It's basically a very boring (and totally pointless) passage about how I have come to use Linux. I also hope to fill it with links to useful Linux-related web sites.

(All of my Linux applications have been moved to seperate pages)

So how did I meet Linux?
Probably the same way as most of it's users. A friend (Bill aka murble) used it at home and brought some boot disks to college (also a laptop, occasionally). I was impressed with what it could do. We were using lynx and ftp and openning telnet sessions on each others network boxes. I was particularly impressed when we managed to samba mount Imperial College (excuse my poor grasp of the terminology here). We could tar files straight from their server onto floppies.

I started using Linux at home when the family got a new PC (the Dell). I started with one of murbles' boot disks, and created a 40Mb loopback filesystem on the DOS partition. This gave me plenty of room for bash and some other stuff but was not very satisfactory. So I bought myself an 850Mb hard disk (second hand) and dedicated it to a Slackware 96 installation (I borrowed the CD from another linux user friend). I later bought a book (Special Edition: Using Linux - quite good but a bit expensive). It came with RedHat 4.1 and Caldera OpenLinux Lite CDs in addition to Slackware 96. I switched to RedHat and have been using it since (although I recently bought a copy of RedHat 5 from the Linux Emporium on the grounds that it would save many hours of downloading).

I actually missed a fairly important point there. While I was using RedHat 4.1, I bought my own computer. Despite chosing carefully, I was annoyed to find that, in fact, my X server did not support my new graphics card. I downloaded a new version and suddenly it came to life. I found I was downloading a lot of new versions (and of course, each informed me of 3 other updates I required for it to work). RedHat 5 was the way out, and I am now very happy to say I am running a modern Linux installation on a modern PC - with no problems.

Throughout this time, I used X a lot. I also used quite a few different window managers. First was fvwm-95 and its many configuration distributions (eg. AnotherLevel). I got into writing m4 config files (my own version of AnotherLevel if you like) quite early on, but never got far. I met KDE (The Kool Desktop Environment). I was impressed. I was also impressed by the libraries that made it possible (Qt). I started writting Qt applications. I found it rather like Delphi but in C++ not Pascal - and without the IDE. I started by tweaking some of the KDE apps, then re-writting them. But I gave that up when I realized that the developers were doing what I wanted anyway (and faster). They also had the advantage of being able to change the way KDE itself worked.

I still like Qt and have actually made my own, fully functional (depending on your definition), CD player. However, I no longer use KDE. When I was using KDE, I converted a friend. He later returned the favour, by converting me to WindowMaker. In fact, my CD player (qplaycd) is slightly WindowMaker enhanced (at his request). Just because it's Qt doesn't mean it needs KDE. The Qt runtime libraries are all that are required by the qplaycd binary - no pixmaps or config files.

For the moment, I have put Qt aside. I currently spend most of my time writing WindowMaker Dock applications. Of course, it's silly to spend time creating applications for a single window manager (that's why I created qplaycd not kplaycd). So all my 'Dock' applications work perfectly well as normal applications under any other window manager.