Charles (Retired)

About Charles…

I’ve been using personal computers since before IBM released their PC in 1981, starting with the Commodore 64 and TRS-80. I got my professional start with mainframes. When my company started buying a few IBM PCs, I was the only person who showed any interest in them and it quickly became my job to support them.

Before long, I was offered a job on a PC help desk and spent the next 20+ years on various help desk jobs, working up the ranks to lead, coordinator and finally to supervisor. Several times over the years, opportunities arose to develop and present training classes.

In 2006, my company created a new position of technical trainer and I accepted the job. Since then I’ve been creating technical training and presenting classes.

My first attempt at using Linux was frustrating and, ultimately, a failure. I finally gave up and went back to Windows XP. But two things happened which persuaded me to try Linux again.

1. Ubuntu happened: A friend told me about a new Linux distro called Ubuntu, which was designed to be easy and to “just work.”

2. Vista happened: I saw several articles which talked about the substantial hardware requirements for Windows Vista, and also about the Digital Rights Management (DRM) which was going to be implemented. This inspired me to try Linux again, and Ubuntu made it easy to switch over.

After a few years of distro hopping (Kubuntu, Freespire, PC Linux OS, Mandriva, and Fedora) I settled on Linux Mint since it is easy to set up and use, yet powerful enough to do everything I need.

I stumbled onto the Linux Mint blog around the time they were talking about starting a podcast for Linux Mint. I liked the idea of contributing to the Linux community, and joined the project.