Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Giving Back...

I've been using Linux for roughly 5 years now. I feel very comfortable with it. I'm actually studying for my LPIC exam right now. I thought I'd be ready for the exam in about a month, but then I looked at the required skills for it...so maybe about two months. XD. Anyway, sometime several months ago, I was hit with the realization that I wasn't "giving back" to the community at all. Sure, I had helped most (if not all) of my technically inclined friends set up a Linux partition. I've been trying to spread the work about free software. Actually, my dad has replaced Microsoft Office on all the computers at his company with Openoffice.org. But, I still felt like there was more that I could do. So, for the past several months, I have been deciding on a distribution that I would to contribute to. I could ramble on about the choices I had my decision narrowed down to and give my reasons for choosing for/against each one, but that would take a while. A LONG while. Well, my final decision was Fedora. Red Hat's community distribution. So, over the next week or two, I'm going to try and get involved some way or another. More than likely, I will try to help out with documentation initially. Why? Because it's horrible (not exclusively Fedora, but Linux and free software in general). Plus, I like it and I think I'm pretty good at it. Maybe I can help out with some more technical things later. I'm interested in Fedora's package management actually. I believe it is written in Python, so maybe I can contribute there later. Well, those are my plans. Also, for those reading, welcome to my blog. This is my first post. :)