Hello!

My name is Fred and I've been stalking this mailing list for about three
weeks now and I thought it was time to come to the surface.

I'm a new Linux user. I installed Mint 17 Cinnamon back in June and I've
been loving it. I started with Ubuntu but there was too much weirdness in
Unity for my tastes. It was suggested on the Ars Technica boards (I'm a
moderator over there) that coming from Windows that I might find the
transition easier with Mint and they were right. Currently I'm dual-booting
Mint with Windows 8.1 but I spend most of my time in Mint unless I'm
playing a game.

I've flirted with Linux in the past but always seemed to get frustrated
with all the hurdles I seemed to run into with getting it all configured.
One of the reasons I love Mint so much is that it figured out my hardware
configuration on its own (including my printer!), not to mention making it
easy to install the nvidia drivers I needed. Not having to do any basic
configuration made it easy for me to explore the things I wanted to check
out on my own.

In reading up on my new OS one of the things that kept coming up was to
check out the local user groups. I found PLUG with a Google search and
signed up for the mailing lists that seemed pertinent. I hope to make it to
one of your meetings sometime but I work nights so it may be a while before
I'm able to do that. In the meantime I'm enjoying reading the emails
produced by the lists. I read them all even though most of the stuff is way
over my head but it's a good learning experience and sometimes there's
conversations I actually do understand!

I decided on some goals for my new Linux journey. In the near term I want
to learn the command line and vi.vi seems an odd text editor to me but I'm
enjoying the challenge of learning it. The command line is awesomely
powerful and I'm having fun with it too. I got a couple of books from
Amazon that were highly rated to help me out. The first is *The Linux
Command Line: A Complete Introduction *by William E. Shotts and the second
is *Learning vi and the Vim Editors *by Arnold Robbins, Elbert Hannah, and
Linda Lamb. Once I get through these I want to install a more complicated
distro (to me) like Arch or Gentoo. The ultimate goal is to do Linux from
Scratch but there's a lot of learning for me before I get to that.

Anyway, thanks for being here and sharing your knowledge about all the
'nixes.


Fred Fifield