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AITD at Work

I am an open source advocate. My operating system of choice is Linux and of late have been utilizing Ubuntu for most of the installations. I have thirteen working Linux installations personally and have installed and trained others on a couple of dozen other machines. Over the past few years I have downloaded and tried various Linux distros. Many are useful, some interesting, but Ubuntu has provided the all around environment that I need for the majority of my tasks and investigation.

Personally, I have been mostly Windows free for a couple of years. I say mostly, because I still repair Windows machines, deal with the plethora of problems it presents to the user, and conduct data recovery and forensic discovery in multiple platforms. Windows is the primary OS at my IT job where I provide technical support to hundreds of users. I also admin four production level Linux servers there, and have a couple of new Linux projects in my schedule. I do own a machine that has Window Server 2003 installed. It was used to learn more about the server environment both for school and work. It functioned primarily as a print and file server and was actively used for a number of months as a place for storing backups of my other machines. It also suffered from repeated “lab attacks” when I began to investigate BackTrack2 (now BT3).

You will find “rants” and “pokes” at the Windows OS and it seems incongruent by just a general reading. Again, while pro-Linux, I also understand that Windows still dominates various networks. Linux IT admins that understand the convergence of various OS implementations in a network are valuable. I chose Linux out of frustration over the limitations mandated by closed source OS's, Mac's included. Linux gives me the freedom to explore computing at will.

Linux is freedom, as in freedom to choose. I was never content with buying and installing a black box software program and then simply learning what buttons to push. I am a life-long hacker of various disciplines. This is why Linux is my OS of choice. Here, I can explore how something works. I can investigate how to break it, then to rebuild it. In this way, life-hackers own the things they know.

I am pro-Linux and an open source advocate because I see the cost of computers and closed-source operating systems as a limitation for more than just a few people. The Internet is full of examples about the personal and business cost(s) of computers and software. In Linux, there are a greater number of choices made available for people to make use of the vast potential of the computer. Even for someone with no real interest in learning the computer or networking itself, Linux can economically provide solutions found in the plethora of software packages available. The freedom of choice, or the “free” software, does not equate to cheap or less than adequate. In fact, Linux is as powerful as mainstream OS’s. I, and many others, find it superior in its capability.

Readers of my blog know that I switched to WordPress there some time back. WordPress is the method of choice for blogging.

Here, I needed a better way to handle project pages and other sections that may or may not be static. A wiki makes more sense for general site pages, and WordPress remains for the blog.

More information about PmWiki is available from http://www.pmwiki.org .