Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
I am a physician and a postgraduate student of Hematology. I live in the city of Chengdu, sitting in the southeast of China, a beautiful place where you can have much great food.
I first knew a PC when I was no more than five years old. At that time, the PC was nothing but a video game player with which I inserted a floppy disk and typed some letters, and played. I learned barely nothing but several commands in DOS. After a few years, I started to write some Basic programs when I was older. I was keen on programing, I tried to write some programs to draw complex curves and play music. I even tried to write a game myself but didn't manage to do so.
In 1999, I bought my first desktop. Intel Celeron 333, 64M memory plus 4M graphic card was a popular profile at that time in China. Anyhow, at that time, a desktop like that would cost an ordinary employee like my father almost one month's income. That desktop was pre-installed with Windows 98 by the retailer, a pirated version, of course. For most of the PC consumers in my country, Microsoft Windows was their only choice, otherwise they would pay much more for a Macintosh. But most of us did not pay for software, instead we spent no more than 1 dollar to buy a pirated CD with Windows in the flea-market.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, the Internet boomed in my country. More and more people began to download pirated Windows systems packed inside a ghost file. I updated my second desktop's OS to Windows XP too. But I gradually found that such files were always packed with trojans and backdoor programs aiming at peeping into private information like credit-card passwords, codes for e-mail or Warcraft accounts, etc.
To get rid of these risks, I tried Ubuntu systems on my desktop, that was Ubuntu 7.04 or 7.10. The boot logo was so nice - more beautiful than what it now looks like. With great passion, I spent quite a lot of time to set up the system before I really began to “use” it, because at that time many settings can not be modified in a graphic interface. One of the most attractive things was that when you need special software, you can find almost any program you want and download it without difficulty, rather than search for it and its crack all the way around the Internet, and jump from site to site in order to locate a faster server. However, the system broke down several times, and finally it became unbootable. I tried to fix up the problem myself, but did not make it because I was not familiar with Grub. So I gave up, and sadly shifted back to the risky pirated Windows XP.
About 1 year later, I learned that a release version of Ubuntu system was available for netbooks. So again, I installed this system, but this time on my ASUS EeePC-1000HE. It was about one year and a half ago. Before that, I tried the OS the manufacturer offered and Moblin 2.0 (a system for netbooks initially developed by Intel but now joined with Meego). I was satisfied with neither of them. They had many defects in function and looks, unlike Ubuntu. This time, Ubuntu worked well and works well up to the very moment I write this sentence with OpenOffice. The system has been updated from 8.04 to 10.10 all the way. I am very surprised but so happy to find that Ubuntu really has made so much progress as it upgraded. For example, I can select any popular source server in a GUI instead of beginning with “sudo gedit…” So many applications like R-Kward (package for scientific statistics, and its GUI), Chromium, Adobe PDF reader, have been added to the Software Center or Synaptic package manager, so that I have almost forgotten how to type “sudo apt-get…” 
. For a none-skillful user, using commands to do everything is really difficult, though now I can use them a little when necessary. Also, I am able to use OpenOffice Writer and Bibus (an application for bibliography management) to write my papers. To write in Chinese, I choose IBUS, a more convenient input method compared to SCIM, as the default input method. Also, I can make use of Jemboss (a package for biological research) to make alignments of the DNA sequences as soon as I get them in the laboratory, but without worrying about having the system infected by any trojan or virus. Another thing to be emphasised is that I can finally read Full Circle Magazine through Chromium (alias for Chrome web browser in Linux), and all the bookmarks and settings are cloned intact. Of course, I should not forget “gconf-editor”, with which I can easily set so many parameters that we might have set with gedit or vi.
In addition to all the advantages I have mentioned above, this time Ubuntu is becoming more and more good-looking than ever before, though many old users probably miss the classical Human theme. I enjoyed the style the designer offered for netbooks, these icons are large enough for ordinary users, and they have bright colors and look really lovely. However, I gave up this, because my netbook turned out to be quite slow. So I went back to the original gnome interface. I selected a nice wallpaper from a KDE wallpaper package I downloaded through Synaptic Package Manager. I also made a dock which I had always been crazy about since I first saw it on an Imac, docking all those commonly used programs on it as you can see in the first snapshot. I love the gmail gadget. It looks nice and will check mail for me every time I log in and tell me how many messages are left unread. On the system panel, I placed as few buttons as possible since the screen is relatively narrow. I set the background color to brown, for I would for once or twice miss the classic style of Human too. I reduced the number of working areas to only two, one for working, the other for entertainment. Simple is the best, isn't it? Thanks to god, in spite of the integrated graphic card, it can still display some special effects, for example, switching between working areas like what Windows 7 can do (see picture 2). I think this is even cooler. So I could always be somewhat flattered when I showed of my desktop to my friends. By doing that, I hope they would be struck by Ubuntu and began to use it too.
All in all, I am now more than satisfied with my current system. But can you believe there is even more to be expected? Though life as a physician and a medical student can be sort of mechanical and tiresome, Ubuntu really adds much joy and excitement to my life anyway.