The Linux Setup - James Nelson, Musician
I continue to be impressed by people who can create music using Linux, which is why I was happy to have James here. He’s doing a lot using Ubuntu, probably aided by the fact that he doesn’t record much, and doesn’t need to worry about kernel latency. It’s an interesting setup for an interesting genre.
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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.
Interview conducted February 14, 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 - Dan Gillmor, Journalist
I’m a huge fan of Dan Gillmor. As a reporter at the San Jose Mercury News, he was on top of a lot of great tech stories. His book, We the Media, was an incredibly accurate prediction of where American journalism was heading in the early part of this century. And he’s been very public about his move to Linux. So I’m pretty psyched to have his participation here.
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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, 2013Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?
Interview conducted February 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.
The Linux Setup - Ron Guerin, Entrepreneur
I know Ron’s name from when he used to organize the New York Linux Users Group (NYLUG). He’s got a no-frills setup with a lot of solid software choices (what’s better than gPodder?). Like many Linux users, Ron is a ThinkPad guy, of which I wholeheartedly approve. They’re great computers in general, and the ones I’ve had have always handled a wide variety of distros very well, without a lot of drama.
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Who are you, and what do you do?
I’m Ron Guerin, and I guess the best way to describe what I do is ‘entrepreneur.’ I also was the main volunteer and then primary organizer of NYLUG for over a decade. I’ve been a member/attendee/volunteer of many tech and FLOSS groups over the years. Now I’m doing some tech/FLOSS events over at luny.org.
What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?
My distro is Debian GNU/Linux (Testing) with MATE. My first Linux was OpenLinux and I got my copy on April 13, 1999 from Ransom Love at a LUNY meeting. After riding Red Hat Linux to the end, I switched to Debian Testing and haven’t looked back.
What software do you depend upon with this distribution?
On my notebooks, I mostly use Firefox, Thunderbird/Lightning, MATE, VLC, OpenShot, Scribus, Geany, GNOME Terminal, XChat, Pidgin, gPodder, Audacious, Audacity, Apache, MySQL, PHP, rsync, and ssh. When not working, like many people these days, I am both a producer and consumer of content and I use my Linux desktops for that as well.
What kind of hardware do you run it on?
My hardware is ThinkPad (T61 and T500). I always put as much memory and storage as possible in my desktops, as I use it all.
What is your ideal Linux setup?
ThinkPads are pretty much my ideal setup. I presently have two of them set up pretty much the same way. So long as Lenovo maintains the ThinkPad experience, I’d like my next machine to be a ThinkPad as well.
Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?
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.
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…
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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.
The Linux Setup - Chris Knadle, Engineer/System Administrator
I found Chris through a post on the Linux New York (LUNY) listserv. His description here of his tools and how he chooses them is great, as is his distro evaluation table. The interview is long, but there’s a lot of really interesting stuff stuff here, from the mechanical (how he uses KDE) to the conceptual (the social challenges of collaborative package maintenance).
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Who are you, and what do you do?
Short version: engineer/system admin/power user/gamer/amateur radio operator.
I’m mainly an RF and electrical engineer, and a Linux system administrator (primarily on Debian these days). I’m also a programmer (C, C++, Qt, Bash, Assembly, on rare occasion Perl or Python, or various Macro languages in documents) but on a day-to-day basis I consider myself more of a “power user.” I’ve also active on 2m FM ham radio, gaming (mostly 3D FPS and RTS games) and I occasionally do woodworking, auto repair, embedded system programming, hardware design, and fly RC model aircraft. [In case anyone is over-impressed by this list, I’ll just mention that “I’m just a regular guy” — I’m friendly and I don’t have a big ego.]
I’ve recently started to delve into Debian package development (mostly out of necessity, the mother of invention) and just recently set up my own private signed repository via the reprepro package, along with a custom keyring package, although I’m currently re-working some of the details.
A couple of months ago I ended up having to do an NMU on the Mumble VoIP package after the maintainer broke the package (due to lack of upstream support for the required base assumption codec, CELT 0.7.1), then acted quite unkindly, leading to a conflict and a two-month heated discussion with the Debian Technical Committee, then forcing someone to do an NMU since the maintainer refused to help or communicate at all after the decision. Debian has it’s share of social problems — and unfortunately they don’t have a code-of-conduct like Ubuntu has. This social brokenness is the exception rather than the rule, but it’s an ongoing unhandled problem which Debian is well known for. And although Ubuntu has a social contract, that doesn’t really solve the problem because Ubuntu wants packages to go through Debian first. Same goes for Mint.
However as part of the Mumble NMU work, I got in contact with a very pleasant Austrian Debian developer (Gregor Herrmann) who I briefly met in person during DebConf10 in NYC, and I’ve been slowly gaining a bit of helpful mentoring from him as part of our continuing discussions. I haven’t yet uploaded a Debian package of my own through debian-mentors so I’m not officially a maintainer of a package yet, but I likely will sometime during 2013. Maybe I’ll eventually apply for Debian’s New Maintainer process… we’ll see. I have plenty of interests that will still keep me busy if I don’t. ;-)
What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?
I run Debian Sid for my own desktops and laptops, along with a few packages from Debian Experimental as needed. For servers and other non-power users, I stick with Debian Stable.
I started experimenting with Linux in late 1994 with Slackware, and finally started using it on the desktop in 1997 with the release of Window Maker, and it became my main desktop in 1998 after the release of KDE v1. I’ve mainly been using KDE ever since.
Slackware was wonderful but too really troublesome to keep up-to-date (the procedure was “just reinstall” at the time — then download and recompile all the locally-compiled programs…). I did learn to configure and compile the Linux kernel during this time, which is something I still do today.
I made the (somewhat painful) switch to Debian in August 1999, which was the Slink release. Back then Debian was painful to install because there was no kernel driver auto-detection — the installer would literally ask during the install for each kernel module that was needed. As I learned more about it I started to experiment with running Testing and Unstable, and I’ve been running Debian Unstable as my main desktop distribution since 2002 — I mainly started running it because it was what gets the most support from Debian developers. That it also happens to be the platform that all new Debian packages need to target is just a side bonus. ;-)
What software do you depend upon with this distribution?
Debian-packaged external kernel modules: virtualbox-source, tp-smapi-source, nvidia-kernel-source (proprietary Nvidia driver :-( for 3D support as well as TwinView for projectors/presentations)
Kernel: custom-compiled (currently 3.5.7) to a Debian package from “vanilla” upstream source using the “linux-stable” upstream git repo
Browser: Iceweasel (from Debian Experimental)
CAD: LibreCAD, FreeCAD, and a commercial OpenGL CAD package (VariCAD) in a VM
Desktop Environment: KDE4
File Browser: Krusader
Editor: Nano
Image Editor: GIMP
IRC Client: Irssi, Konversation
Mail client: KMail
Movie Viewer: SMPlayer (for DVDs), SMPlayer2, VLC
Music Player: Qmmp
Office Suite: LibreOffice
PDF viewer: Okular
Terminal: Konsole
Torrent Client: KTorrent
Version Control: Git, git-svn for working with svn repos
Virtualization: VirtualBox, occasionally KVM
VoIP client: MumbleFavorite games on Linux: Amagetron Advanced, FlightGear (via the FGo! program), Freedroid, Freedroid RPG, KMahjongg, KSudoku, Oolite, Prboom, Pynagram, Ur-Quon Masters
What kind of hardware do you run it on?
Laptop: Lenovo T61P-CTO ThinkPad
Desktop: Pentium 4 custom built in 2001; Several other Pentium 4 and Pentium III desktops as well.
My firewalls arerunning Debian too; they’re Alix boxes using the AMD Geode LX800 CPU.
The oldest hardware that runs Debian are some Pentium II’s made by IBM (300XL). These were what I was using to duplicate servers in preparation for testing major Debian upgrades on servers before I started doing that work in VMs.
What is your ideal Linux setup?
The GUI choice of Xfce4, LXDE, and/or KDE4.
Hardware that allows 3D capability (preferably using open source drivers, if possible).
The distribution needs to allow updating to the latest version in perpetuity, rather than needing to reinstall, and run on both new(er), old, and /very/ old hardware. So far Debian seems best suited to these goals. If I had to choose an alternative it would probably be OpenSuSE, Vector, or Fedora.
For laptops I want sleep and hibernation-to-disk, as well as the security of using full-disk LUKS encryption, preferably with LVM on top so that only one LUKS password is required, and XFS or ext4 for filesystem choice. XFS is fast but is prone to corruption on unclean shutdown and is troublesome to fsck/repair (it requires a LiveCD distro with cryptfs and xfs_repair on it). Ext4 is reliable but somewhat slower. I haven’t yet tried Btrfs.
For KDE4 I immediately turn off the “Desktop Search” features of Nepomuk and Strigi Indexing, because these are incredible performance hogs that quickly make a KDE4 desktop sluggish. I leave the desktop settings as “desktop” with no folder plasmoid nor desktop icons, add plasmoids to the desktop for status of CPU, temperatures, and network throughput, and customize the taskbar as well. Lately I’ve added a “quicklaunch” bar on the left-side of the screen with programs I typically use so that I don’t have to go into the “K” menu as often. I also always switch the K menu to “Classic Menu Style” over the “Application Launcher Style.” I use some of the 3D compositing effects like “Cover Switch” for Alt-Tab switching and the “Present Windows” action when the mouse is put into the top-left corner of the screen, but I minimize using these features — so no wobbly-windows or exploding windows on closing, etc. I try to keep it simple and stick to the features that are useful yet non-distracting.
A weird note about my use of KDE4: I don’t use multiple monitors, nor “activities,” and I generally don’t use multiple desktops either. Over the years I’ve simply gotten into the habit of letting the various program windows pile on top of each other and using Alt-Tab or the label in the taskbar to get to the program/window I want to get to at the moment. I don’t really know why I still do this and why this still works for me, because everybody else I talk to wants multiple monitors.
On a related note concerning distributions — in March 2011 Mid Hudson Valley Linux and Open Source Users Group had a “Desktop Shootout” meeting discussing window manager and desktop environment choices which raised my interest in looking at them again. I then started to think about trying several other distributions to have a look at what they’re like now. In August 2011 I tried the top 25 free software distributions in the order that was listed by DistroWatch.com at that time, loading each of them in a VirtualBox VM. Here are some loose notes based on the experience.
* = distribution is Debian-based.
- Unity GUI is confusing… I don’t like it. 3D = runs poorly in a VM. The AppArmor security features are relatively nice, but Ubuntu targets newer hardware, and last I ran it, they didn’t support upgrades-in-place even though Debian (which is what they’re based on) does.
- Fedora 17 was pleasant and worth a look. SELinux by default is good, but it’s too complicated a solution, IMHO.
- OpenSUSE was surprisingly pleasant and snappy — definitely worth a look. Definitely one of my personal “top 5 distros.”
- Arch Linux has SUPERfast package installs. However there’s no graphical installer, I couldn’t get the sound working, and some of the instructions were wrong concerning installing Grub2; the “Beginners Guide” is correct.
- Puppy is very light and quick, but I didn’t find a way of installing the packages I needed.
- PCLinuxOS gave me packaging trouble, and when I looked at the /etc/apt/sources.list file I was horrified to find only “rpm” lines. :-O A Debian packaging tool using RPMs? Sacrilege.
- Ultimate ran terribly; it’s “max 3D” which in a VM means “max slow.”
- Pear was wonderful to see, because the entire GUI emulates an Apple Macintosh, except the Apple is a Pear. Seriously, it’s cool.
- FreeBSD doesn’t install a GUI by default, and doesn’t seem to tell you how to do so, either. It’s not that you can’t, it’s just that I didn’t figure it out even after web searching. Not cool.
- Gentoo. This is where I want to start cursing. The base install and KDE
4.8 was a *three full day compile* on a Core2 duo using both cores and
carefully following the instructions, plus having to figure out emerge
command line options to deal with unexpected dependency issues. After
all that, I couldn’t get X to start so the whole experiment was a big
waste of very hot CPU time. Ultimately frustrating. Gentoo advocates
are quick to point out that the distro is the fastest of them all —
which let’s just say it is — yet it gets there by way of massive
CPU time, such that the result is false economy.
The Gentoo project has a lot of great documentation on the web, and I greatly respect their developers and their choice of OpenRC as an initialization system, but running the Gentoo distribution is not for me. - Vector is Slackware-based, but with package management. This distro was fun and snappy — enough that I gave serious consideration to keeping it loaded and continuing to play with it.
- Knoppix is my personal favorite Debian-based LiveCD distro, so I kept it in the list even though it wasn’t in the top 25 on DistroWatch.
Other notes:
- Many of the Debian-based distributions allow running as a LiveCD and updating/installing packages into memory while still running the LiveCD (i.e. this doesn’t alter the contents of the hard disk at all).
- Distributions that require 3D for the GUI (Ubuntu, Ultimate) are a pain because that causes the GUI to be very slow in a VM.
- Some of the installer/updaters in the distribution were difficult to use or made it difficult to search for a particular package (Fuduntu, SolusOS).
Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?
The 3D CAD drawing is a corner desk I custom designed and built some years ago which is very strong, yet can be disassembled, moved, and reassembled without any damage to the wood whatsoever. It’s built from three sheets of oak 3/4” ply, two pine 2x4’s, and some decorative 3/4” quarter-round, using 1/2” deep screw-in wood insert nuts for locations to bolt to (McMaster Carr calls these “Tapping Hex Drive Insert Nuts with Flange”). I tried to find something reasonably priced before doing this but didn’t find what I needed. Total cost to build was in the range of around $300. I’m using the desk to this day, and I’m still very glad I built it.
Interview conducted 1/9/13
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 - Zack Lofgren, Developer/Student
Zack has a cool setup. I love that he’s using Lubuntu, because it’s such an underrated Ubuntu flavor (although maybe not for long). There’s also a real logic and cohesi