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Learning Linux, OSS, and other g33k stuff

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I’m a g33k. Not a real g33k but still pretty geeky.

I’ve been fiddling w/ Ubuntu for about a year and a half, since 7.04 (Fiesty Fawn). Last night I made the leap and switched to 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron). I was frustrated like many Linux n00bs because I couldn’t get Flash and Java to work.I’ve never made it my main OS so learning on it is a little slow.

I had a good friend crash course me on Ubuntu and while I am appreciative of him getting me going he probably wasn’t the ideal person to start me off. He’s a hard core database programmer so that means he tried to teach me everything in command line promts. While I do hope to learn BASH someday, this isn’t the easiest way to switch from Windows.

I spent a lot of time trying to find new repositories to use and a lot of frustration in not being able to get anything to install. I decided that I was over thinking things and should step back and keep it simple. The main reasons I wanted to learn Linux and chose Ubuntu was two fold:

  1. I wanted to check out Linux and open my mind to what else is out there
  2. I wanted to learn some basic programming. Nothing fancy just enough to hack up some html/css and php when I needed to do stuff with blogs. That way I didn’t have to harass my programmer friends every time I needed a favor.

After starting over last night and wiping out my whole setup and installing Hardy from scratch I spent some one on one time with the Synaptic Package Manager and discovered just how easy it was to find the Flash and Java files I needed and install them. I’m pretty happy so far although I seem to be struggling with gFTP, don’t know if I’m doing something wrong or if it’s an issue with it or my host right now. We’ll see. Until then I’ll have to live with the default theme. (update: I went w/ filezilla which obviously worked great since I have this nice new theme installed.)

If for some reason you stumble across here, welcome. If you have any useful tips or resources I can always use some help :)

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  1. From Why do I do this to myself? - An Ubuntu n00b on 20 Jan 2009 at 1:04 am

    [...] Heron. This turned into a huge pain in the ass. I almost dumped Ubuntu all together. Like I said in my previous post I was frustrated with a few little things that are the joy of Linux and trying to self teach myself [...]

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