UbuntuHelp:Jpkotta
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Background
I'm an electrical engineering grad student in North Dakota, USA. I've always been interested in technical things, but really wasn't much of a computer geek until I bought a computer. I've always been a science and math geek. I've been using Linux since January 2004. That's when I got my first computer, so I had basically nothing to lose and no one else to piss off if I broke it. I put Mandrake 9 on it, and it seemed pretty cool. At the same time, I was an intern at IBM, and I could see them using Linux on some of their servers. I had an AIX workstation for daily use. It was nice to have Unix at home and work, and I quickly learned and appreciated it. That was the summer of Unix. I will digress for a moment to tell why I switched to Linux. One of the major things that impressed me was Enlightenment. I thought, "that's how computers look in the movies". After trying it, I decided it wasn't really for me (I use FVWM, an ancestor of Enlightenment and many WMs), but it is a very interesting window manager. Also, one of my favorite programs, Fractint, broke on Windows XP, and I saw there was a version for the X window system. I had been using Windows ME (which as we all know is more unstable than the X-29), and I had a hell of a time transfering my data with Microsoft's lame utility to my new computer. Finally, I like to be challenged and I'm independent. Some might say I have a pathological tendency to do things differently. Mandrake got old kind of fast, so by Fall 2004 I was trying to run Gentoo. I half heartedly tried to install it every couple of months. I eventually got it in May 2005, after finally realizing that I had to enable a number of kernel options to use my hard drive (the ones that did it were the drivers for the HD controller, which is very common and probably should be a default). What pissed me off was the fact that the live CD worked perfectly, but the installation was always full of little annoying quirks that were hard to track down (the hard drive support being a good example). Also, Gentoo needs a lot of care and feeding. Gentoo was nice, but unstable, even with conservative make options. Still, I felt it was worth it just to learn a lot more about Linux. In August 2005, I switched to Ubuntu. It is flexible enough for me, yet is sufficiently polished so that I have to do very little tweaking if I don't want to. Also in August, I bought a laptop, and the first thing I did was wipe the hard drive, and attempt a Gentoo install. It kind of worked, but by that time I was sick of all the care and feeding Gentoo needed, so I put Ubuntu on there and almost everything worked out of the box (exceptions were wireless, 3D acceleration, and suspend). Now everything works perfectly, though 3D is still relatively unstable (I can hardlock the machine by starting another X server). I also really enjoy the Ubuntu community, which is one of the real strengths of Gentoo as well.
Current Activies
I mostly lurk about in the forums, helping people with random issues. I generally help with grub related problems, Opera problems, and scripting help. I wrote an installer for FoldingAtHome, and help people with that too. I make copy edits to wiki pages and try to add updates from forum threads. I am making a live CD with mathematical packages on it. The goal is to give college students in engineering and similar majors some tools to replace software like Matlab and Mathematica. Then maybe there will be a package CD for large tools, like TeX. Hopefully, I can put it up on my ECE department's servers.
Contact
jpkottaATgmailDOTcom
