About Us
Welcome to my website.
My love affair with computers and technology started in about 1977, through an interest in HO Scale Model Railways. A vast amount of technical and electronics procedures were involved in setting up my model railway as a kid. This along with an interest in yachting and SatNav systems, led to a general curiosity and interest in computers and technology.
I purchased my first computer at age 11. A Commodore Vic20, with a datacassette drive. I couldn't afford to buy any software for it, but a neighbour was a computer mainframe technician, who had access to printouts of the code for the games on Vic20s. My neighbour gave me reems of continuous feed printout sheets of Commodore Vic20 game code, and I would sit there for weeks at a time, manually typing in the code and debugging it, so as I could play "Ping Pong" or a very simple Maze game.
Well...things have changed a lot since then. Now, almost 31 years later, my passion for computers and technology is stronger than ever.
In 1993, I started hearing about Linux, and decided that it warranted closer investigation. I was already fed up with the entire "Closed Source Software" approach of the major players, like Microsoft, and the way that those Operating Systems hid so much of what was going on, from the end user. Linux brought about a refreshing change, enabling the "tinkerer" to tinker to their hearts content, and get much more "up close and personal" with the software and hardware of the computer system/s.
I found that the approach of Linux, and it's Open Source Software approach was incredibly flexible and powerful, and allowed the end user to modify and customise things about the way the operating system and software worked, in such a way that there was virtually nothing that could not be altered or customised on the system. This suited my needs right down to the ground. I have always had a passionate need to understand how things work, and Linux opens up a fantastic array of possibilities for learning the intricacies of how computers and software work, and communicate with each other, in ways that closed source software can not.
When I first tackled Linux, it was still in it's infancy. The Linux Kernel had only been published on to the web by Linus Torvalds, a Helsinky University student, who had manually re-written the code for the MINIX Unix teaching software Kernel some two years earlier.
The early distributions of Linux were very "rough and ready", and required an immense amount of technical knowledge and ability to be able to do anything at all useful with them. It was a humungous learning curve. Now, 15 years down the track since I first encountered Linux, I still feel like a novice. There is just so much that you can learn. However, I have learned an aweful lot since then, and as the whole philosphy of the Linux Community is all about sharing technology, information, skills, etc, I have decided to setup this website to share with any body who is interested, what I have learned about the Linux opertating system, it's installation, configuration, etc.
At present I will be concentrating primarily on Mandriva Linux, and Red Hat Fedora (Red Hat's Community Driven Free Open Source Software Linux distribution)
I hope that you will find something of interest on this site, and maybe learn a few new tricks along the way. If you are happy to share anything of what you yourself have learned, then by all means feel free to do so, as I am always open to learning more.
Thank you, and I hope you enjoy this site and come back again.
Disentangler.