Mostly silent, mostly ignorant...

[DrEntropy]

...but I'm gonna ramble a bit now.

Started wafflin' around with Linux when a 28.8k modem was FAST. Looking for an alternative to M$, RH was a natural first choice. Since then I've been thru SuSE, 'drake, Ubuntu, the lot. Stuffed RH kernels onto old laptops wot wouldn't run the M$ "OS du jour" and gave 'em new life. Learned the voodoo of rigging PCM/CIA cards, various video card issues with differing chipsets, NIC configurations, always "won" those battles. Mostly due to just enuff know-how to be dangerous and the available forums as info source. Gotta say: the forums are the greatest resource on-planet for fools like me who can "just about" hold their own with bleeding edge warez. With the ubiquity of broadband now, it makes fettlin' with distro's a snap.

Went thru assembling/configuring Intel board & "engine" with SATA and RH9 for a commercial server on a client LAN when HighPoint released their RocketRAID 1640 card (2003), quite an experience. Many other SAMBA servers and LAN setups before and since. I always seem to stick with RH and its open source distros for the familiarity factor. CentOS and Fedora are predominant here at th' hovel with three desktop machines runnin' various incarnations, two old Toshi Satellite notebooks with Fedora. Herself must work with Adobe apps so she has an XP Pro machine out of convenience. Additionally I have run a SmoothWall firewall appliance since the mid-to-late '90's, first on dial-up, now on FiOS... Penguins & polar bears !

This post and ramble are meant to express gratitude to all who volunteer their time and expertise here. It's an invaluable resource for the entire planet! What would take weeks of "poke-and-hope", these forums make "do-able" in minutes. The days of spending time and money on tomes from bookstores that become obsolete before the ink dries are over.

Thank you, sincerely, from one small voice.


P.S. ....anybody wanna buy a somewhat used copy of: "Running O/S2 Warp"?!?! Or "Easy Windows 3.11" ?!? :-x

[pschaff]

[quote]
DrEntropy wrote:
...
P.S. ....anybody wanna buy a somewhat used copy of: "Running O/S2 Warp"?!?! Or "Easy Windows 3.11" ?!? :-x[/quote]

Swap you for an early SunOS vintage "The UNIX C Shell Field Guide" and a Red Hat (Not EL) 3.3 boxed set, and throw in Windows 3.1 and DOS 6.22 floppies. :-D
I think all my Hollerith cards, 8" hard-sector floppies, VIC-20 cassettes, and paper tape already got trashed. Trying to fight that "The entropy of the universe is constantly increasing." but the second law is hard to beat. ;-)

Glad you're finding good help.

[toracat]

[quote]
pschaff wrote:

Swap you for an early SunOS vintage "The UNIX C Shell Field Guide" and a Red Hat (Not EL) 3.3 boxed set, and throw in Windows 3.1 and DOS 6.22 floppies. :-D
[/quote]
Oh, I can throw in DOS5.0 and its original manual (about 1 inch thick). But I will [b]not[/b] give up my "The UNIX C Shell Field Guide" which is my bible/memento/whatever ...

[pschaff]

Yeah - actually I'd probably have to keep mine too, just for old times sake. It's sitting 2 feet in front of me next to a dusty copy of Harbison & Steele's "C Reference Manual".

[toracat]

OK, I just looked at mine which is also sitting ~2 feet from me. It is sandwiched by K&R's "The C programming guide" and Siegel's "teach yourself ... C". Which makes me wonder why I'm not proficient in C... :-o

[pschaff]

My K&R seems to have grown wings and flown away. Back in the day I used to be proficient in C, Fortran, Pascal, Forth, ... before morphing into a still-geeky bureaucrat.

[DrEntropy]

'k... my sides are sore now, but I ~do~ still have a Zylog processor in original packaging and BOTH manuals for it... and I have Schildt's "Teach Yourself C". In spite of that I couldn't code my way to a reboot... Brane like a sieve. Lazy, too: Second Law victim.

My TI99-4A is under the bed, in original box. Not fer sale. I'm waitin' for th' nostalgia wave to kick in. :D