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by Alistair Einstein Izzard
How old are you?
I'm 57 Years old. I was born in Birmingham, England.
What is your marital status?
I have a girlfriend, Tracy. We have been together just over a year
Do you have any children or grandchildren? If so, how many of each?
I have 2 children, all grown up now, both boys, well men now, Scott who is 45, son of my ex-wife, and Damien who is 28.
Do you have any pets, and if so, how many and of what type?
Tracy and I have 2 cats, Missy and Spike. They are very mischievous.
Are you retired or working, and for how long and at what?
I'm unemployed and off sick. I have had depression and anxiety and other health issues
that keeps me from working.
What is the area you live in like? Weather, Serenity, Scenery, etc.
I live on the Isle of Wight, a small island off the south coast of England. I also live in a town called Hemel Hemstead which is a town 20 miles from London. There is a big difference between the two places, one is a beautiful island with places of natural beauty, and the other is Hemel hehe. It's nice there, too. On the island you are no further than 7 miles (11.2Km) from the nearest beach.
Are you handy with your hands, and do you have any hobbies?
My hobbies are pretty much Linux and computers, although I do dabble with electronics and mechanics. I collect "Boomboxes" and have over 100 at last count. It's something I loved when growing up. I still use cassettes.
What is your education level?
My education was to A-level in maths and physics, I didn't go to further education, and started work at 16 years of age.
Do you like to travel, go camping, go fishing, etc.?
I love to travel when finances allow. I loved to go camping back in the day with the family. Nowadays, I prefer more creature comforts.
What caused you to try Linux and join this forum?
Short answer. Windows 95. I was looking in my local magazine store and saw a Linux magazine. I forgot which one but it had a CD-ROM of Slackware on the cover. I bought the magazine. I was fed up of windows crashes, especially as I had been used to the stability at that time of older OS's like TRS-DOS for the TRS-80 model I. (My first entry to computers in 1980) model II and III because I used to go into my local Tandy store where I used to "play" on the demo machines. I was hooked on computers from then on. Anyway I got the magazine and read the instructions, I had to use 2 floppy disks, one for boot, the other root, using a DOS-based program to get the images to both floppies. The boot disk booted the root disk, which had drivers for the CD-ROM, which then booted Slackware. Installed Slackware, and then found other distros. RedHat which had Doom and Gnome/KDE 1 (Slack was KDE) and then Mandrake.
Mandrake was Red Hat on steroids, It used a GUI installer which you could move about the sections. You could jump back or forward to any section of the installer. This is when I learned about the "other" repo for Mandrake, one that was being populated with packages that made Mandrake useful, Media codecs.. DVD-CSS and all the "cool" stuff. The curator of these programs was a certain Texan by the name of Texstar. A few years passed (2003) and on the front of the magazine was a "LiveCD," some little known distro in our circles called PCLinuxOS.
So I popped that in my drive, and it found all my hardware. I was impressed, I installed and been a user off and on ever since. I actually joined the Forum twice, once before the attempted coup and again after. I was thrown off the first time. Since then I have made community ISO's based on Trinity and Openbox, and I even did an Enlightenment one, but wasn't very good at that one.
What do you like about PCLinuxOS? Are there any changes you'd like to see with PCLinuxOS?
I like most things, the awesome forum members, the boring stability I seem to get (very rarely I'll have an issue). It's the best little distribution on the planet, and I've used Arch BTW. I'm looking forward to what we can do for PCLinuxOS. 20 years coming soon!
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