2013 - I've built a Raspberry Pi and it's fun to use but the graphics are not great so I can't see what I'm doing in the Shell. It did rekindle my interest in Linux however and I bought a cheap office computer from Tiger Direct, but the OEM Win 7 included was slow as molasses in January, so I installed Debian Linux on it (the Raspberry Pi had taught me that Debian in a good thing)

There have been enormous changes since my early Linux days in 2005. Downloading and installing software packages is a breeze and today (March 19, 2013) I installed and FTP (Filezilla) program and a WYSWYG webpage editor (KompoZer) and edited a webpage, no problem.

I'll get back to the Raspberry Pi and tackle the graphics interface by and by but, meanwhile, I'm learning some Linux happily on the Debian 6.06 install.

RASPBERRY PI BARBIE

2005 - Ubuntu doesn't fly on my P133, Pentium One. Bought an inexpensive Intel Pentium III 600 processor with 128MB RAM as a spare and upped the memory to 256MB. I use it as as oasis away from the temptations of Windows and I haven't figured out how to get Ubuntu to talk to my net D-Link yet.

I like Puppy because it is simpler to use. I will use its Live Cd on my main machine.
DSL (Damn Small Linux) is neat as well http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

Early Days
Beginning to find my feet with Linux. Have become addicted to Nethack. Learned to write a script file and an 'alias' command. Have found *some* of the files I installed with RPM after figuring out how to 'mount' the CD ROM drive.

Figured out how to get Linux to read from the files in the Win98 partition (with the help of Expert's Exchange). Upgraded to Red Hat 6.00 and Gnome is now operational. Now that I have a GUI it's time to settle down to the command prompt and learn some basic navigation and functionality commands - with flags
("Like an army with banners")