Jim Kissel

Currently I run Mint on an old 901 eeepc, the latest Chrome OS on my Toshiba Chromebook (2014) and the latest Chrom OS on an Asus Chromebox and Ubuntu 14.x via Crouton so I can have all goodness of Linux in  a Chrome window and still have a fast light weight Chrome OS for 90% of my online life.

I started out with an ICL Perq running Unix Version 7.0 and a no-name 68K running a port of System III. Moved onto Sys V on Intel while at ICL. Did some kernel hacking and helped on a device driver on Xenix (yes Microsoft's own Unix derivative) on 286 when working with/for the spooks. I quickly (18 months) moved on to Siemens where I have to pleasure of becoming a Windows programmer (V 2.0 and V3.0) while being Siemen's representative for X/Open? PC Interworking Group. Team Leader, Group Leader, enough of management when I had 17 direct reports. Back to development on PC's and Sinix. Siemens own derivation of Unix. Re-trained to be an SAP Basis engineer. That got me a desk with a phone that never rang and eventually redundancy. By then I had 6 months Perl experience and a couple of years with Web 1.0 technologies. Don't you just hate the nonsense of “Web 2.0”? IMOSHO the only significant development in Web technologies since Netscape 1.2 (yes I do me version 1.2) has been the XMHHttpRequest? which Microsoft invented and didn't patent. I digress.

The redundancy came with 1 months “garden leave” which let me have a leisurely visit with the parents in the states. Oh yea, I'm from Yankee Land, though you wouldn't know from the accent ;-) with 10 years or so in Canada with Northern Telecom. My wife is English though the English say she's Scots and the Scots say she is English, but either way we “decided” to move back to England. I've been contracting for a bit more than 10 years. Mainly on Internet centric projects with a fair amount of time spent in the financial sector. Liked BSD OS-386 from BSDI but they stopped selling it and were bought out by someone. Been using Linux since RH 6.2. Suffered with RH 7.0. Stopped using RH when they came out with their Enterprise version, mainly because of the treatment of Red Hat Network subscribers. That was a great service. Shame it didn't/couldn't last.

My desktop started out as Fedora, then someone gave me a free boxed copy of SuSE? 9.3. That didn't last long as I had just received a 1600x1200 ViewSonic? VP201b. Ubuntu Dapper (6.06) got it working in 1600x1200 mode so I stuck with Ubuntu 6.06 upgraded to 6.10 upgraded to 7.04 upgraded to 7.10 a which point I backed up my data files and did a clean 8.04 install. My home hacking is currently focused on “improving” JeOS? (Ubuntu) on the eeePC. It amazing how a 95Mb ISO expands to a +300Mb installed footprint. I want to get this smaller. Much, much smaller if possible, and improve the boot time to something approaching Xandros on the 701 eeePC. About 20-25 seconds. Less is more in this case. Now all replaces by the very fast Chrome OS ne' Google.

Where do I stand on FLOSS? Somewhere between “Don't tread on me” and the New Hampshire's state moto, “Live Free or Die” (Death is not the worst of evils.). I use proprietary software when there is no free alternative. If I want to watch a iPlayer repeat from the BBC or a DVD on my PC, that's my right and I believe my prerogative to do so by any means I care to employ.

Revised position as of 2016.  I don't use proprietary software.