David Paleino

About me

Hi to you, who are visiting this space.

Before continuing, let me introduce myself. I was born in March 13, 1987 in Mazara del Vallo, TP, a small city in Sicily - Italy, where I actualli live. I'm studying Dentistry and Dental Prosthesis at the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery at the University of Palermo.

I started using a computer when I was about 7 years old, and I got stuck with it. I mean, I started using MS-DOS in 1994, in my parents' office. Since then, computers became a passion, like every scientific thing.

After MS-DOS, I "obviously" started using Microsoft Windows systems: at the beginning the 3.1, then 95, 98, 98SE and ME.

As all "normal" Windows users, I went to XP. I understood the unbearable monstruosity and unmanageability of Redmond's system. I thought this since a while, but I had never had any occasion to feel it so deeply (well, yes, I accepted all versions of Windows before ME... ME was a sort of prophecy of XP's ugliness).

In 1998 I had already tasted the sweetness of GNU/Linux operating systems (beware: GNU/Linux, not simply "Linux"...): in that year, in fact, for the first time I had a Debian 2.0 Hamm. At that time I did not have an Internet connection so as to download an X server and one of the desktop environments. So I had to challenge a beautiful text shell! I was already used to MS-DOS, it was equally fascinating to discover all those new commands which didn't exist in my first OS.

Then I used (not in this order): RedHat 8.0 Psyche (I downloaded and burned all 5 CDs, and also printed the covers!), SuSE 7.1, Gentoo and Slackware (don't really remember which versions ): time passed, as the distributions installed on my computer.

"Naturally" all of these distributions were in "dual boot" with Microsoft's system. This because, although the years spent learning on the various distros, I did not feel ready for "the big jump" on the other side of the river. I just preferred to stay in the middle, and have benefits from both the systems.

The fatal moment came.

A night in December 2003 (or 2004?) my "loved" Windows XP decided not to start anymore. It decided to zap all my hard disk's content. One of the worst thing happened in years of Windows usership: I had always recovered, more or less, some data. That time nothing. Windows, for a missing (or corrupted, don't remember) DLL didn't want to start. And live GNU/Linux distributions showed me (sadly, I'd add) that my hard disk was empty. Simply and sadly empty.

So I decided to jump to the other side. That would have been the last thing Windows would have done to me: I downloaded Debian's netinstall, a minimal setup of about 100Mb, from which I could have downloaded the software I needed. Since then, I'm a happy Debian user. On my desktop I've got only it.

On my laptop, however, I'm still in dual boot: in fact, on laptops, GNU/Linux systems are not the best, as concerns hardware recognition. To lower laptop's costs, in fact, manufacturers base their hardware on Windows API calls. To work on GNU/Linux, then, they need to be emulated: this is the case of some WiFi cards (look at NdisWrapper drivers). And since many manufacturers don't even release specifications for the hardware they produce, it becomes a hard job to write a driver from scratch. It's because of this that I still mantain Windows on my laptop: it has the minimum space possible on my hard drive, but it's still there unfortunately. I use Windows only to use a TV-out that my graphical card has.

Well, what else? If you want to know more, if you have any curiosity about me, just contact me!

How to contact me

My projects

My computer

I've got a laptop, an ASUS A4000, I won it in a lottery (yes, I know, I'm damn lucky ). This is the hardware on it (using Debian device driver check page):

* = if anyone succeeded in having the items marked with * working, please drop a line... the Discussion page is there, my mailbox too, and you can even talk live to me using MSN, Y! or AIM!

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