Hi All

I'm hoping to come to the meet on sunday so I thought I'd give a brief intro. I've played around with computers and telecoms for about 14 years but still know surprisingly little. I am one of life's dabblers and now I'm dabbling into linux.

I've played around with a few distributions recently and at the moment have mandrake 8.0 installed with KDE 2.11. Yesteray evening I tried setting up the internet access and within a few minutes was on line. Very impressed. So here in tribute is my first email message using linux (apart from a test send and receive which doesn't count).

I know it's not really 'installing' or 'managing linux' in any technical sense - using an installer that auto configfures everything, using a few menus in KDE to set things up - but all the same, for a newbie like me it is great to have something tthat I can actually use while I start looking around under the bonnet.

I bought and read a lot of 'Running Linux' two years ago. It's fascinating but does give the impression that al of that hand-editing of config files and using the command line is the only way to install and use linux. So when I first tried out a Storm Linux CD last year I was absolutely gobsmacked to find a GUI desktop coming up. Who'd have known? I know it sounds daft but there must be many others who think like that after looking at the recommended books.

I really don't think that the linux community puts over how easy it is to install and use, at least to do a few simple things like browse the web and send a few emails etc. (I'm assuming that it still works today of course when I come to send this in a few minutes :)

Anyway, I know I'm boring all you non-quiche-eating sysadmins out there but if there are any other newbies lurking on the list, wondering whether to dive in, then I just want to say - go for it and have a go. With a beginners distribution at least, it really does seem to be pretty straightforward - if I'm not tempting providence, fingers crossed and pass the garlic.

Hope to meet some of you on sunday - hopefully I won't be the only peson who doesn't know their xml from their sql

Regards Syd

PS - I will be driving so anyone from the Norwich area need a lift - email me.