[Sussex] Hello from an new list member - a bit about me

[Tony]

Hello all

I have just joined the SLUG list and thought I should introduce myself.

I have been playing around with Linux for the past 3 years, it was Richard
Stallman's article about how computers and software are too valuable to be
left in the hands of commercial enterprises that got my attention.

My programming career started with decimalisation and mainframes.  I was a
commercial applications programmer for about 15 years - Cobol, Fortran,
PL/I, assemblers, C and then in the process of working for small software
houses found myself becoming a salesman, manager, consultant.

This all got far too boring so I took a year out in USA in 1996/7
(http://www.gigaday.com/ayear). On my return I decided it was time to get
up to date on the technical front and turn my back on the collar and tie
stuff, so I taught myself networking (Netware and TCP/IP) and worked for
Olicomp in Lingfield from then until the end of August this year. (Olicomp
have now merged with Midrange Networks to become Serval Systems in East
Grinstead.)

I started trading as a one man company (Gigaday Computing Limited) at the
beginning of September with the aim of promoting Linux in the business
environment.  My current work load is mainly Windows network support but I
am guiding my customers towards Linux solutions.  I already have one using
a Linux mail server (Exim, Couier-IMAP, Apache2, SquirrelMail).

Having started playing with various Linux distros about 3 years ago (I
bought the Cheep Linux all-in-one-box) I soon came to the conclusion that
it was going to be an uphill struggle to sell people Linux desktops.  That
coud be changing now and I have someone ready to start trying the Evesham
Mandrake PC offering - I also have a customer piloting OpenOffice on
Windows with a great deal of success.

A lot of my work in the past 5 years has been with fairly small-scale (up
to 50 users) Internet connectivity and email applications, resulting in a
reasonable number of M$ Exchange Server installations.  I started tracking
Linux alternatives to M$ Exchange as, I could see this as an excellent way
to start getting Linux into businesses without having to disrupt whatever
they already have.  Samba servers are also a possibility as a way in, but
small companies often think that they understand Windows enough to run
their own file servers, whereas they don't understand email and don't mind
someone else looking after that for them.

So, what I have put together is a set of standard Linux components that
will do most of what M$ Exchange Server does - http://www.gigaday.com and
my game-plan for Linux advocacy is to use email servers as my way of
introducing GNU/Linux to my customers.  On this front, as I am a one-man
outfit, I will be interested to hear from anyone out there that might want
to become friendly with what I am doing; I have no plans to employ anyone
but if there are others who share my vision, of Linux email in particular,
I would like to collaborate with a view to mutual support.

I work from home in Caterham, where I have broadband, and 5 computers -
Windows XP for reference, grandchildren and wife - Windows 2000 server for
reference and supporting M$ systems - Gentoo 1.4 Linux mail server -
Gentoo Linux 1.4 desktop - spare machine to rip apart and play with.

My initial experiments with various distros were of varying success; I
found the desktops very frustrating (this was a while back) compared to
Windows and found that there were things that I hated about both Gnome and
KDE.  I settled on SuSE as my preferred distro because it came with a
reasonable set of manuals, which made gettng started easier.  However, I
got frustrated with SuSE because of the KDE desktop menus nonsense (I
expect that they have sorted this out by now) and the fact that it was
never up to date enough - eg Mozilla JavaScript debugging or whatever - so
I would be installing things from off the distro and soon couldn't figure
out which RPMs were in the distro and which I had downloaded to get a more
up to date version.

I tried Debian several times because everyone said it was the business,
but found it not easy to get started with and then I read a review of
Gentoo in Linux Format; I was already considering Linux From Scratch or
Sorcerer because the idea of getting the up to date release from the
developers' sites sounded like a good idea to me.

What I saw on the Gentoo web site blew me away - detailed understandable
documentation, user forums with thousands of users and hundreds of
thousands of posts, optimised bloat-free software, social contract, etc. 
So I downloaded the the LiveCD for 1.4 RC1 booted up the spare box and
spent the next 3 days installing it; it is time consuming but it's so much
FUN!  I had better not go on about how much I like Gentoo or everyone will
get bored (assuming you even got this far), but I will say that what I
like most about it is that it straight-forward to use and all the
management is from the command line, which is excellent for remote
support. What's more, it just seems to be so logical and it is
sufficiently up to date that I haven't had to go anywhere else to get
dowloads.

What do I use most?  Command line is liberating now that I have spent a
lot of time (continuously) learning how to use it.  I use IceWM for a
window manager, it's light-weight and a lot like M$ Windows in appearance,
which isn't such a bad thing and I _like_ editing my menus in a text file,
because it's easy and it works.  I compile everything without Gnome or KDE
support and copy/paste works in all my applications which include OOo,
Mozilla and Gnome-Terminal (don't ask me how).  I use Gentoo file manager
(nothing to do with the distro of the same name actually) and it's pretty
good, very configurable, low bandwidth for remote support and can be
operated almost entirely from the keyboard.  All the Linux machines I put
together have VNC installed for remote admin.

What am I doing to go forward?  I have started writing plugins for
SquirrelMail to fill in some of the gaps in order to to get to a
commercial M$ Exchange substitute; currently I am working on a User
Maintenance plugin that sets up users and allows for folder sharing
managed from the SM web interface.  I'm learning PHP to do this; still a
beginner but what I have so far works.  After this, I have a Zaurus in the
cupboard that I want to be able to sync with SM, so I am going to have a
go at that.

Sorry for such a  long post - I guess one just starts to waffle on when
one gets a bit older.

Regards.

Tony Austin
Gigaday Computing Limited
http://www.gigaday.com
tony at gigaday.com