About

My name is Andrew Stephens, and I am currently a support worker for individuals with exceptionalities.  I also currently maintain a couple of blogs: a personal journal (this one) and one where I share my thoughts/opinions/experiences in personal development (link).

Short Films

A friend of mine is quite talented in the area of film-making, and I’ve been fortunate enough to act in a few of his short films. These are all things we came up with on the fly, and he seems to thrive in these types of settings.

Linux

My journey into Linux began in 2000 when I did a google search for a free operating system I could install on my 486 laptop. I think I ended up downloading a version of Debian that could fit on a floppy. I put it on the disk, installed it and rebooted. I was presented with a command line – that was OK since I liked DOS – but then I started to feel like I didn’t know what to do with it next. Can I like, run a program on it? After about 20 minutes, I wiped it off my computer and found a copy of DOS to put on my laptop.

In the year 2001, I purchased a book called ‘Red Hat Linux for Dummies.’ By this time I had seen some Linux screenshots and realized that you can actually do things with it. The book came with 3 CD’s for installing it and I ended up picking up a used 233Mhz computer to try it out on. The install was pretty straight forward, and I even found out how to have both Windows 98 and Linux on the same computer (dual boot). I even was able to surf the net which I thought was pretty cool. But, what got me was that I didn’t understand how applications worked. More importantly, what was up with the file system? ‘/usr/bin’? ‘/home/andrew’? ‘/usr/local/share/games’? What does it all mean? Where do programs go?

At least by this time I had decided to really give Linux a shot. I read up on some different Linux distributions and gathered that Slackware was the most UNIX like (not that I knew UNIX anyway) and learning to use it would help me understand things a little better. If I had gone with a distribution like Mandrake or Red Hat (both of which I have used) a lot would have been taken care of for me by ‘wizards’ and I wouldn’t know how it worked in the first place. This is where Windows is frustrating: it never told me what it was doing, so when it went wrong I had no real way of figure out what had happened, other than rebooting, or reinstalling things. Slackware, on the other hand, was brutally text-based and required hand editing of the configuration files.

Anyway, my Linux story could go on forever so instead I will give some of my opinions on distros, window managers, applications, etc.

Distributions

Slackware – my old faithful. I use it on my old laptop (which I’m using to type this). It’s fast, stable, and I understand how it works fairly well.

Ubuntu – this one is very popular and cool. It’s fairly cutting edge and when I’ve tried it, it has come with things I’d never seen before. It is based on Debian, another old distribution, so it uses the apt-get packaging system. It’s an impressive packaging system, but I find it can bloat up my system. With Slackware, I do have to think about package dependencies, but at leat I know what’s on my PC at all times. With apt-get, I can easily find the package I want (which is great) but once I try to install it I suddenly see package after package being installed in order to meet dependencies that are only necessary because the person who made the package wanted ALL of the options available for the application. It’s not a huge deal, and if you have a large hard drive you won’t care. For some reason I do… but if I get a good computer I will likely use Ubuntu.

Fedora – a friend of mine (who knows far more about computers than I’ll ever know) uses this one. Red Hat (a distro I mentioned earlier) used to be free (though they had an Enterprise edition) but they decided to make Red Hat a commercial project and let the free-side of it be call Fedora. It’s cool, and they’re are tons of packages for it. It uses a packaging system call yum, which (to me anyway) looks like a copy of apt-get. It seems like a good packaging system and my friend swears by it. Fedora also seems to really be on the cutting edge of things with some of the stuff you can install right off of the bat – like Enhanced Security… I don’t know what it does, but we used it at work.

FVWM

It’s taken some time, but I am now a huge fan of th FVWM window manager. It takes a little more work to configure than your average desktop/window manager, but it’s well worth it when you realize how much control you have over the look and functionality of your desktop. I’m forever changing how my FVWM setup looks/works, but that’s part of the fun :)Oh, if you like any of my FVWM configs, just send me your E-mail address and I’ll send it to you all tarred up so you can just ‘tar xvf file.tar’ it in your home directory, start FVWM and enjoy!

Here are just a few of the links that have been very helpful to me in discovering FVWM:

Say your words