Eric's Home Machine
By Eric Raymond
My home system, snark, is a dual-400MHz Pentium II box custom-built for me by the good folks at VA Research [ http://www.varesearch.com/ ] (for details of my relationship to them, see my disclosure page [ http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/disclosure.html ]).The I/O system is fast wide SCSI-2 run by a NC53c895; two Quantum Viking II 4.5gig drives, a Pioneer DRU06S 32x CD-ROM, and an HP35470A DSS drive. Other peripherals include a Soundblaster-compatible sound card and a generic 3.5" floppy.
My display subsystem is the standout part of the hardware. It's an Matrox AGP card driving a Viewsonic 21PS at 1600x1280. That's a lot of monitor, especially given the ultra-fine 0.25 dot pitch. I use it all.
The Red Hat folks have an enlightened policy about sending free copies to Linux contributors, and I like their product, so I'm generally running their latest version.
Most of my tube time is spent in GNU Emacs, mutt, and Netscape Navigator. The nicest thing about having a monster monitor is that my Emacs window is 78x80 and still doesn't overlap with my shell or 25x80 xterm windows. I have carefully tuned my fvwm2 configuration [ http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/fvwm2 ] to exploit all that space.
I collect my mail using the the fetchmail [ http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/fetchmail ] utility I wrote, of course. Your guarantee of quality...I use it every day, so it has to work.
My net connection is CSLIP via a U.S. Robotics v90 modem to Chester County Interlink [ telnet://locke.ccil.org/ ], and from there via a 56K line to Netaxs [ http://www.netaxs.com/ ] in Philadelphia. My web pages live on http://www.tuxedo.org/, a clone box running Debian Linux colocated at Netaxs.
Date: 1998/11/22 05:30:58
Copyright 1998