MadBob

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About Me
Firstly, the name : MadBob. Think of me as a friendly mad scientist and not a mad axe wielding killer :)

My first venture in Linux was with a RedHat distribution on six CDs. Although I was amazed at the simplicity to install the SW, actually using it was a little frustrating. I had an old P1 200MHz with less ram than a C64; well it felt like that.

Move on a few years and I've got myself a better machine. An AMD3200XP with 1GB of ram. This time -and with many thanks to Steve D- I tried out Ubuntu (7.10 I think).

Having been Windozed for many years, it took me six months to simply become accustomed to this new OS. It was faster than Win2000, booted faster and looked sleeker.

Spring 2008 was the significant date for me as this was the switch over from Win2K to Ubuntu. There was a steep learning curve (still), but now I didn't have to perform all those extra techy tasks like antivirus updates/checks, hdisk defrag, registry cleanups, temp dir(s) emptying. In fact, moving to Linux gave me a life as now I didn't have to spend hours maintaining the Windows setups [that I had to pay for !]

...So what has happened since ????

  • Still on Ubuntu; 9.10 32bit. Tried the 64bit, but it didn't agree with me.

  • Using the LiveCD, a friend trialed Ubuntu versus his troublesome pre-installed OS. He liked it so much he wanted moving over that night. One convert under the belt.

  • Setup a dual boot on another friends laptop. She only uses the Windows side for those apps she can't move away from (yet), but she did show Ubuntu to another unhappy Win user and lo-and-behold another convert !

...What does the future hold ???

  • Release testing : This was going to be my path into Linux, but didn't happen as one's life sometimes goes a bit 'pear shaped'.

  • Coding : Want a program written ? Need a GUI to go with it ? No problem as long as you're OK with 68000 assembler and an Amiga ! C, C++, GTK+, errrrr might need a little help there....

  • Hardware interfacing : So we've all got a complete development system as part of the distribution, but how can I talk to hardware outside my PC box ? Could I learn to reverse engineer a Windows based toy ? Think of those USB based missile-launcher toys. They have motors and sensors that would be a good base for a Linux based sun tracker.
Recently, autumn 2011, have been taking a serious look at OpenFOAM. So far have done some simple benchmarking between 32/64bit Ubuntu 10.04 & 10.10 and have settled with 10.10 64bit.
Website
http://www.nokia.com
Favourite Linux distribution
Ubuntu10.10 64bit and CentOS6 64bit

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