Today has been a wonderful one, sort of :) Read on! No, it wasn't me getting to class or anything. My attendance this semester has been awful, I think I am just burned out from college (not like I am close to completing a Bachelor's Degree or anything) and the long drive to the school, which is 55 miles one way. I think physics is interesting, but that hasn't been enough to get me to come to class to hear the professor append this statement to every single thing he says: "sound sensible, it should be". I wish that professor would get off his hight horse and realize that maybe he sounds like a drone. His drawing up diagrams is even worse. I think it's safe to say that most of the students in this course have quit taking notes in class, because he waits until the students have taken a ton of notes, THEN says "you don't really need to know this".

Wait a second, didn't I just say my day has been a wonderful one? Haha! No, really, today I set up a dual-boot of Windows 98 and Linux Redhat 8 on my wife's machine. That's the time I *should* have been in class. :) Everything went pretty well, and I left some notes for her in an opened gedit file, so she can resume doing the few things she always does with the computer (create word docs, surf the net, work on her recipes log). In the notes I didn't mention that she could reboot the machine and log into Windows 98. I wonder if this approach, though a little sneaky, might be better for helping newbies such as myself become acquainted with Linux?

When I got to the college to work my shift as a Computer Lab Assistant, I decided to try and ssh into my box at home. It worked! From there, I ssh'd over to the machine that my wife uses, to edit that note I had left open for her. Hmm, that just reminded. Since, there was already an instance of the note open, maybe she won't see the changes I made to it. If she does, than that is some cool stuff :) My next task will be to see if I can download a large file like an ISO or maybe somethin smaller like the j2sdk, and see if I can burn that file remotely. Already, I have learned that you can't run apps with gui's (or can you?) such as GTK. If not, that is fine with me. What I have going now is very pleasing to me, since that means I can do away with floppy disks and even zip disks, and just copy my college work to the machine at home. Or, rather I can access the home machine and copy the stuff to the machine in the computer lab at the college.

I spent dang near four hours last night getting my path set right so that bash would see the java executable that I wanted it to see, not the first thing it could find (/usr/bin/java). Somewhere along the way, from following the advice of multiple persons, I had messed up the path and created a faulty sym link. And, seeking help online can be very tedious and sometimes perilous. So, I can use the j2sdk1.4.1_01 now. I've always thought that Java was a beautiful language, just the downfalls of it (speed of the jvm, not very low level) turned me off. But, now, having grown a little wiser in my computing years, I'm ready to tackle Java for fun.

I know that a lot of people come to advogato to learn new things in computing, and I didn't offer much of that. Hopefully, though, someone can take what I wrote in light of "pitfalls a linux newbie should watch out for" and maybe write up a document or tutorial on this.