My Linux Rig

Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is Mark Anderson, and I am a currently a special education ELA teacher and coordinator at a public middle school in the Bronx. I write about education matters on my blog Schools as Ecosystems as well as on GothamSchools. I am a big fan of Linux-based systems and of the open source movement. I have written about the potential that open sourcing curriculum development holds in the field of education. You can also find me on Twitter @mandercorn.

What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?

On my main laptop, my trusty old Dell Inspiron B130, I run Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. On my old Acer Aspire One netbook, I just recently switched from Ubuntu to Peppermint Linux 3, which has injected much needed speed on that machine. It has become the tool I use for writing.

I also use an Asus Transformer TF101 running EOS, to keep up with newsfeeds, and a Google Nexus smartphone. I’m looking forward to giving Ubuntu for phones a spin when it is finally released.

What software do you depend upon with this distribution?

I do my lesson planning using Google Drive on Chrome. I’ve become pretty reliant on Google over the years, as it neatly centralizes my documents and lessons and allows me to share them easily. I originally sought to use LaTeX to open source curriculum, but found it way too technical for my abilities, so I now share my lessons for modification or reuse via Google.

I use Polly for Twitter when on my laptop, Lightread for feed reading, LibreOffice when I’m not using Google Drive, Spotify for Linux, and Dropbox to coordinate my files on my different platforms. On my netbook, I use GWoffice for writing and Chromium for browsing. On my Android tablet and phone, I use Tweetcaster, Pocket, Google Currents, Feedly, Press, and Pulse to read articles and skim for information. I like to utilize a diverse selection of feed readers because it seems like they each expose different sorts of information.

What kind of hardware do you run it on?

I’m using a Dell Inspiron B130 and an Acer Aspire One netbook as my main productivity machines.

What is your ideal Linux setup?

Eventually, when my old laptop finally gives up the ghost, I fantasize about getting a Dell XPS 13 and running Ubuntu on it.

Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is James Nelson, and I am a computer musician who you might know as Retro Banana. I make a genre called “synphony,” my own creation that has classical styles, electronic instruments, and a prominent drum beat.

What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?

I use Ubuntu 12.10 64-bit on my laptop.

What software do you depend upon with this distribution?

I mostly rely on Qtractor — it’s my all-in-one program that can do everything from sequencing MIDI to bouncing down my synthesizer tracks to audio. Because I record very little, I use softsynths like ZynAddSubFX, and, my personal favorite, amSynth.

What kind of hardware do you run it on?

I use an Acer 5735 with an Intel Core 2 Duo, and a 64GB SSD.

What is your ideal Linux setup?

My ideal Linux setup is Microsoft’s Surface running Ubuntu. Unity would use a tiling window manager instead of compositing.

Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

I make good use of both workspaces and screen space. I keep Qtractor on one, and Qjackctl and softsynths on the others.

Who are you, and what do you do?

I am Mary Gardiner of the Ada Initiative. We’re a feminist non-profit supporting women in open technology and culture. I co-founded the Ada Initiative, and my title is Director of Operations and Research. Much as roles in a small startup are blurry they are for us too: my work includes everything from policy work, public speaking, training, business administration, bookkeeping, systems administration and JavaScript programming.

Other things I do include caring for my young child; blogging; the odd bit of swimming, cycling and yoga; and very occasional scuba diving. I am in the very last stages of a PhD in computational linguistics: in the next month or so I need to do the final revisions of my thesis in line with my examiners’ comments and then I will graduate some time this year.

What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?

I run Ubuntu on my laptop. To date I’ve always run the latest stable release, and occasionally the upcoming release when it’s in beta, but my time for upgrading software is diminishing and I’m considering switching to using only LTS releases, even on my laptop.

I am curious about how Fedora is doing these days, but realistically switching distributions is more work than upgrading Ubuntu so I am likely to stick with the path of least resistance.

What software do you depend upon with this distribution?

I run GNOME Shell rather than Unity after having tried them both quite briefly. It works for me, although I’ve also enjoyed using tiled window managers a lot, so I am hoping the shellshape GNOME Shell extension matures further and allows me to use a simple tiled manager.

I use Firefox for web browsing and increasingly for webapps also (I use Google Apps for work). I use Pidgin for IRC and IM, mostly for the feature that lets me set different statuses in different accounts, so that I am not equally available to everyone I know all at the same time. I’ve used irssi for IRC in the past and may again at some point. I use mutt for mail, together with Postfix (in satellite mode) and offlineimap.

When I code, it’s almost always in Python, so Python and many Python libraries are installed on my machines.

For my PhD thesis I also had LaTeX installed, 2E originally and later TeXLive, so that I could use xelatex. I wrote a whole series of blog entries on useful LaTeX packages for academic writing. For shorter pieces of writing I use LibreOffice, when I need control over look and feel, and Google Docs otherwise. I edit plain text and code in Vim.

zsh, ssh, rsync and rdiff-backup play important supporting roles generally.

On my servers my key software is Postfix for mail, BIND9 for DNS, nginx for HTTP(S) and Dovecot for IMAP, together with WordPress for most of my websites.

What kind of hardware do you run it on?

My laptop is a Dell Vostro 3300 that I purchased in 2010. When I was finishing my PhD thesis in 2012 I bought a 24” Philips monitor to use with it. Before that I was reliant on the laptop’s screen. Now when at my desk I use the external monitor, a Microsoft Natural keyboard and a USB optical mouse of whatever brand happened to be selling the last time my mouse broke.

My servers are a Linode VM and a Shuttle box that AusPCMarket built for me. Building my own boxen comes from the same non-existent energy budget that trying new Linux distributions comes from.

What is your ideal Linux setup?

More or less what I have, I guess; I am not very ambitious. There’s probably no such thing as too many screen inches or too much RAM though.

Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

It’s probably time to search Flickr for a more cheerful background.

Who are you, and what do you do?

I teach, write, speak, advise, invest and, overall, keep pretty busy.

What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?

Ubuntu 12.10.

What software do you depend upon with this distribution?

LibreOffice, browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Chromium), Thunderbird email, VLC, Banshee, VMWare for several must-use Windows applications, and a bunch of others.

What kind of hardware do you run it on?

Lenovo ThinkPad T430s.

What is your ideal Linux setup?

I’m fairly happy with this setup. Wish I could have a few niche applications that match the quality of some Windows and Mac programs, however…

Editor’s note: I think he means applications like this:

Wish I could find a Linux screencasting application that actually worked. Everything I try fails. Looks like Windows for this task..

— Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor)

February 21, 2013

Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

Who are you, and what do you do?

I am many things. Software Developer, Systems Administrator and DevOps are all hats I wear, depending on what I’m doing. However, I would consider myself primarily a student.

What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?

On my primary laptop I run Ubuntu 12.04, pretty close to stock. I tend to stick with the plain vanilla stuff that works with my somewhat finicky hardware (ATI graphics card) out of the box, and Ubuntu does an excellent job of handling hardware support for my laptop, while still delivering me fairly recent versions of software. It’s a nice balance between bleeding edge and stability, which is hard to get elsewhere.

What software do you depend upon with this distribution?

I primarily live in the terminal, but I do have a few exceptions:

• Sublime Text 2. Excellent text editor with IDE-like features, but without the bloat. I’ll also swap places with Redcar, a jRuby-based editor. Both are nice, and I use them interchangeably.
• gnome-terminal. My favorite terminal emulator.
• Firefox. I recently made the jump from Chrome to Firefox (after many years as a devoted Chrome user), which is something not many people do (or so I’m told). However, it’s worth it for the performance, specifically how it handles loads of tabs easily on my secondary, “mobile” laptop (with only 2GB of RAM).
• VirtualBox + Vagrant. This lets me handle my virtual machines easily and (somewhat) painlessly. It’s a very nice way to run a mini infrastructure locally, and it has a nice reset button. It also integrates with Puppet, which brings us to…
• Puppet. I use Puppet (a configuration management system) to manage my systems (even my laptops!), and to install all the *other* software that I won’t mention here (build dependencies, things like that).
• Byobu with tmux backend is a lifesaver for when I’m using my primary laptop at home. I’ll toss a terminal with byobu up on one screen and have it show my tests and/or logfiles. It makes life a lot easier. I recommend that you look into it.

I also use the excellent Faenza Iconset, one of the few things I change in terms of the user interface.

What kind of hardware do you run it on?

I run it on a ThinkPad T61 with a 2.1GHZ CPU, 2GB of RAM, and 250GB hard drive. A fairly vanilla system there, with my primary “workstation” laptop being a HP 2000 of some flavor (I forget the exact model number), with a 1.6GHZ CPU, 4GB of RAM, 15” display and a dedicated AMD Radeon Graphics card. The HP (when at home) spends its time hooked up to a 19” external display I got off Amazon. I also have a S3 bucket for backing some things up and a 500GB Western Digital drive that I have for local backups.

What is your ideal Linux setup?

Money is no object, right? Right. Ok, get ready.

My ideal (as in, dream) setup would be as follows:

Home server cluster (you’ve gotta have something to run all my VMs on!) would be two HP ProLiant MicroServers maxed out with 8GB RAM each, and then shoved with hard drives. I have no idea what I’d put on those hard drives, but hey, a guy can dream can’t he?

Then, probably one of those fancy, shiny, unavailable-as-of-right-now Project Sputnik machines, or if that’s not available, then a tricked-out System76 Gazelle Professional, which would primarily be a SSH and web browsing machine (which is, uh, shall we say overkill) but would also serve as a VM host or development platform for those few times I’m not able to access my ‘cloud’.

Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

Here is my primary machine. As you can tell I don’t change a lot of visual things. I use Unity, but that is more because it fits my workflow (and is the default on the install, saving me time) than anything else.