Idea: Linux for Home

[Brian Fahrlander]

Martin Laberge wrote:
> 
> I am living the same thing as you seem to live now.
> 
> I am a 30 years-experience Unix guy (over 45 old) and just lose my wife
> and my little girl of 4 1/2 years old, trying to keep up with living in Linux.

     Wow...that's very, very close; I turned 45 in May, and have two 
daughters, 19 and 21!

> For the last 7 years I was the R&D director of a company with 25 Linux workstations
> serving a batch or 50+ users on differents workstations in real time,
> and 3 Linux servers, 5 high-speed laser printers (60pg/min) with multiple trays
> for the multiples users, 10 different kind on single user lasers and inkjet printers,
> 25 palms for representatives sending orders from 500 miles away, a web catalog
> and command center for customers, and a C++ proprietary application for a manipulation
> of 18000 differents products, with 3600 differents customers/accounts, 
> of a batch of 350 differents suppliers... with all the things that those of you
> who have lived it can imagine that come with this infrastructure.

    It reminds me of Lee Lumber in Chicagao, where I was working to get 
them onto such technology, but repressed because it wasn't all free. (?) 
But this comes from the same guy who demanded I remove the firewall, 
'cause it was 'getting in the way of the customers'...

> One year later I loosed my wife, my little girl, my sole...

     Nah, not your soul; it's here amid the chaos to learn something 
from it.  I even know what that is, since I've basically done the same 
thing.  This effort to develop Linux work is a sign of that.

> Linux was, and will allways be the better thing you can use.
> But sometimes there are traps. Being alone in a bunch of others
> have a price. If there were others to maintain the cie, after my burn out
> then THIS would may had been different.

     Ya know, there's strength here....especially if we're in different 
time zones and all speak English. If we had a central place to post a 
Wiki for the effort (aside from Canonical) I could take calls when 
you're asleep, you could take calls while I'm at work, and someone else 
could take calls if we were both unavailable.

     I dont' know the size of your town, but the biggest marketing firm 
in the world, Microsoft, is so certain there's a business model in 
less-than-stunning-performance machines that they keep pushing WebTV. 
About 90% of the marketplace can be served when you cover email, 
browsing, document prep, and media playing...there *is* a market for 
this, or Microsoft wouldn't be wasting millions (ignoring the fact their 
actual WebTV hardware is laughable.)

     Payment would have to be localized; my clients would have to pay 
me, your clients pay you, but we must all spend some time taking calls, 
ya know? Do you realize how many computers would could convert, and then 
cover, if we got things rolling?  Millions.  And each cell could have 
it's profits, while the entire process makes more 'real' Linux jobs.

     This could be very big, at some point. I'm curious about how to do 
this...but I'm late for work at the bait shop....I mean...sushi bar.

     We'll talk!


-- 
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  Brian Fahrländer                 Christian, Conservative, and Technomad
  Evansville, IN                              http://Fahrlander.net/brian
  ICQ: 5119262                         AOL/Yahoo/GoogleTalk: WheelDweller
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