Everybody who has a Linux-related web site seems to have a page detailing the machines they use. Who am I to flout tradition?
My latest PC at home was self built just a couple of months ago. It is based around an Asus A7N8X mainboard. This has an AMD Athlon xp2600+ processor running at 2000MHz and 512MB of PC2700 DDR memory. The primary EIDE drive is an 80GB Maxtor, with a 120GB Seagate as the secondary drive. Graphics is taken care of by an NVidia GeForce FX5200 AGP card with 128MB of RAM onboard, which feeds an unbranded 15-inch TFT monitor. Other bits fitted include an NEC IDE DVD burner, LG 16 speed IDE CD writer and a Belkin wireless keyboard/mouse combo. This lot all lives in a slinky copper coloured ATX midi tower case. Colour and monochrome hardcopy is provided by a Canon i865 inkjet.
My employers (bless them!) dug deep into the corporate money belt and gave me a nice laptop. It's a Dell Latitude D800, with a Pentium-M 1.7GHz CPU, 512MB of memory, 80GB of hard disk space and built-in LAN card and DVD burner. Getting Linux to run properly on this was an experience, and will be the subject of yet another future article...
Both computers that I use regularly run Mandrake Linux, a distribution which I've been using since version 6.0. My current version is 10.0 on the laptop for production use, and I'm testing 10.1 on the machine at home and in a seperate partition on the Dell. Mandrake has an interesting feature which makes it particularly easy for our children to get to know Linux. The machine boots into a graphical login, and Rachels user account has been configured to allow her to start a KDE session without having to type a password. She is able to select her name using the mouse and simply has to click the 'Go!' button to start KDE. This isn't the sort of feature you'd want to enable on an office workstation, but for a 6 year old it's ideal. I've combined this with making her desktop folder read-only and setting the KDE taskbar to auto-hide itself, and she has a pretty safe Linux environment to play around in, without being able to inadvertently damage anything.
She very rarely uses anything other than Linux now, despite the home PC having a perfectly functional Windows XP Pro install on it. When pressed on the subject, she says that she doesn't like Windows very much, "because it keeps going blue". Clearly this is one PC user who has been severely traumatized by the blue screen of death syndrome that our previous home machine, running Windows 98SE, used to suffer regularly from.
