Logo by Brian Downing      

Linux Experience

At IBM I had a very rich and diverse software environment. I was part of a group which provided the IBM Rochester (MN) lab a workstation-based work environment. It made extensive use of Andrew - Andrew User Interface System and the Andrew File System (once provided by Transarc, now part of OpenAFS). We had hundreds of tools from the Internet on our AIX machines.

So imagine my extreme pleasure when I left IBM and discovered the pleasures of Linux. While I don't use a fancy AIX machine anymore, I have a similarly rich and stable software toolset as at IBM. For bragging rights I can claim to have used Linux since the 0.90 kernels.

For the longest time I used Slackware and thought it was great. A few years ago I tired of needing to know so much about how things worked and switched to using Redhat 9.0 briefly and then Fedora. FC1 was pretty good, but I've been disappointed with FC2. It's no where nearly good enought IMHO. I used Suse 9.1 and have been very impressed. YAST is way way better than anything else I've seen. Ultimately, I left it behind, because I was unwilling to regularly pay for upgrades. I had hoped my employer would strike up a great deal with Suse and I could upgrade for a few dollars. It didn't happen, so I looked further.

These days I'm using a straight Debian (Sarge, stable) distribution. I'd tried Debian years ago, but was overwhelmed by the installation process where I had to guess which of the N thousand packages I wanted. It's gotten better so that I can actually get a usable system right off the bat. In fact now that I've learned to use synaptic, I can search for the packages I want. Indeed, I've even learned how to compile my own kernel and this idea of creating your own kernel package is v-e-r-y nice when you have to support more than one machine running Debian. Finally, I'll confess that having access to tens of thousands of packages is addictive. I can try out software with almost no effort and if I don't like it, I can remove it just as reasonably. This looks pretty good to me.

I had NeXT machine for several years and this experience taught me that it is possible to have a graphical interface that works and makes your life better. There was a time when this was not true. Today I've settled on KDE 3.2+. It really is a better mousetrap. Not as good as the NeXT, but getting closer.

Most recently I've had access to a large Mac laptop (running OSX 10.3) and now I understand why so many geeks have been converted over. I put a USB three button mouse on the laptop and continue to use it like I would in Linux or even Windows. The Mac gives me menus for my right clicks - I hardly know I'm not on a Linux laptop. Even better is the X11 integration and tools available with fink and FinkCommander. I'm not in the market for a new machine, but if I was, a Mini Mac might be just the ticket.

Linux Resources I Use

Meanwhile here are some resources that I've found useful:

• MySQL Home, a very impressive freely available SQL engine
• Apache Server Home
• PHP additions for Apache + MySQL is a dream for Websters
• Linux Documentation Project
• Linux Resources
• Linux HOWTOs
• Linux Mall Offers Linux-Related Material