The Linux Setup - Dave Neary, Red Hat
Dave’s setup is pretty standard, but it makes sense when you read how he described his ideal Linux setup: “The less time I spend thinking about what my desktop is running, and the more time I spend doing stuff, the better.” That wonderfully summarizes how I think about Linux. I turned to it because it was customizable, which allowed me to make it run more effectively for me, but now I run it because it works well, without a lot of fiddling. The customization angle might be less important to me because I now have a handle on what I like and dislike in a desktop experience, or it could be that the desktops are getting better. Either way, this interview is another example of how Linux is a great path for anyone looking to have a machine that just works.
You can find more of The Linux Setup here.
You can follow us on Google+ here.
Who are you, and what do you do?
Dave Neary, Open Source and Standards, Red Hat. We’re a team of people working to make all the Open Source projects Red Hat works with better.
What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?
Fedora 17.
What software do you depend upon with this distribution?
I use Thunderbird for email, Firefox for web, Empathy for IM, XChat-gnome for IRC, LibreOffice for office productivity, Simple Scan for scanning, Shotwell for photo management, Gnote for note taking, and then terminal for other stuff.
What kind of hardware do you run it on?
A Lenovo Thinkpad X220. Nice and light for travel, with a dock and bigger screen for when I’m at home.
What is your ideal Linux setup?
Whatever works :-) There are some pet hates I have, which are more integration and polish issues than anything else.The less time I spend thinking about what my desktop is running, and the more time I spend doing stuff, the better.
Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?
Sure! (With extra blurring of email client window).
Interview conducted January 28, 2013
The Linux Setup is a feature where I interview people about their Linux setups. The concept is borrowed, if not outright stolen, from this site. If you’d like to participate, drop me a line.
You can follow us on Google+ here and subscribe to our feed here.
The Linux Setup - Aditya Patawari, Systems Engineer/Fedora Contributor
Aditya is a technical guy with a simple setup. I think by now we know most people use their computers for typing and web-browsing. Aditya is no different, but Linux gives him access to more specialized tools that make his work easier. Of course, these tools exist for other operating systems, but it’s nice to think how easily all Linux users can access the same tools. Which is how and why I’m about to try out Hotot…
You can find more of The Linux Setup here.
You can follow us on Google+ here.
Who are you, and what do you do?
I am Aditya Patawari and I am a Fedora contributor. I blog about Linux and other open source technologies at various places. I have also been a speaker at the Fedora Users and Developers Conference, FOSS.in, GNUnify, and several other conferences. I am a systems engineer by profession. I work on large scale production deployments, making sure they’re always available and creating setup redundancy. I also manage tools like Puppet, Graphite and Nagios.
What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?
I have been running Fedora for quite a few years.
What software do you depend upon with this distribution?
I use Chromium for browsing, Hotot for microblogging and XChat for IRC. Because of the nature of my work, terminator and Vim are the most essential part of my setup.
What kind of hardware do you run it on?
I have a Lenovo x220 Thinkpad running an i5 processor with 4GB RAM.
What is your ideal Linux setup?
From a hardware perspective, I would want my machine to be lightweight and offer longer battery life. The device drivers should be easily available. The operating system has to be highly flexible to allow me to play with it easily and yet stable enough so that it does not crash with the kind of heavy-duty work I do. It should be fine running a couple of virtual machines.
Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?
My desktop generally has a bunch of terminals open. Here is a screenshot:
Interview conducted January 21, 2013
The Linux Setup is a feature where I interview people about their Linux setups. The concept is borrowed, if not outright stolen, from this site. If you’d like to participate, drop me a line.
You can follow us on Google+ here and subscribe to our feed here.
Steven Rosenberg : Fedora 18 with Xfce: My first impressions from live media
I played with Fedora 18 with GNOME and it was shockingly buggy. Fedora installs beautifully, but once it’s installed, it seems like I always run into complications.
The Linux Setup - Jayson Rowe, Server Administrator
I know Jayson from Google+, which despite its reputation as a ghost town, actually has quite a lot of Linux-centric people and conversations. Jayson is a true explorer, though. Reading through his interview, you can see he’s a KDE person who leans on Xfce when he doesn’t have the specs for KDE. The subtext is ‘anything but GNOME,’ which is a fairly common approach (there are also plenty of ‘anything but KDE’ users, too). But after Jayson submitted his interview, he wrote in to let me know he was giving GNOME a shot, which is pretty cool. It’s very easy to get caught up in your Linux favorites, but part of what makes it so much fun is trying out something different, if only for a few hours.
Jayson reports GNOME is growing on him. But he might just be humoring me.
You can find more of The Linux Setup here.
You can follow us on Google+ here.
Who are you, and what do you do?
My name is Jayson Rowe and I am a Server Administrator that also does some programming. I am also a Fedora Ambassador, a member of the Fedora Infrastructure team and a Fedora packager as well.
What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?
I use Fedora Linux on all of my machines (except one which runs Slackware). I ran Kubuntu/Ubuntu for several years before switching back to Fedora. Fedora simply meets my needs better now.
What software do you depend upon with this distribution?
I use the KDE Desktop on my main machines (Xfce on some other low-powered machines). I am a big fan of Sublime Text 2. I use it for practically everything from quick edits, to writing code to filling out this interview. Although SL2 is my main editor, I do use Kate and Vim (if in a terminal) some as well. I also rely a lot on Chrome, Dropbox and Wine as well as VirtualBox to get things done. I do a *lot* in virtual machines.
What kind of hardware do you run it on?
My setup at home is a system I built with an AMD Phenom II X4 965, 16GB of RAM, 23” and 22” LCD Monitors and a bunch of spinning platter drives. I tried an SSD but it died on me, and I haven’t gotten around to replacing it. I also have a little MiniITX Atom PC that is connected via Synergy that in a lot of ways serves as a third monitor (usually with Twitter up).
I also have a Nexus 7, an old HTC Incredible (running CM7, of course), a Dell Mini 9 netbook, a Dell Studio 15 laptop (running the Fedora Java Remix with GNOME Shell, as inspired by Jos) and an aging-but-still-useful Thinkpad Z60m (which is my lone Slackware machine).
What is your ideal Linux setup?
Intel i7 6-core
Decent sized SSD for ‘/’ and ‘/home’
Two big platter disks in a RAID-1 for ‘/tmp’, ‘/var’, ‘/data’ and swap.
16+ GB of RAM (would love 32GB).For a software setup, I’m very happy with Fedora, KDE and Xfce for my needs.
Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?
I don’t always see my desktop, but when I do, it’ll be a cool picture. I have quite a collection of images I get from InterfaceLift and I keep them in my Dropbox folder. In KDE I have it set to change the picture on each monitor every 15 minutes. My Xfce machines still have the Fedora Beefy Miracle fireworks.
Here is my main PC at home running KDE:
Here is my little Xfce PC at home that acts as my third monitor:
Interview conducted August 29, 2012
The Linux Setup is a feature where I interview people about their Linux setups. The concept is borrowed, if not outright stolen, from this site. If you’d like to participate, drop me a line.
You can follow us on Google+ here and subscribe to our feed here.
The Linux Setup - Amelia Andersdotter, EU Parliament
Amelia Andersdotter, 24, is the youngest member of the current European Parliament. She’s a member of the Swedish Pirate Party, a political party centered around copyright and patent reform. Given her political interests, it’s probably not a surprise that Amelia is a Linux user.
Amelia’s setup is fairly standard. But her Arch-broken XServer issue resonated with me, since that’s what forced me off of Arch a few years ago. Members of Parliament really are just like you and me!
You can find more of The Linux Setup here.
You can follow us on Google+ here.
What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?
I’m just in the process of changing my hardware. My old netbook, which is currently in semi-use, was an Asus Eee PC 1005PE, and ran Arch Linux with awesome window manager (awesome is the name of the window manager). Unfortunately, after the last awesome update, the package broke, my XServer refused to cooperate so for one month I was exiled in Fluxbox.
I also have an Asus K73S which is running Fedora (since one week ago). I’m completely new to Fedora and haven’t explored the potential of the system yet – the graphical interface leaves something to be desired but I also haven’t spent much time configuring this laptop. I like that Fedora chose to remain with kernel 2.6 because things work better with 2.6. On the Eee PC I experienced that the computer got slower after upgrading to 3.0, and even if nothing broke (like, how XServers normally like to break) it was still a bit of a pain. Emacs in Fedora does not include Tetris, since apparently there is some company in the US which may be able to make a trademark claim against someone if it were included.
What is your ideal Linux setup?
An ideal setup for me would be something like… Arch Linux, with a tiling window manager (I currently have my eyes on i3wm), Emacs, Firefox, Thunderbird, with urxvt as a terminal emulator.
Interview conducted January 10, 2012
The Linux Setup is a feature where I interview people about their Linux setups. The concept is borrowed, if not outright stolen, from this site. If you’d like to participate, drop me a line.
You can follow us on Google+ here and subscribe to our feed here.
The Linux Setup - Dave Whitinger, LXer
I know of Dave Whitinger from LXer, which is a lot of people’s must-read for Linux and open source news (obviously, it’s one of my daily stops). Dave has a fascinating setup. As you’ll read, it’s Fluxbox over Fedora, and as Dave points out, it allows him to use the same user interface for as long as he wants to. Thinking like this keeps Dave out of the UI wars and lets him focus on work. It’s a novel concept…
You can find more of The Linux Setup here.
Who are you, and what do you do?
I’m a Linux advocate and developer of community-oriented websites. I have created several Linux websites, most notably LinuxToday.com and LXer.com, the latter of which I am still involved in. I worked for Red Hat back when there were about 20 employees, and in the year 2000 I created DavesGarden.com and last year I created Cubits.org, which lets anyone create and host their own community with forums, articles and things like that.
I live on 90 acres in East Texas with my wife and five children where we keep all kinds of farm animals and grow huge gardens. I’m this year’s president of the Cherokee County Master Gardeners and am managing the Jacksonville, Texas farmers’ market.
What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?
I started with Slackware back in the mid 90s and switched to Red Hat Linux when I started working for that company. When Red Hat switched to Fedora I moved along with it.
Since then I’ve been using Fedora exclusively. I have tried out all kinds of distros out there but I always use Fedora for my “real work” machine.
What software do you depend upon with this distribution?
Vim, Firefox, Mutt, xterm, Fluxbox (along with the dockapps like wmbiff and wmbutton), ssh, rsync, git and mercurial, all the dev tools and libraries, mySQL, PHP, Apache, Rhythmbox, OpenOffice.org, the GIMP, gcalctool, MPlayer, Google Chrome, wget, nmap and tcpdump… I could go on for quite some time, actually!
What kind of hardware do you run it on?
A hand-me-down from a server that I dismantled several years ago.
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core Processor 4400+* (2.2GHz)
Tyan Tomcat K8E(S2865G2NR) motherboard
4GB of Patriot PSD1G400 memory
nVidia GeForce 7600 GT video card with dual 21” LCD monitors.What is your ideal Linux setup?
The one I have, of course! I’ve been using Fluxbox as my window manager for many years and I love it. I am super productive with the customized setup I’ve created and honed over time. Fluxbox lets me have tabs in any window, so I keep several xterms open with multiple tabs (switching between tabs with the Windows-key+tab).
Alt one through eight switches me to different screens. One is a browsing and communication page. Two is the GIMP and notes. Three is my main development desktop. Four is my email (Mutt, of course). Five is my music. Six is a series of always-on ssh sessions to my remote servers. Seven and eight are miscellaneous extra desktops.
Fedora is something that I am very comfortable with. It is reliable and consistent for me, and as long as I can compile and use Fluxbox, their decisions regarding GNOME or other desktops don’t affect me in the slightest.
Using dual monitors is critical for me. On window three, I have a slew of xterms open on the left screen, and my browsers on the right screen. In this way, I can do easy and rapid web development and that is important for me.
My wife playfully gives me a hard time for using Mutt for my mail. She chuckles when she sees me in this modern age using the exact same mail setup that I’ve used since the 1990s. But it works and it works well, and it makes me efficient and fast. My desktop runs Linux and is a tool to help me get work done. I don’t need or desire fancy graphics and fun toys that are really distractions.
I handle change poorly, and I don’t live on the cutting edge. For me, computers are a means to an end. A tool that enables communication and development of tools that enrich peoples’ lives and help them connect with like-minded individuals around the world. My ideal Linux setup is one that gets out of my way and lets me get my work done.
I predict that in 10 years from now, my desktop environment and workflow will be nearly identical to how it is today.
Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?
Sure.
Interview conducted June 12, 2011
The Linux Setup is a feature where I interview people about their Linux setups. The concept is borrowed, if not outright stolen, from this site. If you’d like to participate, drop me a line.
