Linux computing – Intro

For many years I have worked in IT for my day job and photography has been part time for weddings, corporate portraits, and personal fun projects like most of my studio work.

For many years I was a Netware administrator, starting with Netware 2 up to Netware 6, we generally used DOS and then Windows on the desktop, with the exception of a few Sun workstations running CDE on Unix.

For home use I had the same as most users, and worked my way from DOS, Windows, 3.11, Windows 95 and then Windows 2000. I dabbled with Unix, mainly Redhat as we had a few Redhat servers at work, but it was the launch of Fedora, that made me jump from Windows at home to Linux running Fedora.

I happily ran Fedora as my main machine for many years. It was in 2005 I started to drift to the dark side. It was in 2005 I bought a lovely little 12″ PowerMac for my wife.

It was around this time that Adobe started an open pilot of a new product called Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. This was for Windows and Mac OS’s only. It was also around this time I discovered how easy colour management and colour calibration was in the Mac. So my Fedora desktop was my main desktop machine, and the Mac was used for running Adobe.

It was not long before I was using the Mac more then my wife, so I then bought my own Mac and my slip to the dark side was complete.

So I use Mac for photography but use Linux day to day. Arch and Debian are my current main distro’s.

The World Wide Web

I have a had a long career in IT. From mainframes to the start of the PC revolution and the start of networking computers. I have memories from the 1990’s of pulling up the floor to find where the good old coax cable had become broken and brought the whole network down.

I was browsing Mastodon and came across a reminder that last week that we are in the 35th anniversary of the World Wide Web.

Back then the first web browser just ran on powerful Next Machines at Cern, but they developed a universal command line browser similar to w3c that I use sometimes on one of my Linux ThinkPad.

A screen capture of the w3c command line browser I sometimes use on one of my ThinkPads running Arch.

Now with restrictive laws and age verification we are killing the open web; forcing people to use Facebook and other gatekeeping closed systems that steal from us and feed us a lie.

Thank you Tim Berners-Lee and the team, lets hope the open web survives.