LCA2009: the leader of the band

Sam Varghese
Friday, 02 January 2009 05:05

Opinion and Analysis

When Leah finally got her first Commodore 64, the games entertained her for a while. "But, of course, those old disks used to fail constantly," she says. "So then I taught myself BASIC and machine code to bypass or repair the parts of the programs that were damaged to make my favourite games work again.

Microsoft Office 365

The next step was what she calls "learning how to manipulate" the BBS network at high school and later the Macintosh network at college. "I suppose I was always a bit of a hacker and a tinkerer, I've always loved a puzzle and computers really meshed well with that desire to solve problems and come up with creative ways of doing that," is how she puts it.

There is a chance that the hacking gene will surface somewhere down the line in her broader family. "Of my two sisters, my younger sister, Kerryn, is probably the most computer literate; as a early childhood teacher she embraces technology as an enabling tool for younger children, as well as for her son, Brayden," she says.

"And she's a good teacher - Brayden is likely to be the next computer geek in our family, he proudly refers to himself as a 'nerd' and causes his mother no end of grief now he's getting to know enough to be dangerous!"

After years of using Mandrake (now Mandriva) Linux, Leah is now making the move to Ubuntu - for purely functional reasons. She was introduced to Linux in 1998, when a friend gave her a copy of Red Hat Linux, after hearing her complaints about how much she disliked Windows and wished that the MacOS was available for the PC.

"I swapped to Mandrake soon afterwards, as it was just emerging as the Linux desktop system, with multimedia support and its easier to use control centre, and was hooked," she says. "I've been running a Mandrake/Mandriva server since 2002, which handles my file-sharing, web and print; and has gone from serving mail via Kolab to Zimbra."

She is in the process of moving across to Ubuntu. "Zimbra no longer supports Mandriva as a server system and mail systems are incredibly important to keep up to date due to the large number of exploits that can be thrown at them," she offers as her reason for the move.

"When it comes to distros, I'm really not precious - Linux is Linux at its core, and it just ends up coming down to the best tool for your particular job. I've also moved my media centre over to Mythbuntu, they've done great things with simplifying and preconfiguring everything and, really, that's what computing should be about, making things easier and doing all the hard work for us!"