I wandered lonely in a crowd ...

My recent attempts at pretending to be a grown up have caused me to stumble away from my nice, secure (if somewhat insecure) PC-running-Windows environment and headlong into the bewildering, seemingly drug induced confusion that is Linux.

The reason for this is that my income is primarily from telephony based products and a recent contract delivered me to the world of Asterisk, and any serious commercial application of Asterisk tends to force you to use Linux.

I must admit that, despite my initial hostility I have become completely won over. Yes, it's quirky. No, I STILL can't get my sound card to recognise a microphone. Yes, it's a bit like learning Mandarin. No, I have no idea what my main hard drive is called. But, despite all of this, I now have Ubuntu 7.10 as my main operating system with a laptop running Vista for critical emergencies only (and for running RemoteAdmin for access to machines that run nothing else).

The purpose of this blog is not, however, to convert people to Linux, but to offer up little snippets of advice or code that may well help others who feel a bit lost realise that they are not alone in what seems to be a crowd of people who all know where they're going.

I will only be posting sporadically on subjects such as Asterisk, Freeswitch, Perl, PHP & various Linux utilities such as GREP, AWK, SED, etc.

I hope these posts help someone, somewhere.