[clue-talk] little survey

[Nate Duehr]

Inline...

On Wed, 03 Jun 2009 13:41 +0000, dennisjperkins at comcast.net
wrote:

I have a little informal survey about the Linux preferences of
CLUE members.
1. Which distro do you use?



Mainly Debian when I was running my own servers, but the vast
majority of what I have to deal with right now is CentOS.  Linux
is Linux, and it doesn't really matter... I also have played with
Gentoo (which was annoying), and Ubuntu in the past.  I think my
Ubunutu dual-boot on one old laptop hasn't been booted in about a
year, though...





2. Which desktop do you use?  KDE3, KDE4, Gnome, other?



None if I can avoid it, they all kinda suck.  But a couple of
commercial products require the default Gnome desktop from
CentOS, which is loaded on those machines.  I'd rather just SSH
into the box to do real work.







3. How many of your computers run Linux?



When you say "your" do you mean machines I acutally own, or
machines I maintain?  LOL.



At the house right now, zero.  Yeah, sad I guess... but they're
all turned off right now.  Two or three servers have all been
migrated to virtual machines at data centers, or to
commercial/inexpensive services.  (Example, I stopped running my
own mail server after ten plus years of doing it, because living
at someone elses mail server means SpamAssassin and others have
MUCH more data to work with, and work better.  I migrated to
fastmail.fm, and haven't looked back.)



As far as other systems go... I have six or seven "embedded"
Linux application servers based on a stripped version of CentOS
for Amateur Radio linking (www.irlp.net), and I sysadmin two
other server systems for that group, including a "conference"
server with ten "channels", which is infrastructure in that
network, as well as a place where we re-broadcast NASA Select
audio during Shuttle missions to Amateur Radio operators
throughout the U.S. and abroad... usually about 100 of those
little embedded linux systems listen in for each launch and
landing... the machine http://status.irlp.net is also mine to
admin, but the PHP code was written by other volunteers...



Also "for fun" I help out a friend from time to time who runs a
datacenter, but he hired an admin and that's waning unless those
guys run into something they need help with.  Back when he
started a wireless ISP, we also helped him get through the
growing pains of that and built his mail server and DNS "farms",
etc.  All of which was so simple it wasn't even worth charging
him for, really.  (Well, we barter favors... like any good small
business owners and individuals do... he's helped me with things,
I've helped him with things... It's all good.)



In addition to all of the above, my employer is increasingly
using more and more embedded Linux in their products as the
underlying OS for videoconferencing equipment and also for the
servers/infrastructure that surround it, including "smart" H.323
firewalls, etc.



However a much more interesting Linux project with Linux-HA and
High-Availability Informix was cancelled last year.  Oh well...
bummer.







4. Do other family members use Linux?



Not a chance.  Nor would I put them through that.







5. Do you use Linux exclusively at home?



Nope.  Mac.









6. Are you fortunate enough to use Linux at work?



See above. The other systems at work are a mix of XPEK (XP
Embedded Kernel), some REALLY old PSOS stuff (rare), some VxWorks
at the low-level on older hardware, Solaris, and who knows what
else... when seven or eight companies merge to become one, the
variety of OS's and development methods is impressive... but as
mentioned above, more and more it's all headed to Linux.







7. Do you build your own Linux?  (Yes, a few of us are
masochistic enough to do so! :)    )



I did LFS once.  It was a good learning experience, but not sure
it'd be worth doing again.





8. How experienced are you with Linux?



Been cussing and discussing it since 1995 or so?  I think around
RH 5.0 days, and Debian "potato" or whatever was before that.







Why do you ask?  :-)



Nate
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