Because We Can - Fulltime RV'ing

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What the heck is an adventure in the Land of Linux?

Something I am certainly not a fan of is: 1. the most popular computer operating system, 2. the company that created it and 3. the man who founded that company. A long, long time ago I had a computer that used CPM as its operating system. Then I, along with most computer users fell under the paternalistic hand of the boys from Bellevue. One thing I have always held near and dear is a almost total disdain for things big. Big institutions, whatever form they tend to take always think they know what is best for you and so that is what you get; you never get any choice in the matter. And wonder of wonders, if there, by some chance, should be a choice available to you, it is one of their own devising, created solely to yield either greater profit or power to themselves.

I was never really into computers in my former life, sure I used them and played around with them, I ever built a couple, but I never got deeply involved with the software side of them. That changed once we started living this life on the road and the website bloomed. The more I realized the computer was actually an extension of myself rather than just a tool, the more I wanted to be free of the encumbrances it was arbitrarily placing on me. The alternate that most people look at is the Mac, at least in the USA. Fortunately there is the rest of the world, something most Americans tend not to think about and if they do actually look beyond our borders, usually see that something simply as a threat. The USA has its computer world icons, after all we gave birth to the industry, but who would ever guess that Finland of all places would also send forth a beacon, and not just any beacon, but a brilliant multimillion-million candlepower beacon by the name of Linus Torvalds. Now who in the world is Linus Torvalds? He is a man who wrote a computer operating system while still in college and proceeded to give millions of copies away, something that is changing not only the the world of computing, but the world itself. Bill Gates on the other hand, dropped out of college, founded a software company with his daddy's money and influence, made billions of dollars by monopolizing the market, then began to give a small amount to the poor of the world trying to gain a personal reputation for doing good. I always find it interesting how these people such as Gates basically steal from the little guy to get their loot, then give a little away with the goal of being able to point to themselves and claim to be a great champion of the human race. Slime is slime, no matter which side is showing at the moment.

I trust that the foregoing has made my point as to why I am somewhat against using the standard computer software most of have been forced to use for years and years. The result was that I began a long search for an alternative, the results of which are this page. My computer now is a dual boot machine, running both XP, which came pre-installed, and a second operating system I recently installed, the completely free Ubuntu version of Linux. This page was written with Bluefish and uploaded to the website using gFTP, both of which are free Linux programs. Presently I am only a newborn babe in the woods when it comes to using Linux, picking Ubuntu more for its ease of installation than anything else, plus the fact that the desktop itself does not look anything like XP. As I travel down this new and exciting road I will will share my journey with you on this page, hopefully posting something on the install process in the near future.

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