Ubuntu Wiki

My name is André Heßling, I am 18 years old and live in Voerde, NRW, Germany. Currently I am attending the 13th grade of a grammar school.

My specialised courses (Leistungskurse) are English and mathematics. Therefore I am interested in translating parts of Ubuntu into German.

My first Linux experience lies about 3-4 years in the past. I was downloading 2 Red Hat CDs with one ISDN line. After two days non-stop loading, it was finally ready. I had absolutely no experience with Linux until that time. So I borrowed some books from our local library and read some time. But the most time I was learning by doing. I even built my own kernel shortly after that learning period.

It didn't take long until I became tired of the package system of Red Hat (rpm). In my opinion it has too many disadvantages. So eventually I switched to Gentoo (at first I got it to know under VMWare, then I installed it onto a real PC). Using a stage 3 install, Gentoo was ready to use in quite a short time. But it took some time until it was "really" ready to use (updating everything, installing X and KDE/Gnome, configurating everything...). After everything had been put together finally, I was really impressed how small and optimized to my personal wishes a Linux distribution could be. I really liked the package system "portage" of Gentoo. But after having it used for a year or so, I discovered one major disadvantage of Gentoo for myself: IMHO it takes too much time to maintain such a system for desktop use. But I think it is still very good for server use. There was also a short period I was using Debian. The package system is great, but in my opinion it lacks of up-to-dateness in the desktop environment.

So I heard about the "new" distribution called Ubuntu that made its name very quickly in the world of Linux distributions. I must say: it is the best distribution I stumbled upon this far. It has all the advantages of Debian and the up-to-dateness of Gentoo, while still assuring security and stability of packages. I recommended Ubuntu to a friend of mine who never used Linux before. Only with the help of some wikis and beginner's guides he was able to set up Ubuntu and use it just like he used Windows before. He finally banned Windows from his hard disk.

I really must compliment the people and community behind Ubuntu on the hard work and support. Thank you!

André