Welcome aboard, Linux newbie or old hack.

Hello there,
welcome to the Penguin Petting Zoo. No sorry, this is not Animal Planet. This is a blog about adventuring out of the bounds of Windows, mostly with Linux once they are so readily available. This is kind of a field guide, to tame the wild penguin into a meek petting zoo creature, that even you can handle (no offense intended, of coarse).

We sure don't want this to be dumbed down too much, but we sure don't want it to be burdened brain-bending hierarchy tech jargon, either. A simple guild for the common man, wanting explore the world outside of Windows, without getting bit, gored, or impaled.

One of the problems I had adjusting, when I first started down this road, was too many things at once being thrown at you. For example there's like, at least 30 services for each of these distributions that you can active and configure to run on boot. It's a lot like; "You should have spent two years, studying the history of Tech-innovations, before you got here, buckaroo!" Yeah right! You know some of us, will just dive right in, and see where the current takes us. And that's who this blog is for.

My favorite annoyance was articles about recompiling your Kernel. Yeah right, not something I even have the slightest interest in doing- EVER! Even as a professional programmer. I'll wait and download somebody elses, thank you very much. Calculated in Man-Months, it would take $1.14 Billion USD to reproduce the whole thing from scratch in 2006. I don't have enough extra time to become that kind of expert. And that's way too deep into the pool for any beginner.

This is not an ANTI-WINDOWS blog, either. There will be no Windows Smashing or Bashing here! This is about surviving that change of data platform, not about looking back, and casting stones.

This blog however, is not just about Linux. It's about all the Unix alternatives to DOS, including BSD. Some of us have been around so long, we even remember CPM operating systems. But this is not a guide for the old hacks. It's for the modern explorer, trying to figure out, how to make himself at home in this new world.

The point here is just to draw simple road maps, of how things work inside Unix. This is not a deep insider's guide anything. It's far more pedestrian; there it is, get it, use it, make it your own.

Please pardon me for a while. This is like version 0.1 for the next few weeks.

Looking at the way Google's BLOGGER works, how we label things (keywords) are going to be very important to navigating around here. For general nontechnical information, and summaries, I think the keyword should be "introduction". For example, you take this article, find it's labels on the bottom, and press Introduction, and Blogger will filter a list of only article that include that Label. "desktop" might be a good keyword for articles about Gnome and KDE. "networking" for SAMBA and FTP, etc.