[Ryedale] Good evening all!!!!!

[Paul]

Evening all,

I've just joined the group, and due the the excessive heat (meaning that
sleep is a laughable, unattainable fantasy at present), I thought I'd spend
a few minutes saying hello (It's actually just after three in the morning
here and I'm seriously considering the possibility that I may dissolve
before the night's over).

I've been using Linux on and off for years now. I started out with Red Hat
7. Then I moved to Mandrake, before rather shamelessly drifting back to
Windows for a while. Then I tried Fedora Core 4 (I can't remember why now,
but I'm sure there was an excellent reason at the time). I used FC4
successfully for quite a while, although I did have a stab at SuSe 9.3 at
one point (couldn't get the sound to work properly). I had a brief sojourn
in Mandriva land...which was quite enjoyable, though having the words FREE
emblazoned across every screen did somewhat ruin the package for me a tad.
Eventually I went back to Fedora, which recently was upgraded to to Core 5.
Core 5 for some reason hated my modem with a passion. Core 4 loved it. It
couldn't get enough of my modemy  Speedtouch goodness....but Core 5 just
wasn't having it. So, in a fit of not quite rage...more mild irritation, I
bought this months Linux format...tried SuSe 10.1 (couldn't get any sound
whatsoever, but did get the url to the Ryedale LUG, so well worth the six
quid eh?) and then I bought this months Linux magazine, which has Ubuntu on
DVD. Anyway, Ubuntu installed superbly...sound isn't bad at all and within
20 minutes I was installed and connected to the net (albeit using a winmodem
*everyone boos*).

So here I am. With plenty of questions to ask :-)

Question one being.....Is it actually possibly to get Linux working with any
reasonable degree of reliability? I know a few people who use Linux, but my
general experience is that most people seem to have a half working distro
kicking about on their machine (usually in a minute partition), which they
wheel out every time some one's close they think may be impressed with their
jazzy Linux desktop (complete with transparent terminal full of complicated
code they stole from a magazine, over a wallpaper of Tux doing something
weird...often illegal)....but in reality, they have no 3-D rendering...their
sound breaks up more often than not....and they have bits of hardware lying
around attached that Linux really isn't all that keen on acknowledging,
never mind actually getting to work.

So is it possible to iron out all the little bugs? Or is there mostly always
some degree of compromise that has to be made?

Oh, and great links on Al's site. There was a guy who regurgitated a bulb, a
snooker ball and finally a goldfish. Amazing!!!! Plus I strongly suspect
that some one's a fellow juggler. I got the address of the York Jugglers
whilst buying a new set of Mr Babache balls from the guy in the juggling
shop at York but I never dared turn up...partly because sometimes my health
ain't so good.....but mainly because displaying my feeble juggling
repertoire in a room full of probable experts fills me full of terror
(though thankfully not snooker balls, bulbs or goldfish).

Anyway...hi everyone...and I'm off to bed.


Kind regards....Paul
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