Welcome!

Welcome to Open Source Home!

I have set a goal for myself of moving all of my computer-based home management—everything from tracking finances to storing recipes, from creating my Christmas cards to organizing my address book, from producing home videos to streaming music to every room in the house—to free and open-source software*.

Inspired by Mer and Dani at Living Behind the Curve, I'm going to start by setting up my laptop with Ubuntu, and then go from there. I'll chronicle my open source adventure here, and you can follow along and laugh, or maybe—just maybe—get some inspiration to try it out for yourself.

I will admit that I have a bit of background in this: I used to work in a university IT department that had a strong commitment to open-source software, and I did my first successful Linux install (an early Red Hat distribution) in 1999. I had practically no knowledge of UNIX at the time, but I was still able to get it up and running with a lot of online help from the open source community, which is probably the most generous group of folks on the Internet when it comes to sharing their knowledge and experience. I want to contribute back to that community by showing other home-management software users like myself how cool and empowering it can be to be able to make your computer work the way you want it to, all on your own.

So again, welcome! I hope you'll find something of value here.

* "Free" and "open source" aren't always the same. I'll talk about that in a later post.