Ubuntu Wiki

About me

I'm a grandmother who uses Ubuntu and the command line. I believe that learning is not about age; it's about curiosity and persistence.

My interest in how things work goes back to my childhood in the 1950s, a time when girls weren't supposed to be too clever. I got into trouble on more than one occasion for investigating, and sometimes breaking, various things!

My first contact with computers was in 1987 - a Mac Plus with 1 MB(!) of RAM - and I was hooked. I subsequently had a DOS computer but my first and only version of Windows was/is Vista.

I did my first install of Ubuntu (7.04) in mid 2007, with heart in mouth, hoping I wasn't going to wreck my machine - and maybe get lectured by the local computer techs for doing so. Fortunately, nothing dreadful happened.

I asked my first question on the forums a few days later, not quite knowing if I was going to be taken seriously or given a dismissive reference to Google or man pages. Fortunately, the response was friendly and helpful, and I've been around ever since.

Contribution

Ubuntu Forums

I help out with topics that I've experienced or used personally. At one time that was dialup and Scim input software for non-Latin scripts. In more recent times, it's been lighter weight installs such as openbox and xfce. I also play with a home server, in the hope that one day I'll know enough to run a VPS.

I get involved with testing new releases and reporting bugs, though I can take extended times off when other life activities (they do exist!) get in the way.

I like to be fairly certain that my advice is accurate before I post, which means that my post count is probably lower than it could be. I believe also in making it easy for a non-technical person to understand.