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I just love Free Software, and have for about a decade. I'm proud of my contributions over the years in supporting and boosting both it and its users, as well as Linux and in general. Every time someone replies to one of my posts thanking me for my help, it makes my day. I just love Free Software, and have for about a decade. I'm proud of my contributions over the years in supporting and boosting both it and its users, as well as Linux, and in general. Every time someone replies to one of my posts thanking me for my help, it makes my day.

Email: ?MailTo(keeling@spots.ab.ca)

[http://www.spots.ab.ca/~keeling Home Page]

[http://cuug.ab.ca Local User Group]


I just love Free Software, and have for about a decade. I'm proud of my contributions over the years in supporting and boosting both it and its users, as well as Linux, and in general. Every time someone replies to one of my posts thanking me for my help, it makes my day.

I'm a fan of *nix in general with sixteen years of it to my credit, the last ten in administration. I've worked with most of the commercial *nixes as well as the *BSD's, and quite a number of the various Linux distributions (see [http://www.spots.ab.ca/~keeling/small_distros.html my recent foray into multi-boot Linux country]). I prefer Debian for its stability, ample support paths, the fast paced development of Free Software in general, and the Debian community. I respect Slackware (the second Linux distro I used) and its downstream Zenwalk is a joy to work with, and I liked SuSE when I worked with it. Regardless, I keep coming back to Debian.

As for my views on certain controversial subjects, for me it's "Free Software", not "Open Source." Richard Stallman may be many things but he's right about this. The users of computers and software deserve freedom, and that's the sharp end. Calling it "Open Source" to make it more palatable to business misses the point and ignores the the raison d'etre of the movement: freedom to compute and use your resources as you see fit. I like and respect many of the supporters of "Open Source", but on this point I stand with Stallman. I also like his operating system ... er, editor (emacs :-).


Things I Do With Debian

  • Kill spammers (accounts) [http://www.spots.ab.ca/~keeling/emails.html I'm a spammer honeypot]. :-)

  • perl & MySQL development (among other things, until recently, I managed the membership db for my local *nix user group).

  • Read Usenet news and mailing lists, email, web surf.
  • Research on various topics of interest (high energy particle physics, astronomy, cosmology, small "L" libertarian/Objectivist politics, history, Spanish, and many more). I have a fairly eclectic and wide ranging list of interests. :-)

  • Tech. support for customers, friends, and family.
  • Web publishing, documentation, writing.
  • Help non-native English speakers with their English language web sites and Wiki pages (eg., ["WernerHeuser"] and [http://tuxmobil.org ?TuxMobil] (Werner calls this the "Germish" problem :-), Mika (who calls it the "Denglish" problem) and friends at [http://grml.org Grml] (one truly cool Debian Sid based downstream distro), and now Kurt at ["DebianEdu"] and [http://wiki.skolelinux.de/SkoleLiveCd ?SkoleLiveCd] (another truly cool Debian downstream). I'd be happy to help other non-native English speakers with their English pages if I can. Just ask. :-)

  • report bugs to improve Debian.

Nowadays my plan is to get off this Bad Software addicted continent. If I could spend the rest of my days bouncing from one country to the next, installing Free Software on every machine I came across and training its owner in its use, I'd be one gloriously happy man. See [http://www.spots.ab.ca/~keeling/banishaunixgeek.html Banish A Unix Geek] for a (I think) humourous take on the subject.

Favourite Tools (in no particular order)

This list of incredible software was obtained at such a marvelous price ($0.00), works so well, and is so reliable, it's a little (well, a lot!) amazing to me that others choose to use their far more brittle, unreliable, and expensive alternatives. I'd love to be in a position to dump a boatload of cash on the writers and maintainers of this software (or their favourite charities) but for now, all I can offer is gratitude.

  • aptitude - Slackware's pkgtool is pretty darned good, and many say the newer yum related tools for RPM based systems are pretty good, but nothing matches Debian's dpkg, apt-get, and aptitude suite.

  • Emacs - I use both of the real editors: vi(m) and emacs; the former for quick tweaks to config files, and the latter for heavier stuff.

  • perl - The Swiss Army Pocket Buzzsaw. :-) Positively Eclectic Rubbish Lister.

  • Procmail - It's syntax looks like modem line noise for many, but this has been so useful for me I don't know how I'd manage without it.

  • ssh - telnet and ftp have had their day.

  • mutt - The Mail User Agent you can train to do anything.

  • slrn - Usenet News never looked so good or was so managable.

  • MySQL - I'm going to have to try Postgres some day, but I've never needed more than this provides. Great documentation!

  • OOo - When I have to use something like this (communicating with recruiters, headhunters, and others on the dark side), I'm thankful to have it.

  • Bogofilter - Light weight Bayesian spam filter.

  • Blackbox - Light weight and fast X Window window manager.

  • Firefox - Until something better comes along, this does the job. I also use Epiphany, but it can't do some things that FF can.

  • irssi - Once or twice a decade, I dive in and try to make sense of IRC. This is a nice IRC client.

  • Gkrellm - This cute little thing solved about fifteen problems for me when I started using it, and probably fifteen more since then. It's one rich little app. At a glance, it gives me the time, date, local weather, system uptime, CPU usage graph, network usage graph, memory and swap usage, runs my MUA (mutt), plays music and provides a volume control. Wow. And that's not all it can do.


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