[Techtalk] New to the list

[litlone]

Hello,

Usually Net etiquette says I should introduce myself when I come to a new 
list. Ok, I have been on computers for the last 6 years prior to that I 
stayed as far away from the things as I could. However, I was a very quick 
study and have now rebuilt 5 machines. I have a fair idea of the windows 
operating system find it very frustrating, but didn't know anything about 
the Linux operating system and when I attempt to read a manual, I get a 
migraine from well needless to say I have to put the thing down and take it 
almost page by page with intervals in between. I taught myself HTML, 
attempting to teach myself perl and java. Realized that if I would have 
passed algerbra this might not be so difficult. So put the perl and java 
aside and am now teaching myself and my son algerbra.  My husband is a 
devote Linux user. Understands it well enough to be paid to work with a 
Unix based system, where he is the answer man for Linux, and Unix. But he 
does the techie talk and speaks linuxese and unless I want to get that look 
like "What?" I tend not to ask questions like " if you were on a window 
system you can do this, how can you do that on a linux system."

I love the graphics programs that windows offers and am hesitant to switch 
my system over to linux because of this alone. He has explained that I can 
run a windows interface and that is all well and good except the windows 
interface can't exactly tell you which programs will run and which ones won't.

This past Christmas we built our in home network- We have a total of 6 
machines running in our home except in the summer time we have 7 when my 
nephew comes around. 4 of the boxes are windows based  3 of these we are 
seriously considering turning into linux boxes but since I am the one who 
maintains them, I have to have a better understanding of linux, the last of 
the 4 is XP the other two are running Mandrake linux. Helping to set up the 
2nd Mandrake box I found that some of it is just knowing abbreviations to 
commands, which made it a lot easier. This box originally had Lindows on it 
that was not a friendly thing at all so that is not any help to me. So I 
can see that the appearance is somewhat familiar but the commanding of the 
system is way different. More of the user actually being the inputter 
instead of the machine doing the work for you.

Anyway after all of that chatter, the reason I joined was to hopefully get 
an understanding of linux what the differences are between that blasted 
windows environment and the linux environment. I am already aware that the 
security difference is immense and that is an added bonus.

What I have noticed is that there seems to be that some are having a 
problem with men answering alot of the techie stuff. So how would it be if 
a man answered the question verbally and a woman typed the answer in. Would 
there be a problem with that?

litlone (who doesn't have much of a clue about linux and never thought she 
would want to)