out there that encountered the same BS dialog that I did. Maybe they will wind up doing a google search and find this post or this forum in general. They will probably download a livecd and try it first, like I did...

TheMahn and his contributors in this community get mad props (in the parlance of our times) and thanks in my book. The Ultimate Edition represents the maturation of the linux OS and open-source software in general to the point where it can be really useful in a lot of ways to a lot of people with very little user-effort or know-how. This is also the only open-source community I have ever entertained the notion of participating in. But one thing at a time...

'nuff said,
jmilo

[DaddyX3]

Welcome aboard jmilo! I have few oppinions about Winblows...

[drama]

yes welcome aboard. if you cant figure out the graphics issue feel free to open a new thread or pm me. ill attempt to help you figure it out. ati is my strong point so hopefully thats what it has and not like intel or via. if you do need my help all i need is the output of lspci (easiest way for me to get hardware specs). also a copy of your xorg.conf (/etc/X11/xorg.conf) your xorg log may also be helpful (/var/log/Xorg.0.log) and ill see what i can do.

anyway back on topic.

i dont really have any programming knowledge like most of the rest of you do. whoever i would consider myself more of a "troubleshooter". still have alot to learn as i cant always solve every problem i come across but i have learned quite a bit so far. i actually have a test box set up aside from my main box. test box as its name implies is mainly used for testing new things before doing it on my main box. i actually "purposly" break my test box from time to time just to see if i can fix it again (not always possible though) that is where i have gained most of my knowledge from the rest from google and different forums. my stronge points are ati,xorg,grub (only partial),common display issues,sound issues,audio/video production. also very knowledgeable in the interworkings of p2p technology. my weak points would be graphics creation, via & intel video issues, wireless networking. i have knowledge of both fedora/redhat and ubuntu since run both but ubuntu is my main os. glad to be here. cheers:)

[cowboy]

Welcome jmilo glad to see you here. Don't take this wrong you should get 3 post credits, lol..

[thanathos]

Hi, I'm Thanathos, I live in Argentina and am a marketer, advertising speciallist, web developer, artist, independent worker, husband and father.
I discovered Ultimate Edition 1 month ago.
This is the best distro I ever found.
I'm using it now to my daily work, and being a Windoze user since the 3.0 version, it was a little bit strange at first, but never difficult.
I want to give THANKS to TheeMahn because of this excellent and really impressive work he's doing, creating and maintaining a community, the repos, and etc.
I've found not only the power of Ubuntu, packed with the best Open source software selection installed, but also the almost total independence of Windoze.
TheeMahn, if I can ever be of any help, please do not hesitate to PM me, I'll be glad to help!
Man, you are so cool!
Thanks again,

Thanathos