So, it is without further ado that I introduce my next victim guest. Silver Fox is generally a quiet member of the Ubuntu Beginners Team, but does good work within said team which goes – largely – unnoticed. I thought it would be appropriate to try and bring these to light for others to see.

1. Tell as much as you’re willing about your “real life” like name, age, gender, location, family, religion, profession, education, hobbies, etc.

I am a professional web developer and database administrator living and working in the UK.   I don’t really have much family but I do have a good number of friends.  My hobbies include running, badminton and just lately photography.  I also keep a blog where I post pretty much anything on my mind.

2. When and how did you become interested in computers? in Linux? in Ubuntu?

The earliest computer I remember “playing” with was an acorn electron.  I got fascinated by how what you typed somehow made sense to the computer (certainly didn’t to me). I got it into my head to try and work out how this all works.  After much time and effort I had to give up, I just didn’t “get it”.

I can’t remember what I was doing after that but I picked up the computer interest sometime around windows 3.1.  Again I was drawn to the programming side ,  with fond memories of writing applications in qbasic.  This time I seemed to get on better with it and stuck the course.  Years later I found myself with a BSc (Hons).

Linux was a bit of a background noise initially to me,  I had heard people mention it but I was not sure what to make of it at all.  I finally took a jump after some serious problems with Microsoft Vista.  A colleague suggested I try Ubuntu (I believe I caught the end of 7.10).  Since then I have tried many distros but a firm favourite would have to be Ubuntu (and those based on it).

3. When did you become involved in the forums (or the Ubuntu community)? What’s your role there?

I joined Ubuntu Forums in June 2008,  though I lurked for a period before hand. Here is a link to my profile.   I try to help anyone I can, even if its pointing them to a howto.   I especially try to help those who post in Absolute Beginners Talk.  These are the people I can relate to most,  totally stuck and feeling lost.  I consider myself a beginner at best but I would like to think I must have learnt something by now about Ubuntu

4. Are you an Ubuntu member? If so, how do you contribute? If not, do you plan on becoming one?

I am an Ubuntu Member. Here is a link to my wiki page.  My main involvements are with the Ubuntu Beginners Team.  I am in my second term of leading the IRC focus group. This group aims to provide real time support to those who require help.   I have other activities listed on my wiki page for those who would like an in depth breakdown.

5. What distros do you regularly use? What software? What’s your favorite application? Your least favorite?

Currently I am mainly using Ubuntu and #! Crunchbang Linux at home.  From time to time I boot into Fedora and Zenix.

My favourite application would probably be Firefox.   Its usually one of the first application I run when I turn on my computer

6. What’s your fondest memory from the forums, or from Ubuntu overall? What’s your worst?

My fondest memories on the forum are two little words, Thank You.  I get great pleasure from knowing that I helped someone.

7. What luck have you had introducing new computer users to Ubuntu?

I have had some success in introducing people to Ubuntu. A few of my friends are now happily running the operating system with me serving as immediate source to help if it goes wrong (very little has )

8. What would you like to see happen with Linux in the future? with Ubuntu?

I would like to see awareness of Linux increase to the point where I can talk to “Joe Public” about Linux and to not get a blank look back.

9. If there was one thing you could tell all new Ubuntu users, what would it be?

Hello and welcome   The community is fantastic.  Never feel like you are alone when tackling a problem.

From what I read, the book can prove incredibly useful to newcomers, and old-timers alike. I really do think it’s well written, helpful, and I would quite happily recommend it to anybody looking for a book on Ubuntu. Not to mention, the book is compact (much thinner, but equally as full as, some other Ubuntu books I own), and very stylish…that’s my opinion of course…but I think this book would look quite the part sitting on anybody’s bookshelf.

See for yourself:

The book can be bought on Amazon (UK site link), or many other bookstores.

Essentially, it allows you to “swype”over the word your want to type and, somehow, it works! Though it does appear that it’s only available for android at the moment, unfortunately.

And yes, this entire post was written from swype on my phone.

As I upgraded, I decided to change my theme. I quite like the new theme, it makes a change to have a bit of colour on my blog, which I quite like, though I do still have the old theme kicking around on the server, should I decide to change my mind. Another change, is the VPS on which this blog is hosted, which is now hosted by Fivebean. So far, no real issues, the minor issue I initially had was dealt with promptly and explained thoroughly, I’d definitely recommend giving Fivebean a look if you’re in the market for a VPS

I do have one small issue currently, which I’m not sure whether it is being caused by WordPress, PHP, Apache, or the VPS setup on Fivebean’s part, whereby directly after a reboot the RAM usage sits at around 300MB, and refreshing the WP dashboard causes usage to jump upwards by around 200MB. Now I know WordPress likes its RAM, but not that much, it certainly wasn’t an issue on the old VPS. Anyway – more news on that as it comes.

Anyway, in time honoured tradition, I thought I’d share the stats from my somewhat neglected rtorrent screen session for the 10.04 release:

Not quite sure about those tracker messages, but nonetheless, it seems that more people are wanting the 64 bit release this time around.

I’m quite happy with this!

Simply put – we have new staff over on the Ubuntu Forums Please join me in congratulating drs305, duanedesign, Iowan, lisati, loell, Ms_Angel_D & philinux on their new roles on the forum, I’m sure you’ll all do great!

I’m unsure where these ads are being shown – but they appear to be on far too frequently in the UK, to the point where some people will probably get sick of the sight of them. The thing that interests me the most, however, is that Microsoft feel the need to advertise these…I think I understand why they are, but it shows that times have changed from when Microsoft was almost guaranteed to be on any PC.

I believe that the IE8 advertising is probably limited to Europe. The reason I make this (fairly large) assumption, is because of the EU ruling which ruled bundling IE8 was unfair to competitors, only last week did Microsoft push out an update which advertised alternative browsers to those users who still had IE8 as a default browser. Admittedly, more than 1 of these was based on the Trident engine, the same as IE8.

As for Windows 7, I’ve got a strong suspicion that a slow (but steady) decline in the OS market share has Microsoft a little worried, and they’re starting to push Windows 7 as much as they can, not to mention the catastrophe that came before 7…more commonly known as Vista

One thing that did frustrate me (immensely), while trying to install Lucid, was the partitioning situation. I wiped my Ubuntu partition(s) completely, including my /home and everything. I decided before installing that I’d make backups of the important stuff, and go from there. Somewhat frustratingly, the partition manager mid-way through ubiquity decided to give up the ghost and die. Not a problem, I thought, as I downloaded the daily live CD, I’ll just install from here….no go – the daily live CD was showing exactly the same issues as the Alpha 2 disc.

Before I ditched my attempts to install Lucid and drop back down to Karmic (9.10), I figured I’d try running GParted, and create the partitions before running ubiquity. Good job I did! This worked fine, without any hitches. Naturally I think I should’ve been able to specify my partitions as part of the ubiquity installer, but at least it’s installed now! More on my Lucid thoughts as I get any experiences to share with it.

A couple of examples: I’m working on a project with one of my friends (a Java application, for the more curious of you), and from time to time, I’ll sit and code into the early hours of the morning without realising…other times, despite enjoying coding, I’ll open up the code, look at it, and think “I really can’t be bothered”, despite the fact earlier that day, I was totally motivated and yearning to do it.

I’m not sure why this happens, or if it happens to anybody other than myself, but it doesn’t stop it being any less frustrating

Anyway…time to go back to work!