Randymanme

[Randymanme]

Hello, everyone.

About four months ago, I became active with an egalitarian collective, The Sporeprint Infoshop. The inforshop is a safe space for free thinking (most of us tend to lean a little towards the anarchist side).

Sporeprint has something of a relationship with two other groups with which we are all amicable: The Third Hand Bike Coop, and Freegeek Columbus.

I enrolled in college online, spring quarter, and (being homeless) did all my classwork at places with public computers available. But I was often behind in my studies and would have to pull all-nighters at the infoshop to a couple of times a week to keep from flunking out.

One of my buddies at the infoshop who's active with Freegeek, arranged for me to get my own desk top (I keep it a another friend's apartment where I'm welcome anytime). My computer came with Linux 8.04 and a whopping big load of add-ons and plugins.

Now up until that point, all I'd ever done with a computer was surf the web (and I'm sure, now, only with microsoft). I'd taken a couple of college classes in Basic and Cobol back in the '70s, but none of those required me to do more than just see a main frame or desk top (such as they were back then -- a television for a monitor and a cassette recorder or punched cards for memory).

Although I was tickled to death to have my own computer, there were problems right of the riff. All the components worked at the shop; but they wouldn't work, together, across town. Videos played real slow and/or choppy after my buddy did get it to work. But the freegeeks seemed reluctant to fix anything for me. They think (and I agree) that since I have a good computer and access to all kinds of software and Ubuntu tutorials and info on the computer and online support, I should become computer self-sufficient.

So I tinkered with this baby and tried this and that after reading this and that, and it was starting to shape up better and better to my preferences. But there was a problem -- South University. It provides technical support for microsoft and mac, but not for Linux; me and the website aren't compatible.

Some one on Launchpad told me to download Wine. I did; but then I didn't know how to install it. If finally met that objective. But, then I didn't know how to run it. I kept asking but I didn't get or find any answers. But I did see somewhere that Jaunty Jackolpe came with Wine installed. Hmmm. When reading the April release information, I became convinced that 9.04 would solve all my problems and concerns.

It took me several hours to find out that I had to upgrade to 8.10, first.

[I don't know how long this can be -- maybe I better post it and continue later.]

[oz]

Welcome aboard... hope you enjoy the forums!