Eric's Home Machine

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 Linux Systems [ 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-inch floppy.

My display subsystem is the standout part of the hardware. It's an Matrox Millennium II AGP card driving a Viewsonic 21PS at 1600x1200. That's a lot of monitor, especially given the ultra-fine 0.25 dot pitch. I use it all.

My pointing device is a Logitech TrackMarble. Optical trackballs rule -- they have all the advantages of conventional trackballs without being subject to mechanical fouling. I'll never buy a mouse again.

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. Lately I've been augmenting it with the KRUD distribution from tummy.com

Most of my tube time is spent in GNU Emacs 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 use GNOME [ http://www.gnome.org/ ] + Enlightenment [ http://www.enlightenment.org/ ]now, but you can look at the carefully tuned fvwm2 configuration I used to use [ http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/fvwm2/ ] to exploit all that screen space.

I collect my mail using 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. I read it using mutt [ http://www.mutt.org/ ]

My net connection is PPP via a U.S. Robotics v90 modem to Netaxs [ http://www.netaxs.com/ ] in Philadelphia. My web pages live on http://www.tuxedo.org/, which is actually a Netaxs machine.

I travel with a Sony VAIO 505TR, named golux after the Golux in James Thurber's fantasy "The Big O". This nifty little laptop weighs only 3.5 pounds and fits on an airline tray table, but has a nearly full-size keyboard and a 1024x768 display.

Thanks to the amazing generosity of the folks at MacHack 15, I also own a blue Macintosh iBook. It's named hurkle, after Theodore Sturgeon's "The Hurkle Is A Happy Beast". It dual-boots Mac OS9 and Yellow Dog Linux.

Date: 2000/07/28 04:19:51