I like the idea of Linux, Open Source everything and the GNU license. I guess that is because, at least in part, it is free. It is not free as in a free gift but rather free as in freedom. In other words, it is something we all need to work on. In order for the open source idea to work everyone has to be willing to play by some certain rules and help each other. This reminds me of the way our country was originally founded. It was founded on the idea that we want to be represented and have some say in how and when laws are made that will govern our lives. Again, for this to work we all need to participate. We need to talk about politics and discuss openly our feelings about our own political persuassions. I find it shameful that we are not taught the responsibilities of democracy. Since, it seems that schooling is mandatory, part of that curriculum should include how a democracy continues to function. The representatives that we elect, I sure hope you vote, discuss creating laws. In this process if we agree with them we should let them know. If we disagree, again we should let them know. Once the law is enacted it is up to us to abide by it. If enough people do not obey a certain law, it will become impossible to enforce no matter how many police officers or soldiers try to force us to obey. We are the number one example of this, as the British military tried to impose the will of the law upon us, enough of us said no and we "snubbed" the law. That means for our government to continue to function we must willfully obey the laws even if we may disagree with them. If we disagree there are means available for us to bring concerns to lawmakers. On the contrary, the colonists had exhausted all methods to have King George address their concerns and were left with no alternative but secede.

Back to GNU/Linux. I have tried many different persuasions, flavors or distributions. This is the list of those that I have tried in no particular order: Knoppix, Suse, Redhat (before Fedora), Slackware, Puppy Linux, Quantian, Scientific, Vector, Mepis, Arch Linux, Zenwalk, Zenserver, and Ubunutu. I have tried both 32bit and 64bit versions of some of these. Most of these I do not like. I like most of all SuSe. It is, i think, the easiest to use on a desktop and have most everything work at the start. Slackware is the oldest continuously updated and can be the most different for someone just cutting their teeth. It is stable and a good way for a newbie wanting to learn. It forces you more than some other distros to get in and understand the nuts and bolts of how things work in linux. That is a good thing. Knoppix is another very useful distro. As a full linux distro on a CD without installation, it was a novelty when it first hit the market but is still nice to have on hand to repair, hack a system or have on hand to demo it to a someone new to linux.

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