I'm not sure if this thread isn't dead (I've had a very long week and not really
been checking my personal email address) - but I thought I'd give my two pennies
worth.

Shen, I first got involved with FLOSS on a voluntary "do nothing but read" basis by
joining a few lists and just learning how the community worked by submerging
myself in it. I've not got a "computing background" whatsoever, I just spend a
lot of my teenage years troubleshooting MS problems and doing the odd bit of
hardware maintenance. I never took IT past age 14 as it was just too simple - I
got my best grade at school in IT though (100% in the course, with a letter home
to my parents about my lack of effort). It was an easy course, rather than me
being some child prodigy though, unfortunately.

Ubuntustudio is a great distribution - I use it on my main PC at home and it's
great fun to have such powerful tools at your fingertips for free. I thoroughly
recommend it. However, if you're wanting to learn more about the computer and
how to fix things, I'd recommend sticking with what you've got and trying to
solve the problem. Jumping around distributions to solve kernel panics is a bit
like hitting a sledgehammer with a nut.

You seem to have a good skillset on your C.V. If you want to build a linux
system from the ground up, I thoroughly recommend gentoo (providing you're using
a fairly modern machine otherwise you'll spend half the time waiting for things
to compile). It taught me a fair bit about the basics underlying a GNU/Linux
system. I've also recently had a play with PCBSD (though I'm not a KDE fan so
had to give that one a miss).

If you do have access to multiple machines - use one as a test bed and just play
and play and play with whatever you can find. There's so much to learn (and so
little time to do it). My flatmate through University used to call my Linux
geekery "faffing" - but breaking and fixing things is all part of the game.

The one OS that I've yet to use (and it's shocking that I've not got round to
doing it yet) is Debian. I'm sure other people on this list could advise whether
that would be a good system to play with (as it's what ubuntu is based on) yet
it's a bit more.. industrial (I think that's the right word).

Lastly - support. I don't want to assume anything (so forgive me if I'm
oversimplifying things for you) - but mailing lists, and IRC are fantastic
resources. The other thing I've learnt is that RTFM is a very _very_ useful
thing to do. If you are tasked with using a package - rather than just install
it and go for it, read the man pages. It may take a little bit more of your
time at the offset, but even the faintest memory can help solving a problem
become so much easier. Don't worry about taking it all in at once, but make
sure you've at least scan read it before you do anything "flying-solo."

Anyhow, sorry for the long email - but I like seeing new people working in
FLOSS.

On Thu, 15 Nov 2007 00:38:10 -0800 (PST), tryo tas <tast...@yahoo.com> wrote: