At my college, I have volunteered to teach faculty, staff, and students the advantages of using Linux. After doing it for a couple of years, I have come up with a few tips that others might find helpful when showing new Linux users the ropes.

I'll start at the end by telling you that I'll finish this with a discussion of my “Distro of Choice”, Gentoo. But before we get there . . . It royally annoys me when people say that Linux is too hard to learn!

"...Emacs is an extensible, customizable, full-screen text editor. You can learn enough to be productive in Emacs in 30 minutes, but there is enough to learn about Emacs to keep you busy for years. The goal of this tutorial is to show you enough so that you are comfortable using Emacs as a work environment, not just as a text editor..."

So I have said that Linux is one of the keys to creating a truly free flow of information in the computer world. As such this is my first article on Linux geared towards the activist community. I'll start with a basic introduction and next week I'll start talking about some things you can do with it.

I use a ton of software applications, but a major portion of the time I spend using a computer goes to writing, and creating documents. There are many good open source tools for everything from word processing, to desktop publishing, to booklet creation, to weaving words and graphics together.

"...Thankfully Emacs has the table mode as part of the standard distribution. Invoke table-mode as M-x table-insert and create the table. Answer the wizard questions and enter the data for the columns. Once you've written the data into the table, generate the LaTeX table by hitting C-^ and choosing the export format as latex..."

Well, since I've gone through both Ubuntu and openSuSE Linux, and my curiosity about Unix systems in general has really started to kick in, I've decided to go through a few more variants to see what they are like...The next candidate is Mandriva Linux, currently on what they term their "Spring 2008" distribution.