I've used various operating systems at various times, but yeah, I first got my hands on Linux in 1998 (a set of Cheap*Bytes CDs for Debian 1.3.1 that a guy from the Mansfield LUG gave to me and didn't need back because they were a full release cycle out of date) and have long since lost count of how many different Linux distributions I've used over the years.

I've not used Fedora as such, though I did use the basic non-enterprise version of RedHat back when there was such a thing (in fact, RedHat 6.0 was the first Linux distribution I used that included a pre-compiled ready-to-install X server on the installation CD), and Fedora is probably the closest equivalent to that these days. But I'm pretty sure there are new tools for installing applications since then. Sometime around version 7, Mandrake added something to their distro (which was initially based off of RedHat) called urpmi, which automatically looked up dependencies and prepended them to the install list in much the same way apt does for Debian (though I'm not sure apt existed yet at the time; CPAN.pm did exist already for installing Perl modules, though, and it did this as well). The Mandrake folks then proceeded to create a graphical front-end for it, which they called rpmdrake. I'd be VERY surprised if RedHat didn't follow in their footsteps, but I haven't used a recent version of Fedora, so I don't know for sure what it's called. The word “yum” sticks in my head as something I've seen on various web fora, but I could be getting Fedora confused with Suse (the other major distro I have not used).

> Hope you don't mind when I hit you with questions

No problem. I don't promise to know everything, but you can always ask.

BTW, I went ahead and installed Anthy and tried it out, and it works pretty well. For just kana it's only better than my hand-rolled mode in the sense that it works in applications besides Emacs (which, granted, saves flipping back and forth between windows and copying and pasting), but then it also does kanji, which is indeed very nice. Typing kanji in this way is fairly tedious (always having to look through a list to pick the one you want, since there are usually dozens of them that match the phonemes you typed; I don't know how the Japanese can understand their spoken language at all with so many homophones), but I can't think of a better way to do it that doesn't require the user to memorize a unique identifier or code for each and every character.

I've used various operating systems at various times, but yeah, I first got my hands on Linux in 1998 (a set of Cheap*Bytes CDs for Debian 1.3.1 that a guy from the Mansfield LUG gave to me and didn't need back because they were a full release cycle out of date) and have long since lost count of how many different Linux distributions I've used over the years.

I've not used Fedora as such, though I did use the basic non-enterprise version of RedHat back when there was such a thing (in fact, RedHat 6.0 was the first Linux distribution I used that included a pre-compiled ready-to-install X server on the installation CD), and Fedora is probably the closest equivalent to that these days. But I'm pretty sure there are new tools for installing applications since then. Sometime around version 7, Mandrake added something to their distro (which was initially based off of RedHat) called urpmi, which automatically looked up dependencies and prepended them to the install list in much the same way apt does for Debian (though I'm not sure apt existed yet at the time; CPAN.pm did exist already for installing Perl modules, though, and it did this as well). The Mandrake folks then proceeded to create a graphical front-end for it, which they called rpmdrake. I'd be VERY surprised if RedHat didn't follow in their footsteps, but I haven't used a recent version of Fedora, so I don't know for sure what it's called. The word “yum” sticks in my head as something I've seen on various web fora, but I could be getting Fedora confused with Suse (the other major distro I have not used).

> Hope you don't mind when I hit you with questions

No problem. I don't promise to know everything, but you can always ask.

BTW, I went ahead and installed Anthy and tried it out, and it works pretty well. For just kana it's only better than my hand-rolled mode in the sense that it works in applications besides Emacs (which, granted, saves flipping back and forth between windows and copying and pasting), but then it also does kanji, which is indeed very nice. Typing kanji in this way is fairly tedious (always having to look through a list to pick the one you want, since there are usually dozens of them that match the phonemes you typed; I don't know how the Japanese can understand their spoken language at all with so many homophones), but I can't think of a better way to do it that doesn't require the user to memorize a unique identifier or code for each and every character.

Fedora Core 4 was the first Linux distro that I ever did anything with. I
managed to install it to a secondary hard drive in my computer, take
screenshots, customize the wallpaper, connect to the internet, and set the
screensaver. Never figured out how to install applications! Ha ha. It's
embarrassing now. Now that they've zoomed through to Fedora 10 (or Fedora 11
in a month's time, it seems), I'm wondering how far it's come.

And hey – 300 kanji is a good place to start. (But good luck writing your
own conversion software for multiple readings, etc. Using an existing setup
would probably be a lot easier…but perhaps less gratifying.) I actually
set a goal for myself this Golden Week, since I am not traveling anywhere. I
will attempt to learn 400 new kanji characters, and corresponding
vocabulary. Sounds fun, huh? I'll probably fail, but I'll still have learned
more than I otherwise would have.

I've never tried Fedora as such, but I did use the desktop version of Red Hat for a while back when there was such a thing, though, and Fedora is probably the closest equivalent to that these days.

I wrote my own custom Emacs modes for typing kana (it's basically just a big fat associative list, some key bindings, and a couple of functions that look up what you've typed in the list and pull out the corresponding thing from another column). I haven't looked into typing kanji yet, but I'm starting to approach the point where I probably should soon (I now _recognize_ just over 300 kanji, which is a start I guess.)