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Eric's Home Machines

My home machine is a ULB 200108, a dual 1.2GHz Athlon machine built around the Tyan K7 Thunder motherboard and IBM Ultrastar 36Z15 drives. It was custom-built to my design by the savvy people at Los Alamos Computers in August 2001 and will be fully described in a November 2001 article in Linux Journal.

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.

I run the KRUD distribution from tummy.com, a Red Hat variant you can buy by subscription that gives you monthly security fixes and a tasty selection of additional tools.

Most of my tube time is spent in GNU Emacs and Mozilla. The nicest thing about having a monster monitor is that my Emacs window is 80x94 and still doesn't overlap with my shell window.

I use GNOME + Sawfish now, but you can look at the carefully tuned fvwm2 configuration I used to use to exploit all that screen space.

[mutt logo] [fetchmail logo] I collect my mail using the 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

My net connection is 384 DSL through Speakeasy. My web pages live on www.tuxedo.org, which is actually a rackmount server in a back room at VA somewhere.

It's named hurkle, after Theodore Sturgeon's "The Hurkle Is A Happy Beast".

I travel with an IBM ThinkPad X20, named golux after the Golux in James Thurber's fantasy "The Wonderful O". This nifty little laptop weighs only about 4.5 pounds without base station and fits on an airline tray table, but has a nearly full-size keyboard and a 1024x768 display.

(I'm still in mourning for my Sony VAIO 505. That was 3.5 pounds and worked great and looked really cool until it physically fell apart :-(.) My desktop system before the ULB-200108 was a dual-400MHz Pentium II box custom-built for me by the good folks at VA Linux Systems (for details of my relationship to them, see my disclosure page). It's my wife's machine now, and renamed "minx" after a cute critter in the game Beyond Zork.

Thanks to the amazing generosity of the folks at MacHack 15, I also own a blue Macintosh iBook (named "billywig" after a blue flying creature in J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" universe). It dual-boots Mac OS9 and Yellow Dog Linux.


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Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com>