[HLUG] Hello.....HLUG

[brightfield at runbox.com]

Hi All,

I hope this is the right place to be posting this. Just to introduce myself. My name is Charlie Beresford... I live right on the border of Shropshire and Herefordshire. I started down the Linux route because I wanted the freedom and just got bored of the whole Apple/Windows yawn.

I made the switch to Linux about a year ago for my everyday computing. Started with ubuntu ended up using Crunchbang (based on Debian 7 but using openbox) as my main distro. In my day job as recording engineer and visual/graphic designer I still have to dip my toes into the dark world of proprietary software, but recently I have been exploring Open Source more and more and actually managed to do a commercial job using it totally. Which I was very pleased about. Packages I have become familiar with are Scribus, Blender and Kdenlive for video editing, Inkscape, Gimp and I have been using the new adobe Open Source Brackets for editing CSS and html 5 templates. 

I would say I'm an intermediate user in some things and advanced in others. I have been able to solve most of the issues I've had using the forums and past experience. I can find my way around bios and use the terminal for routine tasks but still learning there.. I regularly make USB bootsticks.... and have saved the bacon of a few Windows users this way in the past also...

I was please to find the group and thought it a chance to meet people who are like minded about computing. I was really interested in the groups wanting to get Open Source into schools as my work takes me into schools occasionally and I am shocked at the number of systems that are down and how they are running such out of date software because of the way they have tied themselves in. I am part a group called Footloose Community Arts and we went into a school recently to do a large scale workshop to be told that their ICT suite no longer worked fully.. Fortunately we are all running Linux distros on laptops so we were able to rescue the day and bypass it all.... I am a large advocate of extending the life of computers... I am writing this on a Thinkpad X61s that cost me £50 on ebay and with a few tweaks to the hardware and an SSD it now boots faster and operates quicker than my friends brand new Powerbook, much to their annoyance....:D I even recently plugged it up to a large screen and edited an hour long video for a multimedia performance and didn't suffer a single crash....

Too much I in this email, sorry looking very Apple product...:/

Hope to be there on Wednesday...

Smiles and regards,

Charlie.