First, I participated in my state’s Presidential Primary today, and I had the pleasure of a close associate new to the political process joining me. Woo Hoo! I’m happy to report the elections office was busier than I’ve ever seen a polling place–even on general election day. It’s nice to see Blacks exercising a right many of our ancestors never had.
But this post is really about the sidebar banner change. It’s been a while since I geeked around with Linux, but I cut my teeth on Redhat. I used to run a headless server (DNS, SAMBA (file and print), Apache, and masquing NAT) in my living room. In fact, I wrote my first masquing firewalls using IPTABLES. I built custom kernels and compiled Firefox from source way before it became the popular alternative to Internet Explorer that we know and love today.
When Redhat offered Fedora as their community maintained distro, I hung on for a few whirls around the dance floor. Their accelerated production schedule soon had me switching to the longer life, quieter Suse. However, I’ve been away from Linux all together for a while now. But I’m once again considering the mighty penguin for my general purpose, multimedia friendly living room machine. I’ve also considered a Mac Mini, but persisitent rumors of its demise and the $600 price tag most likely rule that option out. I’ve downloaded an ISO of Fedora 8 to keep me busy relearning where everything in *nix land is until I can grab version 9. Meanwhile, enjoy the countdown banner and join me in celebrating free (as in speech and beer) and open source software.