On 2014-07-28 16:37, Fred Fifield wrote: 

> 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 [1] 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

Welcome Fred! You'll find a lot of helpful people here. 

Dennis Kibbe
Linux Program Lead
Mesa Community College 
 

Links:
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[1] http://vi.vi