Hi, like it says in the "welcome to the list" e-mail, I'm meant to introduce myself...
My name is Ricardo, I work for local government as a Windoze NT Network Admin (and a Lotus Notes Admin)(oh, and as a MS SQL Server admin), and I was attracted to Linux once I saw the license costs for MS products! Seriously, though, I have been frustrated at the lack of security and general lack of affordable network resources for this OS, Windows scripting is poor etc. etc. You get the idea. Unfortunately our beloved government has decided exactly what OS's and which products to use, and I cannot change that (for example we are not allowed to upgrade from Lotus 4.6 to R5, senseless!). However, we are soon going to have external access to our WAN so we need a firewall.....
I'm much more into the ethos of free software and I've started learning C programming, and would like to contribute once I'm competent enough. (I think maybe making .rpm's for newbies will be one of my main tasks when I'm not one)
I'm currently getting to grips with Linux-Mandrake 8 on my desktop computer (that means working on it after the pub till 3am just to do something that would have taken me about 4 seconds to do in Windoze) , and have Zipslack on my knackered laptop- I got it 2nd hand and it didn't come with any CD's at all (not that it has a CD-Rom!): I'm not sure that I'd risk replacing the OS entirely just yet. (My desktop box has lots of USB devices which aren't supported, so I'm currently struggling with a triple-boot system! [Win 98 for games & periphs, Win 2k as my productivity station due to stability, and Mandrake]. Hopefully I can get Linux to replace Windows 2K on my desktop for ever!
Currently D/l ISO's for progeny debian, Smoothwall, Slackware, maybe fiddle around with them too. God bless free kilostream connections!
When is the next meet? Both my machines have network cards, and I might be able to borrow a hub or two.
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