[ILUG-Social] Use LINUX

[sdempsey]

I got real bored one day this week and this is the result
Any comments and improvements will be dutifully ignored.
Have a lot of fun.

        ...shane 

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Ladies and gentlemen of the class of '00: Use LINUX.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, using LINUX would be
it. The long term benefits of using lINUX have been probed by computer
scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more 
reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice
now.


Enjoy the poverty and meaninglessness of your win32 youth. Oh, never
mind. You 
will not understand the poverty and meaninglessness of your youth until 
you've seen a BSOD for the 10th time in as many minutes or experienced
the joy of a successful 30 hour compilation under LINUX. But trust me, 
in 20 years, you'll look back at your web archives  and be very ashamed
of
your abundant activeX  controls and your proprietary JFC code.

.
Don't worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as 
effective as clearing out your Iexplorer cache to improve Windows
stability. The real troubles in your life are that kind that blindside
you at 4:55 on 
a 5 O clock deadline day when the NT server is on the blink and you
can't open 
that f*&king word 97 doc with the word 95 on your hopeless underpowered
machine.


Do one thing every day that scares you. Don't reboot. You won't need to
if you use a real OS which won't suddenly develop strange afflictions
and crash 
amid a multitude of stalled, unresponsive applications and abusive
language. 

Don't sing. Instead play your blade encoded MP3s as loud as your
speakers can handle it.

Configure your sound card. Go to your distros homepage  , trawl the web
and find that driver. Sort out your locks and your IRQs. 
Don't be deterred by confusing documentation or little things like the
unavailability of your driver. 

Don't be reckless with other people's processes . Don't put up with
people who 
are reckless with yours.

Floss . I know that your'e a programmer / admin type but try it anyway.
You just might like it.

Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes
you're 
behind. The race is long and, in the end, LINUX won't crash.

Remember cookies you receive. Forget the memory leaks of Netscrape. 
If you succeed in doing this, please tell me how.

Keep useful LUG mail  .Throw away the massive stack of dublin related
motd/ potd stuff. 

Stretch , your machine not your patience.

Don't feel guilty if you are still using Windows at 22. Help is out
there.
Just subscribe to your local Linux User Group , LUG  (see below for
details ) 
Some of the most interesting people that I know still use Windows at 24,
even if it is only to play half life.


Get plenty of WINE. Be kind to your emulators. You'll miss them when the
machines and OSs that they bridge are dead and  gone..

Maybe you'll upgrade , maybe you won't. Maybe they'll eventually sort
out all the library problems, maybe they won't. Maybe you'll dance the
funky chicken
while listening to MP3s at your 7 month linux anniversary party.
Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate
yourself either. Nah go on , congratulate yourself , you did the right
thing.
 

Enjoy your machine. Use it every way you can. Dual booting might make
you
happy and enable you to play unreal during those quite days at the
office.
Don't fear LILO and remember loadlin.

Dance, even if you are in the office. You've read the FAQs, looked at
the sites and got your distro. You are now a player.

Do not read PC magazines. They will only remind you that try to tempt
you into going down the windoze road to ruin with promises of free and
exciting demos.


Respect your hardware. Don't mess around with vidtune until your monitor
explodes and start whinging about free software. Be nice to your
libraries. They're the best way to link your programs  and the files
most likely to enable you to compile them in the first place.

Understand that kernels come and go, but with a precious few you should
spend your days and nights configuring. Try to bridge the gaps between
the standard setup and the desired bzImage kernel with all those useful
things like networking and sound support because the older you get, the
more you'll 
realise that you are better off not switching to windows for anything.

Go to an installfest once but leave before it makes you hard. 
Subsribe to social once, but leave before you start talking about the
relevant merits of bicycles versus Buffy driven Toyota Yaris's ( sorry
couldn't help myself) 


Travel, to potds , just to see what the hell several drunk computists (
or more obvious titles) and their fluffy penguins get up to on a night
out.

Accept certain inalienable truths: Linus is a god . You are not. You,
too, will get old. And then you do you'll fantasize that when you 
were young you were a god, OSes never crashed and computer scientists
were sex symbols.
Unfortunately not.

Expect LINUX support to improve. 

Be careful when choosing periphs, look up the relevant sites and make
sure they are supported .

Remember this advice while remembering that adviceis a form of
nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of 
trying to recover the data from a corrupted file system by copying
everything over onto a  clean machine, salvaging as much of the FS as
possible and 
hoping that everything important still works. Hmmm ... 15 minutes until
I lose all this data....

Use LINUX

Trust me I'm a tux.


-- 
##########sdempsey at iol.ie sdempsey at emhain.wit.ie########
#######...shane D  http://www.iol.ie/~sdempsey##########
QWERT (kwirt), n. [MW < OW qwertyuiop, a thirteenth]:
1. a unit of weight equal to 13 poiuyt avoirdupois (or 1.69 kiloliks),
commonly used in structural engineering; 2.  [colloq.] one thirteenth
the load that a fully grown sligo can carry; 3. [anat.] a painful
irritation of the dermis in the region of the anus; 4. [slang] person
who excites in others the symptoms of a qwert. -- Webster's Middle World
Dictionary, 4th ed.