Welcome!
Hi Steven M.,
Welcome to the Appropedia wiki. Please make yourself at home! If you need a general wiki-tutorial, see the main help page (or the more in-depth one on WikiEducator).
Check your preferences and be sure you verify your email address and turn on email notification if you'd like it -- you can find out when your talk page, or any page on your watchlist, is modified. You may want to upload a photo or information about yourself to your userpage (which is at http://appropedia.org/User:Steven_M.).
If you have a particular interest or project in mind, go ahead and start it! If you have questions or suggestions, the best place to leave them is at the Village pump - you should get a fast response. Or, feel free to leave me a note on my talk page if you have further questions, need help finding your way around, have a cool idea for a project, or just want to chat.
Glad to have you here!
Hi Steven,
I've been thinking about the porting issue. I do think it's best to have an original page, in the "Original:" namespace, and protected. At least in most cases it makes sense, where the original carries some authority because of who authored it.
If you make any progress on making the porting process smoother, please be sure an make notes of everything. And any questions, please ask - I'll usually respond more quickly than I did this time. Thanks for your work! --Chriswaterguy 07:02, 21 February 2009 (UTC)
Good work!
Hi Steven,
Just saw Stoves for Institutional Kitchens (original) - looks good.
How are you finding the porting process? Are the instructions clear, or could they do with improvement? Thanks! --Chriswaterguy 19:43, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
Thanks
I was going to thank you on your work on the internal combustion engine page, but I read your user page and it is creepy how much I identify with your sentiments. If you have time this summer, we would love for you to join us in Nicaragua.
--David.reber 18:32, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
BRIDGE Nicaragua
Did you see our Projects Page? --David.reber 17:22, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
Notes to self
Continue researching GNU agreement and practical ways of getting content under copyright approved. Clean up PATB Pages to port page and create categories. All most done! Find new content...see if there are new briefs to port. Wikipedia has a category: sustainable technologies, although it might be redundant here, maybe the high end tech stuff can have its own category? Ah Green Computing!!!
Highlighted projects and welcoming
Hi Steven,
Great meeting with you today. Here are the notes:
Highlighted project pages:
Suggested next highlights:
Standard greeting:
- Template:Welcome
- {{subst:Welcome|yourusername}}
or roll your own, like mine:
- User:Lonny/Welcome
- {{subst:User:Lonny/Welcome}}
Open, in new tabs, all talk pages on people that are all red, then paste the subst code and summarize with Welcome! See this welcoming matrix for some guidelines on greeting:
| Name | Talk | Contribs | Suggestion for Greeter |
|---|---|---|---|
| red | red | red | Greet! |
| red | red | blue | Check contribution (block if spam; help if needed), then comment on their talk page. Then add standard greeting. |
| red | blue | red | Probably already greeted… feel free to check. If not a greeting, add one. |
| red | blue | blue | Already engaged. |
| blue | red | red | Check name page, comment on it and greet appropriately. |
| blue | red | blue | Check name page and contributions, comment on it and greet appropriately. |
| blue | blue | red | Already engaged. |
| blue | blue | blue | Already engaged. |
Thank you, --Lonny 02:22, 9 April 2009 (UTC)
E-waste Installing Linux on old PCs
Great to hear!
My knowledge is limited, but what I've learnt:
- Join a local LUG - look out for days when they help people install Linux.
- Vector & other Slackware distros don't seem user friendly - I looked into it, but with only about 2 years experience in Linux, I didn't feel up to it.
- Openbox (window manager) and LXDE (desktop environment using openbox) are really nice and lean. LXDE is lighter than XFCE, but nicer to use. Expect to see these become more popular. You can add them to any distro, but where they're not one of the standard options, in some cases there can be clashes (probably a bigger problem on a laptop).
- I like to find a distro where it's set up to be lean, but it's easy to use.
- I'm not hung up on installing free stuff only - I want Skype and I want video codecs. (I install Linux firstly because I want an operating system that does what I need, not to make a statement.) Ubuntu makes for a little hassle with this - you have to add repositories and certain packages (programs and codecs), and the new user doesn't know this - they just wonder why things don't work. Debian makes it hard work for a newbie, especially if any of your hardware doesn't have a perfectly free (open source) driver.
- I strongly prefer something that is at least based on a major distro, and uses the package repositories of that distro. There's the potential for better support and in theory for bug fixing (Ubuntu is buggy anyway, in my experience, but it does have good support). It also means far more software choice. Basically, this leaves me with one distro:
- CrunchBang Linux: is based on Ubuntu, but uses Openbox, but with some very cool usability tweaks, including partial use of LXDE, and comes with Skype and video codecs installed. This is the only distro I know that comes with Openbox by default
- Well, actually Debian 5.0 comes with with LXDE as one of its standard options, which means it has Openbox - but Debian was unnecessarily difficult for me. When it didn't even recognize the hard disk on my ThinkPad, I thought: if this is a sign of how things work in Debian, I'm trying something else.
- I've heard good things about [Puppy Linux] - it was flaky when I tried it ~2006, but may have improved. It's also kind of a backwater in Linux development - a lot of non-standard stuff, running as root by default (which sounds like a bad idea to me and to many Linux people), with its own kind of installation, and far fewer packages than a major distro. So unless you need to go super-light (even lighter than Crunchbang)
- Anything I've said related to something being hard to use (e.g. Debian) becomes much less of an issue if you have geeky friends close by and/or belong to a LUG. My preference though: Get something you can mostly handle yourself. You'll still need help, but no need to make it harder than necessary.
Thanks for the question. I've thought of blogging on this, and I think I've just written my blog post :-). --Chriswaterguy 13:22, 10 April 2009 (UTC)