[Sussex] Salutations!

[Geoff Teale]

On Sunday 20 April 2003 9:02 pm, Alan Fitton wrote:
> Hi, i just saw the link for this user group in the Linux Magazine (reading
> material to keep some sanity on a stressful weekend away). Until now i have
> been unaware of any Linux users in the area, it's great to see this user
> group. I thought I'd introduce myself :)

Good stuff!

Welcome to the group!

> I live in Easebourne, just outside of Midhurst.
>
> I run Slackware 9 which i keep very up-to-date, it's easily the best Linux
> distribution I've come across after using a few versions of RedHat and
> Mandrake but not quite getting it working with my hardware or to my likeing
> to make it my primary OS.

I think a lot of people find the likes of Red Hat, Mandrake and SuSE very 
comfortable at first, but ultimately the desire to tune things to their taste 
overcomes them and they end up using something a little more hands on.  
Ultimately any Linux distro is as good as another if you have the knowledge 
to tune it to your taste, some just start out from a place that is easier for 
certain tasks.  

> Anyone in Midhurst that hasn't already should head over to
> broadband4midhurst.co.uk and make your pre-registration for ADSL. A friend
> runs the site and i help here and there.
>
> On my P4 box I use it as a general purpose desktop
> (GNOME/KDE/Wmaker/Blackbox mostly). I also have a quite ancient box (no
> XF86) which, for now, Is for learning/messing around with Linux, when ADSL
> becomes available in Midhurst i will run it as a dedicated server running
> Apache+mod_php, sendmail, popa3d, MySQL, BNC. It is quite a wreck really -
> 100mhz, 32MB RAM, no video/sound card, monitor, mouse, keyboard (all is
> done via SSH) but it manages to do its tasks reasonably well. When Midhurst
> gets ADSL it will probably host a forum for broadband4midhurst.co.uk where
> people can seek advice and support with our new technology!.
>
> I currently dont know any programming languages, just some very basic perl,
> tcl and bash scripting (none of which really count!).

Now, now.. I'm no great fan of Perl (as list regulars will now), but it is 
very definitely a _real_ programming language as are tcl and bash.  Those 
languages are very powerful in their own right.   There is a lot of snobbery 
amongst programmers, a kind of mental heirarchy.  In my time I've written 
everything from 68000 assembly code, through C and C++ up to Basic, 
Javascript, VBScript and even LOGO (OK, the last one was in school ;) ).  In 
a few weeks time I will be joining a company that bases it's product 100% on 
Linux and Python.  Python is a language the occupies very much the same space 
as Perl (although its approach is different).  I am very happy to be moving 
to this language, and I very definitely consider it to be a real programming 
language.  Sure, Python can't be used to write the kernel of an operating 
system, but then C/C++ can be unecessarily difficult if you need to write a 
frontend to a database application.  It's horses for courses!

> I look forward to taking part in discussions soon.

Looking forward to talking to you.

BTW, our meet is this week on Thursday evening in Horsham!

--
GJT
tealeg at member.fsf.org

Looing