The Linux Setup - Dolores Portalatin, Admin/Designer
Dolores has an interesting setup, especially her window manager, but I’m really most impressed by the amount of outreach she does in the Linux and Free and Open Source communities. I found Dolores through Arch Linux Women, as I was trying to diversify the kind of people I interview here. Linux is an amazing concept that speaks to lots of different people, but the public face can be a bit homogenous. Dolores and her work helps to more accurately represent the typical Linux users, which seems to be getting less typical—both demographically and in terms of technical skill—all of the time.
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Who are you, and what do you do?
My name is Dolores Portalatin aka meskarune. I work for Linode LLC, a VPS hosting company and do some freelance work in graphic and web design. I first switched to Linux in 1998 (one guess why) and haven’t looked back. I spend my free time painting and contributing to various open source projects. My primary focus for the last seven years has been on Arch Linux. In 2012 I founded Arch Linux Women - an organization that aims to increase the contributions of women to Arch Linux and FOSS in general.
What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?
I used to be a Debian user, but wanted something more updated. After distro-hopping for about a year, I found Arch and really loved it. I have Arch Linux installed on all of my computers and production servers. I occasionally play with FreeBSD and Haiku as well but don’t use them as my main OS.
What software do you depend upon with this distribution?
I use herbstluftwm (hlwm) as my window manager. Hlwm is a manual tiling window manager similar to i3. It’s very fast and flexible and you can write scripts for it in any language. I use urxvt as my terminal emulator and vim for text editing. I have some Python and bash scripts for server monitoring and use tools like Munin and AWstats. I use WeeChat for IRC, Pine for email, and newsbeuter for RSS feeds. Midori and ELinks are my primary web browsers (Midori has very low resource usage, which is great for netbooks). For graphic design, I use GIMP, Inkscape and ImageMagick. The great thing about using libre software is the lack of copyright and licensing concerns. I think more people should adopt these tools in their work.
What kind of hardware do you run it on?
I have a home-built desktop computer I use as my work horse, a small computer with two HDTV’s for monitors as a media center/file server, some Linode VPSs and an ASUS Eee PC netbook that I use to ssh into my other boxes. I like having the netbook for mobility, so I can work at the coffee shop or in the park.
What is your ideal Linux setup?
I would love to have something like the MetroNap EnergyPod, with a huge overhead monitor, built-in speakers and a wireless split keyboard. I’d love a netbook with four cores and a 24-hour battery life too (I don’t think they exist yet). Having video glasses would also be fun, but I don’t know how practical they are.
Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?
Sure.
Interview conducted January 22, 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.
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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.
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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.
An interview with Derek Sivers
An Arch user on The Setup!
Nice!
The Linux Setup - Jonathan Roberts, TuxRadar Podcast
One of my favorite podcasts, Linux or otherwise, is TuxRadar, which is produced by the editorial team of Linux Format magazine, an English publication. Jonathan Roberts is a TuxRadar host presenter/Linux Format editor, so I was especially excited to see what kind of system he uses.
Also, if you’re not already listening to TuxRadar, it’s something you definitely want to do. It’s funny, informative, and thought-provoking. And the European perspective can be especially enlightening.
You can find more of The Linux Setup here.
Who are you, and what do you do?
My name is Jonathan Roberts and I recently became the staff writer for Linux Format magazine. The magazine’s permanent staff also put together a fortnightly podcast called TuxRadar, so since joining I’ve also been a contributor to the podcast. It’s mostly about Linux, but always lots of fun.
Before joining the team at Linux Format, I studied Theology at Exeter University. I also contributed to the Fedora Project in various guises, where I was known as JonRob, ran the Questions Please podcast (http://www.archive.org/details/QuestionsPleaseOnFreeSoftware) and attempted (but failed) to launch a campaign promoting free culture called Free Me (http://www.archive.org/details/FreeMe_DVD).
What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?
I run Arch Linux, and I love it. It’s fast, always up to date and is actually the most stable Linux distribution I’ve ever used. It takes a little while to get set up, but thanks to the amazing Beginners Guide anyone can do it and it’s well worth the investment.
What software do you depend upon with this distribution?
I’m not that fussy about software and often experiment with different options to see what works best for me. At the moment, I write my articles in Vim, and I use Chromium a lot for research etc. I used to use gedit, but when preparing an article on the 50 best Linux applications, Vim got such glowing reviews that I had to give it a go!
I also use VirtualBox for testing distributions or setting up servers/development environments when researching an article. It saves me breaking my system and having to re-install it all the time.
What kind of hardware do you run it on?
I use a Toshiba Satellite laptop - an R630 to be exact. It’s a great machine, and it was a real bargain too. It has 2GB RAM - I’d love another 2GB sometime soon - a Core i3 processor, integrated Intel graphics and a Broadcom wireless chip that uses the open source drivers. Everything works out of the box with 2.6.38+, so it’s an ideal machine in my mind.
As well as all those components, it’s got a 13-inch screen, is incredibly thin and light with a 3-4 hour battery life. Since I carry it to and from work everyday, these are really important features to me.
What is your ideal Linux setup?
Just give me another 2GB RAM and I’ll be thrilled.
Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?
Sure, though there’s not a lot to see since Gnome Shell hides everything! When I’m at work I have an external monitor and keyboard connected as well, hence the strange look of the screenshot.
Interview conducted 9/12/11
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.
The Linux Setup - Chris Forster, Academic
I was very excited when Chris Forster agreed to participate, because the academic perspective, especially the humanities perspective, isn’t always very visible within the Linux community. Chris does more than get academic work done, though. He does it with a fairly hardcore setup that might make some computer science faculty gulp in fear and wonder.
You can find more of The Linux Setup here.
Who are you, and what do you do?
I just defended my doctoral dissertation in the English Department at the University of Virginia on the literature of the early twentieth century and obscenity (if you’re thinking of Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’ Lover, you’re in the right ballpark).
Like most graduate students (particularly in the humanities), I earned money chiefly by teaching—often first-year composition. I’ll be staying at UVA for one more year as a postdoctoral teaching fellow, teaching courses on twentieth-century literature. (After that, I’m looking for work; so if you need a scholar of modernism let me know.)
What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?
I spend too much time tinkering around with distributions. There are machines somewhere in my house running SliTaz, Slackware, and CrunchBang (which runs great on the eee, though I use that machine less frequently since buying a new laptop battery). Right now my primary desktop computer (the main, “family” computer) is running Ubuntu 11.04. I know I’m in a minority, but I quite like the Unity interface—or, I like it theory. In practice it is still a little buggy, but I’m trying to give it a fair chance.
On my laptop, I just started running Arch Linux (with XMonad as my window manager) a couple of weeks ago. It is definitely a learning experience, but I am really loving it. The rolling release schedule is attractive, package management is great, and I’m learning more about my system and how to best configure it.
I also have a home server which I use to store files and serve media. It runs Amahi on top of Fedora 12.
What software do you depend upon with this distribution?
Above all, I’ve come to rely on emacs. I regularly use flyspell and AuCTeX for writing, and yasnippet for editing html. I also use org-mode pretty extensively. Org-Mode is, I think, the killer app for emacs. I started gradually using it to organize notes; soon I was using tags and other things. I am now keeping all my notes for reading, writing, and teaching, as well as other to-do lists, in .org files. I like the idea that emacs is old, time-tested software. As Kieran Healy writes, emacs will “be there when the icecaps melt and the cities drown, when humanity destroys itself in fire and zombies, when the roaches finally achieve sentience, take over, and begin using computers themselves - at which point its various Ctrl-Meta key-chords will seem not merely satisfyingly ergonomic for the typical arthropod, but also direct evidence for the universe’s Intelligent Design by some six-legged, multi-jointed God.”
Org-mode is made even more useful by keeping everything sync’d with Dropbox. I know there are other syncing options (and emerging security concerns); but Dropbox is just so easy right now. It works great in Arch (where I don’t even have nautilus installed).
Most of my dissertation and most of the papers I wrote as a graduate student were written before my infatuation with plaintext, in OpenOffice (or, more recently, LibreOffice). I allow students to hand papers in electronically; most students send various Word formats as email attachments. Open/LibreOffice has been able to handle them all without any issues.
Academics, or anyone responsible for organizing a large number of bibliographic citations, should be using Zotero. Zotero keeps me using Firefox when I might otherwise have fully switched to Chrome. Given my emacs-orientation, I’ve also played with Conkeror which is nice.
I know many people treat conky as though it were just geeky eye-candy, but I find it invaluable. Particularly given my tendency to leave too many tabs open in Chrome, it is helpful to keep an eye on how much memory I’m using.
I tinker a bit with some programming: Python and the Natural Language Toolkit and Processing. (There is processing minor mode for emacs, but it hasn’t been working for me lately…).
For media I used to swear by Amarok (1.4); it managed podcasts beautifully, recognized my iPod without hassle, and was really just amazing. I’ve since switched from an iPod to a Sansa player which is not nearly so attractive, but automounts as a mass storage device with no fuss—so iPod support is less important. With the new Ubuntu I’m trying Banshee which is okay; but it feels too sluggish to really fall in love with it. On the laptop I’m using mpd with Sonata as the front end. So far so good (it does handle radio streams quite nicely). To be honest, the Amazon Cloud Player is good and seems stable enough that it may end up being my primary music player. I use bashpodder now for grabbing podcasts (or Chess Griffin’s—whose Linux podcasts are just wonderful—modification, mashpodder).
For photo management I’m trying Shotwell which is an improvement over F-Spot; but I have yet to find a photomanager which reall impresses me.
(And you folks know about Handbrake, right?)
What kind of hardware do you run it on?
The desktop is a pretty cheap (~$300) box I built: an AMD Athlon dual-core processor and 2GB RAM, running on an ASUS motherboard. It has an nVidia video card with the MCP61 Chipset (or so lspci informs me). With the nVidia proprietary drivers I can run a dual monitor setup without too much hassle—and dual monitors is something I’ve come to really appreciate (two LCDs picked up from a University equipment auction).
The laptop is a Dell Latitude D510 which I purchased used a few years ago. It is old enough that neither wireless nor video drivers give me any trouble.
The Amahi server is an old Compaq Presario (2.8 Ghz Pentium 4) running headless in my laundry room.
What is your ideal Linux setup?
I would love to have $500 to throw at a linux-based HTPC, running XMBC. That would be great fun.
I frequently have Mac laptop envy. I’ve never seen any non-Mac laptop which matches Mac laptops for sheer attractiveness. I would happily settle for an X series Lenovo ThinkPad, though.
I would also like an HD webcam and a really nice mic.
Emacs and AUCTeX would really hum if I had the really gorgeous fonts which come pre-installed on Macs these days too.
And, in an ideal setup, all this would be tied together via a home server with a little more storage and a little more power than mine has (and a faster connection than DSL). I’d also love a lot more knowledge, so that when I port forward connections from my router to my home server I don’t feel like I’m taking my life in my hands.
Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?
Here is the desktop, where I’m writing this very response:
And here are a couple of the XMonad laptop. Clean (that is Velasquez’s Las Meninas as wallpaper—from Wikimedia Commons):
Working with PDFs in Evince and writing in emacs:
htop, sonata, and alsamixer (which I’m using to control volume because I haven’t got media keys working… yet):
Interview conducted June 21, 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.
The Linux Setup - Dusty Phillips, Developer
Dusty Phillips certainly falls into the power user category and his answers reflect that status. Dusty runs a tight system that’s optimized for his workflow. And it’s fascinating that he does so much with just one machine.
You can find more of The Linux Setup here.
Who are you, and what do you do?
I am Dusty Phillips, and I wear many hats. Professionally, I am a Canadian freelance software developer who works primarily with Python. Lately, I’ve done a lot of Django work, but I wouldn’t typecast myself as a Django developer.
I’m the author of the book Python 3 Object Oriented Programming. I expect to be writing another book soon, and I also spend a fair bit of time editing and proofreading.
In the open source world, I have held too many positions within the Arch Linux community to count. I think these days, I’m most known as the maintainer of the Arch Linux Schwag store.
What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?
Arch Linux. I’ve used it since December of 2003. At first, I would toy with new distributions when they came out, but I have been satisfied with Arch’s direction for so long, now, that I’ve stopped experimenting.
What software do you depend upon with this distribution?
In distribution specific terms, pacman is a key component, obviously. The other Arch-specific tool I use a lot is netcfg.
In day-to-day use, I rely largely on my terminal and gvim or vim. I recently switched to Eterm, as gnome-terminal and a few other gtk apps have been acting up recently.
I couldn’t get by in my work without bash, SSH, PostgreSQL, Python, and random packages from the Python Package Index.
I run Firefox and Chrome about equally for web browsing and development, but I’m satisfied with neither. Firefox has a slight edge because the NoScript plugin works better than NotScript, and Chrome no longer allows me to decide whose cookies I accept. But Chrome is faster and definitely has an edge on Javascript intensive webapps.
I use awesomeWM for my window manager. It always does exactly what I need with the minimal amount of fuss.
What kind of hardware do you run it on?
I’ve been trying to scrape the money together to upgrade my four year old ThinkPad x60 for several months. I’m amazed at the kind of abuse this machine has taken, but it keeps putting up with me.
I divide my time between my desk with a 24” external monitor and Kinesis advantage Pro Dvorak keyboard, and my couch, where the 12” laptop is sufficient.
Aside from servers and VPS’s scattered around, the ThinkPad is the only machine I own. I don’t believe in underpowered netbooks or overpowered desktops. Having only one machine that I can plug in or pack up and take with me means I rarely have to worry about syncing and I don’t get excited about storing my data in the cloud.
What is your ideal Linux setup?
Newer hardware than what I have would be nice, but I have my software configured exactly the way I want it. Of course, I tweak things here and there, but there isn’t much that frustrates me right now (barring those broken gtk apps I mentioned).
Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?
Sure. There’s not much to see, since awesome keeps out of the way. I think I’m using a zenburn theme at the moment.
Interview conducted May 23, 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.
Why I Switched to Xubuntu
With the end of the year rapidly approaching, I thought it’s as good a time as any to discuss why I switched to Xubuntu.
Like most Linux users, I tend to distro hop. I had an XP/Ubuntu dual-boot for years. When I finished grad school and didn’t need SAS and Stata anymore, and when I had some free time to troubleshoot issues, I moved to a 100% Fedora install and got rid of XP (there were brief flirtations with Kubuntu and OpenSuse that ended after less than a week).
Fedora never quite made sense to me and the wireless wasn’t great with my ThinkPad T43, so I switched to Arch, which was nice, but a lot of work to maintain. Eventually a GNOME update broke my system and rather than fixing it, I returned to Ubuntu (The great thing about Arch is you have full control of your system. The horrible thing about Arch is you have full control of your system).
Ubuntu was great and stable, and soooo much less work than Arch, but it never felt as snappy as I thought it should. GNOME Do, the application launcher I loved, seemed to be crashing a lot, and a huge part of my embrace of Linux revolved around the beauty of GNOME Do.
But in general, I often felt my system was lagging; like there was too much going on behind the scenes. Even with Compiz turned off.
I wanted something easy and convenient like Ubuntu, but simpler. I wanted programs to snap open. If I wanted pauses between actions, I could have stayed with XP.
I wound up playing with a VirtualBox version of Xubuntu and I liked it a lot. It was responsive. It was snappy. And while I could still use GNOME Do if I wanted to, the native Xfce application launcher was pretty great.
Xubuntu 10.04 was a long term stable release, so it seemed like great timing to switch from Ubuntu to Xubuntu, via a clean install.
I made the move back in August and I haven’t looked back. The power of the Ubuntu repositories and the simplicity of Xfce have been just what I wanted.
Of course, like any Linux users, I’m always thinking ahead to my next distribution. I’m sure I’ll stick with Xubuntu, but I’m very intrigued by Linux Mint Debian, which I run virtually at work. It’s pretty nice, but I mostly love that I never have to worry about version updates. With Ubuntu, you always have to decide whether you’re going to move to the next version, even with the long term stable releases. With Linux Mint Debian, it’s a rolling release, so you’re running bleeding edge updates that have been vetted and tested (for the most part).
That’s a very attractive feature, but GNOME still feels bloated and laggy to me. I suppose I could just remove all of the GNOME stuff and substitute the Xfce packages, but that feels like a lot of work. I could also just run Debian myself and use the Testing repository, but at the end of the day, I’ve just been very spoiled by the variety available in the Ubuntu repositories.
So for now, I’m committed to Xubuntu, even with it’s slight bit of Ubuntu bloat, but with an eye on a solid rolling distribution that has some kind of Xfce spin.
But if I had to stick with Xubuntu forever, I think I’d be pretty happy. It works well with my ThinkPad and it lets me do what I need to do without my needing to overthink things. The vast majority of things I need to do (type, print, surf and download music) all happen without my micromanaging the process.
A few months in, I’m still very happy I made the switch to Xubuntu. As a one-time compulsive distro hopper, that’s really saying something.
