[tlug] The artist formerly known as 'n'

[neil_macphee <yeehi@example.com>]

Well, now that you have me in your crosshairs...

I have with fear read the TLUG submission guidelines and shall henceforth and 
herewith endeavour to conform. But please, continue to knock me into shape as 
necessary. 

I have tried to get my name rather than my handle to appear on this note. I 
hope it appears.

I must introduce myself. If you are a scorpio, like me, you will understand 
how much this entails...

I am an English teacher. I started computing with a BBC B, and merrily played 
elite. What a great game and bit of programming. It is now available in an 
emulated version for the pc. I did a bit of computing at college, was useless 
at it. Couldn't even do writeline hello. I might have typed in the code 
properly but into what? Years later I thought I might enter the land of milk 
and honey by becoming a c++ contractor. I was told that to do that I would 
first have to get used to the envrionment, and that was my intro to linux, 
redhat 6.2 iirc. I continued trying and failing to use red hat through 7.0. 
No joy, then I tried mandrake as it was good for newbs, no joy. Then I found 
a distro that had my sound working, automatically could do streaming video, 
and had a desktop that looked like something I knew. It was great. Their on 
line community was/is great too. 

I started with windows, and began getting annoyed with having to reinstall it 
all the time. So that was why I also wanted to move over to linux.Then I 
started to dislike the M$ monopoly and though I think xp is now pretty good 
and stable, I would prefer to completely go to linux coz of the philosophy 
and culture, which  I am trying to fit into. 

I have 2 systems, both dual boot, or should. XP and Lycoris, and the other one 
is Redhat 7.3 and nothing at the mo.  I have xp for games ( v imp, 
fortunately my faves have been put out for linux too: half life, neverwinter 
nights,  Civilization, Alpha Centauri, Europa Universalis...) and coz I know 
it. I would try and do stuff on open office 1.0 but havent been succesful at 
that yet.

I do now partition so that my home directory is on its own partition, but have 
never tried to get etc on its own partition. It might be a good idea. 

My ability with linux has been bad for a long time. I can't do simple things 
and can't extract myself from my own screw ups.

Anyway,

I am curious. There seems to have once been a bit of a flame war or something 
on TLUG and good people left. Can I look at the relevant digests to see how 
it happened? When was it?