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Welcome. The idea of self-sufficient living, providing for oneself, is central to the concept of individual freedom. At the core of the American ideal of personal freedom is the idea that you cannot easily free yourself from a system you depend on for your physical or economic survival. It has become popular in recent years to associate being self-sufficient with back-to-the-land, off-grid living, but this is only one, narrow application of the concept. One need not move to the country or adopt a radically different lifestyle to apply the concepts of self-sufficiency. It is far less expensive to start right where you are. The key is to always look for ways to eliminate or reduce dependency, whether that is dependency on a single vendor for a product you can't produce yourself, on an employer or the taxpayer for a pay check, a landlord for a place to live, an electric utility or oil company for energy, or the grocery store for your food. This is why this site runs almost entirely on Linux. The more dependent you are, the more your choices are reduced to a closed loop of offerings that are not necessarily in your best interests. The purpose of this site is to develop and teach methods to enable individuals to become as self-sufficient as they want to be. We refer to this as economic self-sufficiency. We have three main goals.
This
site runs entirely on Linux, Apache, and MySQL. Linux has been my
primary desktop operating
system since 2000. Windows 7 runs only as a
virtual machine. You can do all
the same things with Windows, but it will cost thousands of dollars and
you will be beholden to the whims of Microsoft. Dependency is
not freedom. Linux and
Windows each do some things better than the other. I
believe
you should use each one where it best serves your interests. Open
source is not limited to Linux. If you must use Windows, you should
definitely look for an open-source Windows application for whatever job
you require. That choice
should be informed by
actual experience. Our Full-on First
Linux Course teaches you to use Linux on your personal and business
computers, and we are developing a course called Open-source Windows
Applications to make people aware of open source options available for
Windows.
In
some cases, certification is required to do certain things, but to use
the information technology field as an example, the more vital question
is can you diagnose and repair
my
PCs, networks, or servers in a timely and
cost-effective manner using the resources on hand?
If so, certification becomes
negotiable. If not, of what real value is certification? We apply the
same principle to teaching you to start a home business, trade and
invest in the markets, building a raised garden bed, generate your own
power, or build your own tiny house.
When we title a lesson, Setting up DNS in Linux, you'll have a working DNS server running on your desk when we're done if you follow the directions properly. We don't refer you to a bunch of other sites, or try to up-sell you before you get the useful stuff. One caveat, we never put anything in the course work we haven't actually seen work and we do try to keep everything current, but we can't always guarantee our solutions will work due to differences in everything from the speed of Linux development to local ordinances. Always consult qualified experts and thoroughly test anything you find here before deploying it, particularly in a production environment.